Creative Writing as Translation

A few months ago, I went to an exhibit of the winners of the 2011 World Press Photo competition. These were winning photographs taken in 2010 by photojournalists from around the world. There were several categories: Portraits, General News, People in the News, Sports, and so on. The World Press Photo of the Year, the image that broke through every category to define 2010, was the disturbing, striking photo of eighteen-year-old Bibi Aisha, the young Afghani girl whose ears and nose were cut off by the Taliban for daring to run away from an abusive husband and household. I am nearly certain you know whom I am talking about. Her close-up image, angled to give us an unobstructed view of her mutilated face, had been on the cover of TIME magazine.

As I continued to walk from room to room of the gallery space, here is what else I saw: a decapitated head lying on a roadside in Mexico. A man in Haiti hurling the body of a child out of a window and onto a pile of other corpses. A Kenyan woman in the quiet aftermath of a botched abortion, naked from the waist down. I looked at those photographs taken of people in Europe and America and those told a more varied story: an overcrowded Brooklyn apartment with a computer screen blazing light into a room; a sports crowd in the midst of a crush; a young, fragile mother’s struggle with drug abuse. It seemed the eyes observing these subjects were gentler, less probing, less violating, and more complicated in their narration.

The photos depicting events that took place in countries where so many look like you and me were as beautifully composed and lit, just as striking, but those seemed to tell of lives lived in the extremes of violence, desperation, and even stoic dignity. This is not to say that there were no portrayals of similar situations from the West, but the majority of the winning photographs of 2010 presented a narrative of Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America that was noticeably different from the rest. As I left the exhibit, I remember asking myself: are these the only events that happened on these continents, in these countries? Are these the only photographs that exist of Mexico? Of Sierra Leone? Of Haiti? When did it become acceptable for us to gaze at the humiliation, pain, degradation, and suffering of people of color with such dispassionate eyes? Where did this come from?

These photographs told a kind of story that I think writers of color are all too familiar with: they are interpretations of our tragedies and triumphs, of our struggles and our fears. But they do not seek to complicate our understanding of what we are looking at. Some may contend that is not the role of the photographer, that what happens beyond the frame becomes the responsibility of the viewer. And while I agree, there is something disturbing going on when the reflected narrative is skewed and consistently so.

But why is this important now, on this panel? What does this have to do with creative writing and the topic of translation? I have tried to discard this moment from memory, but as I begin to think of what we do as creative writers and the world from which we create and re-create context, I cannot help but think of the exhibit. I cannot help but make a connection between what we see and how we interpret it. When we write, we pull from our experiences and we take it all in—sight, sound, scent, emotion—and we find the words to make these real on the page. We use words but we don’t function in a world of words alone. Every day, when we sit down to write, we must wade through the debris of old memories and emotions and reconstruct them. I want to try to consider what is reflected in the moving screen of our imagination, and what it is we then go on to transmit, and why.

The narratives and images about and of...