Seeing Double: Creative Writing as Translation

A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that give it wings.

—Khalil Gibran

You write your first book at the age of three, before you can speak or learn to write English. Your mother had given you your first notebook, in celebration of the first day of pre-K at Nuestros Niños Day Care Center. You fill every white page of that notebook with black scribble and give it right back to your mother.

Toma, Mami, te escribí un libro. Here, Mami, I wrote you a book.

From the Los Sapitos, you’re promoted to Los Gatitos; there’s a huge evolutionary divide between tadpoles and kittens. And though you’re a kitten now, kindergarten is where your stomach stops translating lactose into simple sugars and you come to hate milk. Kindergarten is where you will acquire both literacy and English as a one-shot deal. Here, you confine your drawings to the squares mimeographed on sheets of paper. Under these squares are rows of lines reserved for the stories that accompany your drawings. You draw too well within the lines. And after you’ve colored in every blade of grass, Miss Kathy comes over to write out your story immediately beneath the land you’ve drawn.

Here is the grass on the hill.Here is the sun smiling.Here is the palm tree, waving hello.Here is the building where I live in Brooklyn.

The story Miss Kathy has transcribed is illegible to you. During sharing time, the narrative you hear is not the one you’d drawn or told. This new story is in a rubber-band language that makes you run to the bathroom in a fit of tears, unable to articulate that you feel robbed of your tongue.

Soon, though, you learn to write your first word in this rubber language while making Valentine’s Day cards for your parents. And what pride you feel after carefully writing out “love” in a rainbow, all by yourself. This is like nothing you’d ever scribbled in notebooks. This is like writing with light on the walls of an unlit room.

Fellow writer Maaza Mengiste asks what it means to write a love story set in an area of strife. “What is it that [Afro-Diasporic writers] can do, with words, with our imagination, to become true reflectors of our world? What can we do as writers to make ourselves transformers rather than simply translators? And what is it that we change?”

I heard an answer last night in Hortense Spillers’s excellent keynote address on Baldwin and cultural translation: We need a Second Birth. We need to be born again inside ourselves and again become the three year old who writes even through the dimness of her understanding. Only when one is able to inhabit a double-consciousness—simultaneously self-detached and in the self, said Spillersg—does one truly mature and evolve, does one transform beyond translation as individuals, as a people, as artists.

This evolution of sight lies in the ability to take in the world as a whole, and in doing so, allows the seer to have both insight and outsight, self-awareness without sacrificing empathy. And I can’t help think of Anableps, the four-eyed fish that simultaneously sees clearly above and below the water. They can live in both fresh and brackish waters. Also fit to mention is that they live best in schools.

What is reading and writing and translation, then, but the lending and borrowing of eyes. The notion of eye exchange, in fact, is what I’m exploring in my current work. I lend and borrow some vision here in discussing my writing process in response to the issues raised by Mengiste and Spillers.

The spirit of this novel-in-progress originates in my wanting to write away from the kind of despairing narrative that, as Mengiste points out, will continue to be rewarded by those entities who prefer to “keep on gazing at one part of our histories” and who “will pack a gallery and stand the longest in front of the...