THE TRANSLATOR, PART 2

"There is never enough help sent to solve the problems of poor people, but this effort did help many women at some camps. And it made me feel that I could do something."


—page 87, The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari

Hari's memoir is not my first encounter with the horrors of warfare and civil unrest in postcolonial Africa, although this is the first book I have read on the violence specific to the Darfur region of Sudan. Therein lies my problem. Two recent books have influenced my reading of any books about African conflicts that followed them. One is nonfiction, one is a fictionalized retelling of an oral history: We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch and What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers. The problem is that both are so detailed, so rich and dense, so well-informed, so well-researched, that I have to find the voice that lies in the current book. I have to give it room to breathe and live on its own. This was my main struggle with The Translator.

This was also my main struggle with A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. I read the book shortly after the experience of What is the What. Beah's book was a very well-crafted firsthand account of the horrors of civil war, both as victim and perpetrator of violence. The problem was that images and information from What is the What kept influencing my reading of A Long Way Gone.

Therefore, I had to sit and think about The Translator to allow it to simmer and steep. I needed to allow Hari's voice to emerge from the chorus and echoes of the voices of Gourevitch, Deng/Eggers, Beah, and the myriad others.

---

The Translator is an oral account given to the two people who wrote the words down—Dennis Burke and Megan McKenna. In that sense, Hari is the author and Burke and McKenna are scribes. This is the story of Daoud Hari, even if the specific words on the page are not his. (And, I don't know for certain whether or not liberties were taken with his tale or if the words are verbatim. If the tale is true, does it matter?)

The book is different from What is the What because the words of Hari appear to be his own. The cadence and rhythm and language feel like a story being told to the reader, rather than the reader simply reading the story. I wrestled with this for the first third of the book, until I settled into Hari's style of storytelling. By then, his voice was clear. I heard it. I understood it, as much as I could. His tale is foreign to me in many ways.

The most refreshing piece of reading this particular tale of survival in the midst of civil war in postcolonial Africa is that it is relatively "uncinematic." This was also my experience with The Farther Shore. The brutality in the book is difficult enough. It doesn't need to be splashed across the page in Technicolor crimson. Images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay came to mind when reading the torture scenes. Fortunately, Hari doesn't spend too much time in the midst of them. And, really, how can one express what is happening to one's self, in the midst of torture? How do you capture the "scene" in words? It seems to me, that words ultimately fail.

[Part 1] [Part 3]