Accra

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 3: Accra

The house on Cantonments Road had a gate. The gate was green — not the green of the mango trees that grew behind the house, which was a deep, saturated green that darkened as the fruit swelled and ripened, but a paler green, the green of paint that had been applied years ago and that the Accra sun had faded, the sun bleaching the color the way the sun bleached everything it touched with sufficient duration, the duration in Accra being every day, every month, every year of equatorial light that fell on the gate and on the house and on the corrugated roof and on the girl who grew up inside the gate and who would, decades later, sit in a glass booth in The Hague and translate the testimony of survivors of massacres, the girl not knowing this, the girl knowing only the gate, the green, the house, the languages.

There were always languages. The house on Cantonments Road was not a house of one language but a house of many, and the many were not separate but layered, the way the house itself was layered — the concrete walls beneath the plaster, the plaster beneath the paint, the paint beneath the dust that the harmattan wind deposited in December, the fine Saharan dust that coated everything in a film of ochre and that Amara's mother swept from the porch every morning with a palm-frond broom, sweeping in Twi, the sweeping accompanied by the particular murmur of a woman performing a daily task and commenting on the task in the language of daily tasks, the mother tongue, the language of the broom and the dust and the morning.

Twi at home. This was the rule, though the rule was not spoken, not codified, not posted on the wall the way the school rules were posted on the wall of the classroom at Lincoln Community School. The rule was enacted — enacted in the kitchen when Amara's mother, Akosua, told her to wash her hands before dinner, enacted on the porch when her mother called her in from the yard, enacted in the bedroom when her mother said goodnight, the Twi the language of instruction and comfort and the particular intimacy of a mother speaking to her child in the language the mother's mother had spoken to her. The rule was the language's own gravity, the Twi pulling the household into its orbit, the household orbiting the language the way the earth orbited the sun, the orbit not chosen but natural, the natural the condition of a Ghanaian home in which the parents were Akan and the mother tongue was Twi and the tongue was the mother's tongue, literally, the tongue that had shaped Akosua's first words and that shaped Amara's first words and that would shape, though Amara did not know this, the architecture of every language she would subsequently learn, the Twi the foundation, the bedrock, the thing beneath all the other things.

English at school. Lincoln Community School was in East Cantonments, a ten-minute walk from the house, the walk conducted each morning by Amara and her father, Kwame, who walked her to school before continuing to his office at the Ministry of Trade, the walk a transit between linguistic zones, the zone of the house (Twi) and the zone of the school (English), the transit marked not by a sign or a border but by a shift in the air, a shift Amara felt in her body, the body adjusting from the posture of Twi to the posture of English the way the body adjusted from the warmth of the house to the warmth of the street, a different kind of warmth, the same temperature but a different quality, the quality the difference between inside and outside, between private and public, between the language of the mother and the language of the world.

At school, the teachers spoke English. The textbooks were in English. The examinations were in English. The morning assembly was in English — the headmaster standing before the gathered students and speaking in the English of Ghanaian education, which was English but which carried in its cadences the rhythms of Akan and Ga and Ewe and the other languages that the students and the teachers spoke at home, the English a common ground but not a native ground, the English the language of the school the way the school uniform was the clothing of the school — put on in the morning, removed in the afternoon, the uniform English and the uniform clothes both instruments of a particular identity, the identity of the student, the identity worn for the hours of the school day and set aside for the hours of the home.

But in the corridors. In the corridors between classes, in the yard during break, under the neem trees where the older students gathered and talked — in these spaces the English dissolved and the other languages emerged, the students speaking Twi or Ga or Fante or Ewe or Hausa, the languages of their homes, the languages they carried inside the English the way they carried their own clothes inside the school uniform, the languages hidden and then revealed, the revealing a form of rest, of returning, of being in the language that did not require effort because the language was not learned but inhabited, was not acquired but constitutive, was not the second thing but the first.

Amara moved between the two. She moved between Twi and English with an ease that she did not recognize as ease because she had never known anything else, the moving the condition of her life, the condition of growing up in a country where the official language was one language and the spoken language was another and the two coexisted in a relationship that was not parallel but interpenetrating, the English inside the Twi inside the English, the two languages not side by side but nested, each containing the other, the containment the particular linguistic condition of postcolonial Ghana, a condition that the country's linguists studied and that the country's people lived without studying, the living the more thorough form of knowledge.

She was good at the moving. She was good at it the way some children were good at running or drawing or mathematics — not through effort but through a constitutional aptitude, an aptitude that her teachers noticed and that her mother noticed and that Amara herself did not notice because the aptitude was invisible to its possessor, the way a fish did not notice water. She moved between Twi and English without the micro-pause that she observed in other children, the pause that occurred at the transition, the fraction of a second when the mind shifted from one grammatical system to another, the shift a gear change, the gears grinding slightly before engaging. Amara's gears did not grind. Amara's transition was seamless, was fluid, was the linguistic equivalent of a bird banking in flight — the direction changing without the speed changing, the change a curve rather than an angle.

Her mother noticed. Akosua noticed because Akosua was a noticing woman, a woman who observed her daughter the way she observed the weather and the market prices and the moods of her husband — with attention, with the particular attention of a woman whose intelligence had been given to observation rather than to the professions that observation might have led to, because Akosua had not attended university, had not studied linguistics, had not been given the opportunities that her daughter would be given, the opportunities that Akosua would create for her daughter through the particular labor of a Ghanaian mother who understood that her daughter's future required investments that the present could barely afford.

Akosua said, one evening on the porch, in Twi, while the harmattan wind carried the Saharan dust across the yard and the mango trees rustled with the dry sound that mango trees made in December: "You do not switch. Other children switch. You do not."

Amara was nine. She sat on the porch step, her school uniform replaced by a cotton dress, her feet bare on the concrete, the evening warm in the way that Accra evenings were warm — not the heat of the day but the residue of the heat, the air still holding the day's warmth the way a wall held warmth after the sun moved past it. She did not understand what her mother meant. She did not understand because the not-switching was invisible to her, the not-switching the water she swam in, the water she could not see because she could not get outside it, the outside not available to a nine-year-old who had never lived in a single language, who had never experienced the switch as a switch because the switch was not a switch for her but a flow, a continuous flow, the Twi and the English not two rivers but one river with two currents, the currents moving in the same channel, the channel Amara.

Her mother explained. Her mother explained in Twi, because explanations in Twi were explanations in the language of truth, the language where things were said as they were rather than as they should be. She said that when other children moved from Twi to English, there was a moment — a small moment, a breath, a flicker — when the child was in neither language, when the child was between, and the between was visible in the child's eyes and in the child's body and in the particular hesitation that the between produced. But Amara did not have the between. Amara did not have the flicker. Amara was in both languages at the same time, the way a person could be in two rooms at the same time if the rooms shared a wall and the wall had a doorway and the doorway was wide enough for the entire body, the entire self, to occupy the doorway itself, to be in both rooms without being in neither.

Amara listened to her mother. She listened in Twi, in the mother tongue, and the listening was the particular listening of a child hearing her mother describe something about the child that the child did not know about herself, the description a revelation, the revelation not of a new thing but of an existing thing newly seen, the seeing the mother's gift, the gift of naming.

But Akosua was wrong about one thing. She was wrong that Amara did not have the between. Amara did have the between. Amara was the between. The between was not the flicker, not the hesitation, not the pause between languages. The between was the doorway itself — the space where both languages existed simultaneously, the space that Amara inhabited not by passing through it but by living in it, the living the condition, the condition the aptitude, the aptitude the thing that would become, decades later, in a glass booth in The Hague, the skill.

The Volta Region in August. Every August, Amara traveled with her mother to Kpando, to the house of Mama Dede, to the mango trees and the Ewe and the particular light of the Volta Region, which was different from the light of Accra — softer, greener, the light filtered through the canopy of trees that grew more densely in the Volta Region than in the coastal plains of Accra, the trees producing a light that was not direct but diffuse, the diffusion a gentleness, the gentleness the light's character, the character the Volta Region's character.

Mama Dede spoke Ewe. Only Ewe. She understood Twi — the two languages were related, both Niger-Congo languages, both Kwa, the relationship visible in shared vocabulary and shared grammatical structures the way the relationship between siblings was visible in shared features, the nose, the chin, the particular way of laughing. But Mama Dede spoke only Ewe, because Mama Dede believed that a grandmother's language was a grandmother's gift, and the gift must be given in its original form, not diluted, not accommodated, not translated into the grandchild's language but offered in the grandmother's language so that the grandchild had to come to the language rather than the language coming to the grandchild, the coming a journey, the journey the gift's condition.

Amara learned Ewe at Mama Dede's kitchen table. She learned it in the mornings, when Mama Dede prepared banku and okra soup and spoke to Amara in Ewe about the preparation, about the ingredients, about the particular way the banku must be stirred — clockwise, always clockwise, the direction important, the direction carrying a meaning that was not superstition but tradition, the tradition encoding a knowledge that had been tested over generations and that the generations had preserved in the direction of the stirring, the preservation a form of language, the language of gesture, the gesture older than words. She learned it in the afternoons, when Mama Dede sat on the porch and told stories — Ananse stories, trickster tales, the spider who was clever and foolish and who moved between worlds the way Amara moved between languages, the spider a translator of a kind, translating the rules of one world into the opportunities of another.

She learned it in the evenings, when the light in the Volta Region turned golden and the air cooled and the insects began their chorus and Mama Dede sat in her chair and spoke to the evening in Ewe, spoke to the air, spoke to the mango trees, spoke to the memory of her husband who had died before Amara was born and whose name Mama Dede spoke every evening as a greeting, the greeting not addressed to a person in the room but to a person in the air, the air the medium through which the living and the dead communicated, the communication conducted in Ewe because the dead spoke the language they had spoken when they lived, the language their gift to the living, the gift renewed every evening in Mama Dede's greeting.

Amara was eleven when the thing happened. The thing that she would later understand as the moment of recognition, the moment when the aptitude became visible to its possessor, the moment when the fish noticed the water.

She was at the market in Makola. The Makola Market in central Accra, the largest market in the city, a vast, dense, roofed complex where thousands of traders sold everything — cloth, food, electronics, medicine, cooking pots, school supplies, the material inventory of Ghanaian life arranged in stalls and on tables and on cloths spread on the ground, the arrangement not random but organized by an internal logic that regular visitors understood and that newcomers found bewildering, the logic the logic of the market, the logic of proximity and competition and the particular relationships between traders who had occupied adjacent stalls for decades.

Her mother had sent her. Sent her to buy tomatoes and ground pepper from the woman they always bought from, a woman named Auntie Efua who sat behind a wooden table piled with tomatoes and who spoke Twi with the accent of the Central Region, the accent slightly different from Accra Twi, the difference audible to Amara the way a musician heard the difference between two tunings that a non-musician would call the same.

Amara walked through the market. The market was a river of languages. Twi flowed in the widest channel — the majority language, the lingua franca of the market, the language in which prices were negotiated and quantities discussed and the daily commerce of buying and selling conducted. But other languages flowed alongside it — Ga, the language of Accra's indigenous population, the language that had been in Accra before Twi arrived, the language that the Ga traders spoke among themselves and that surfaced in the market's soundscape like a different current in the same river. Hausa, the language of the northern traders who sold kola nuts and shea butter and the particular goods of the savanna. Ewe, the language of traders from the Volta Region who sold smoked fish and palm oil. English, the language of the price tags and the signage and the occasional foreign buyer. Pidgin, the language of the cross-cultural, the language that traders used when they could not determine the customer's language, the pidgin a bridge, a provisional language, a language of transaction rather than identity.

Amara walked through the river. The languages entered her ears simultaneously — not sequentially, not one at a time, but all at once, the way the sounds of an orchestra entered the listener's ears all at once, the violins and the oboes and the drums arriving together, the listener's ear sorting them, separating them, identifying each instrument within the mass of sound. Amara's ear sorted the languages. Her mind separated them. Her body moved through the market and the languages moved through her body and her body held them without confusion, without the flicker her mother had described, without the pause between, the languages not replacing each other but coexisting, the coexistence the condition she had been born into, the condition the water.

She reached Auntie Efua's stall. Auntie Efua was speaking to a customer in Twi — rapid, commercial Twi, the Twi of negotiation, the Twi that moved fast because business required speed and speed required economy and economy meant that the sentences were short and the words were precise and the transaction was completed in the minimum number of syllables. Beside Auntie Efua, her daughter was speaking to a Hausa trader in English — the English the bridge between them, the trader's Hausa and the daughter's Twi meeting in the shared space of the colonial language, the English serving its postcolonial function, the function of connection between Ghanaians whose mother tongues did not overlap. Behind the stall, a radio was playing — highlife music, the guitars and the horns and the vocals in Twi, the music the soundtrack of the market, the music the language of the market's emotional life, the language that was not transactional but expressive, the music expressing the joy and the sorrow and the daily persistence of the market's community.

And Amara stood in the middle of all of it, stood with her mother's money in her hand and the tomatoes before her and the languages surrounding her, and she heard them all — the Twi and the English and the Hausa and the Ga and the music and the call to prayer from the mosque two streets away, the Arabic drifting over the market's roofing, the Arabic another language, another stream in the river, the stream the oldest, the stream that had flowed through Ghana for centuries, the Arabic of Islam and trade and the particular history of West Africa's engagement with the world beyond the Sahara.

She heard them all and she held them all and the holding was not effort but nature, was not skill but condition, and in that moment — standing in Makola Market at eleven years old with tomato money in her hand — she understood for the first time what her mother had described on the porch. She understood that she was not switching. She understood that the languages were not arriving sequentially, were not replacing each other, were not occupying her mind one at a time the way visitors occupied a room one at a time. The languages were simultaneous. They were all present. They were all active. They were all held in her mind at the same time, the way the market held all its goods at the same time, the tomatoes and the cloth and the electronics and the kola nuts all present, all available, the availability the market's nature, the simultaneous availability the market's gift.

She bought the tomatoes. She paid in Twi. She carried the tomatoes home through the Accra streets, through the afternoon heat, through the languages that filled the air of the city, the languages the city's breath, the city breathing in Twi and Ga and English and Hausa and Ewe, the breathing continuous, the breathing the sound of a city that had always lived between languages, that had always held multiple languages simultaneously, that had always been the market, the river, the space where the languages met and mixed and traded and coexisted.

She carried the tomatoes home and she carried the understanding home and the understanding was the beginning of the vocation, though she did not know the word vocation, did not know that the understanding she carried alongside the tomatoes would become a profession, would become a booth, would become a microphone and headphones and one-way glass and the particular architecture of simultaneous interpretation, the architecture that would contain her and that she would fill with her particular skill, the skill of holding two languages at once, the skill of living in the between, the skill that was not a skill at all but a condition, a condition born in the house on Cantonments Road, shaped at Mama Dede's kitchen table, confirmed in the Makola Market, carried from Accra to Paris to Kinshasa to The Hague, carried in the body that sat in the booth and put on headphones and pressed the microphone button and opened her mouth and spoke, and between the speaking and the hearing, the between, the space where Amara had always lived.

The gate was green. The house was on Cantonments Road. The languages were everywhere. The girl was eleven, and she held them all, and the holding was the beginning.