Translation

"I use words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others or let me be silent."
Samuel Beckett, Endgame

". . .with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human realm. That is not a mechanical problem, but an essential one. . .I do not mean to simplify, to attenuate, or to sweeten the horror, but to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and his language, to rescue the suffering from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity and to restore the person's given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him."
Aharaon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair

Sometimes I sit and read my dictionary. It's a huge Webster's New World dictionary I was given in grammar school. For a long time I hated dictionaries. You had to spell to use them. I was never a good speller. And while I currently spell better, homonyms are my Nemesis.

But I read. And I read the dictionary to find words.

I didn't start this till I took an Anthropology class while an undergraduate at Cal. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe was our teaching assistant. We didn't have sections but she read and commented on our papers. She was eloquent, uncorrupted and uncompromising. I wanted to impress her. She assigned Malcom X's Autobiography. I read how he taught himself to read while in prison by reading the dictionary. He was like the men in my family—but they never made the changes necessary to claim El Hajj. They staid where they stayed.

I always arrived to class early and sat in the front. I was terrified of flunking out. I still lived at home and attended meetings every night in the city. On the weekends I locked myself in my room to read and memorize. During the week I rode BART to campus and squeezed myself into seats and paradigms. I was always mispronouncing. People had no shame in correcting me. I felt stupid—and often still do, when people correct my English, at the store buying groceries.

For our final we were required to write about home, using several of the texts. I only remember Malcom, Jayne's lecture on the Rastafari and Anthony Garcia's lecture on Urban Indians. (This was the only class I took at Cal, outside the Native American Studies department that even mentioned Indians—except for a cultural Anthropology screening of Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area? I had to leave midway through. I couldn't stand it.)

I'm not sure how I answered the question of home, when my world was bound by the daily journey from house, to work, to class and to meeting, but I know I couldn't speak. I started to go by the tag line: silent. Shaping words was beyond me. I was simply trying to get from one world to another intact. Getting to a meeting at the end of the day was a successful day, getting up in the morning a successful night. The process of translation requires a similar desire: to move from one place to another with something remaining—though it remains changed, it remains nonetheless.

In my experience home is not a place to speak from. Voice originates in the process of transformation and the desire to carry that over—from San Francisco to Cal, from Navajo to English, from here to there and from me to you.