A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake
We are constantly and without a moments notice bombarded with images and news stories centered around conflict and suffering. An overload of tragedy, a tsunami of reality, an insurgence of information. So why is it then that we so easily turn a cheek to the pain and harshness of the world and of the stories being told? We have undoubtedly become desensitized to struggle for various reasons, how do we then effectively reconfigure that narrative and become reengaged with the issues of the contemporary world, its histories, and its problems? What if you were mandated to embody the stories, the pain, the realness? No longer could we flip the front page of the news paper over and continue on with our day. The work of meaningful translation does just that.
It’s not enough to reconfigure the narrative though, we must situate ourselves inside of it. This starts with deep listening and understanding, skills we truly don’t practice enough. The transformative process is not easily achieved because it largely requires both of these tactics. This is what took place in South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the eradication of the Apartheid regime, and this theme of translation along with the importance of the translator in this mass mediated event, is what the play turned documentary Truth in Translation attempted to highlight. I felt a deep connection to the intent but also the applicability the work demonstrated in the play. How do we bring forth notions of conflict that are so deeply engrained in the history and culture of a place through dialogue with one another.
The applicability of this work comes with the inextricable link language has and the roll it plays in cultural spheres.
Language needs to perform social functions. It needs us and we need it to communicate, teach, learn, think, raise political consciousness, and move forward. The labor that it takes to bring up deeply rooted conflicts is embedded in this universal concept. Language can move us forward it can similarly hold us back from change. Do we come from language or does language come from us? It is both? In this sense we carry forward a tradition so we can exist within linguistic and social spheres, this is a condition of the collective. So when the collective upholds and permeates conflict it demands rupture. Rupture in the form of what exactly?
As displayed throughout Truth in Translation, rupture needs new perspectives and framework. Frameworks of understanding to communicate the other perspectives, the other stories. After watching the documentary I understood this rupture to be made possible through the arts but almost more importantly, an acknowledgment of the labor translation takes. As Michael Lessac, Director of Truth in Translation and Snake Gives Birth to a Snake, explains it, “The film is neither truth nor fiction, but it is true. It has hope based in despair. It is a journey where darkness and light constantly jump out at you, where one truth morphs into its opposite. It takes these courageous actors through worlds often more painful than their own nightmares…where people also have masks and are better rehearsed than they are. It is an homage (for me) to South Africans – as a microcosm of what is possible. It can be painful…But it allows us to celebrate a terrible truth that every really good actor knows – that what another person looks like…is our own responsibility.”
Truth in Translation told a story, it told a million stories, but at the root it was translation, dialogues, and conflict that stuck with me most. Living in an age and place when the sticky residue of slavery and the civil war still exists, despite how pervasively it is ignored, I couldn’t help but wish something like the TRC should have taken place in the United States. Attempting to think of a contemporary time that could exist if this was achieved was almost impossible for me. For I have been shaped by my existence within the conditions of post- slavery America. The way the news is given to me, the way the class antagonisms of this country play out with minimal to no productive acknowledgment, the contradictions that riddle my very being when I do acknowledge them.
These feelings all factor into how relevant I thought the dialogues of Truth in Translation were in our course this semester. How do we act as the translator of events in our own life as well as the conflicts of the world and of our country, and then how are those all actually entangled in one another. The way we discussed the inevitable intertwining of stories and events throughout history and ways they get told made me want to engage with different outlets of writing about crisis. Truth in Translation recalibrated crisis and historical conditions within the contemporary moment. The actors saw a need for creating a space to speak and in doing so found themselves in many different settings with vastly different conflicts to work with. Their violation to transform the perspective of where content comes from gave me reason to see our course as holding a sort of power as a place of great learning. Every piece in this book will display the immersive experience and complex understanding of connections and ruptures we sought after through a very tumultuous semester. To understand the power our reconfigurations hold, to speak of violence and conflict in open dialogues, to acknowledge otherness and perspectives that are not our own, these are a spaces we must open up this is where we will locate and undercore the conjunction of our words to be world shifting.