It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York. That city had become disorienting to me, after my father’s death and my mother’s sudden retreat to Singapore. For the first time, I understood how much my parents had anchored me to this place none of us were from. It was my father’s long illness that had kept me there, and with its unhappy resolution I was suddenly free to go. I applied for the position of staff interpreter at the Court on impulse, but once I had accepted the job and moved to The Hague, I realized that I had no intention of returning to New York, I no longer knew how to be at home there.
The first-person narrator of this novel is an example of an unnamed protagonist. The opening paragraph institutes the basic premise of the narrative: the move to The Hague to commence work as an interpreter. This lack of definition is thus symbolically delineated as well in the blurring of lines represented by two different countries, two different cultures and her work as a translator. All these aspects of her life blend together to situate the identity crisis at work in the unnamed woman telling her story. The strong assertion of planning to never return to New York and the assumption that she could never call it home seals the deal: this paragraph represents the thematic thread of the story in miniature.
Amina explained, it was the intimacy of the interpretation, she was interpreting for one man and one man alone, and when she spoke into the microphone, she was speaking to him. Of course, she had known when she accepted the post in The Hague that the substance of the Court would be darker than the United Nations, where she had previously been working. After all, the Court concerned itself exclusively with genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes.
In describing the valuable information she has learned from a fellow interpreter, the narrator here also explains the significance of her moving to The Hague. “The Hague” is a metonymic reference to the city oddly named city in the Netherlands. When people reference “The Hague” outside of that country, it is usually not in reference to the city as a whole, but the fact that it is home to the International Court of Justice, more familiarly known simply as the World Court. This court is internationally recognized and validated as the site where war criminals will be held to account for the worst crimes of society in the modern world. As such, taking on the job of translator carries with it far greater responsibilities and the potential for emotional scarring than perhaps any other high-profile position available to those trained for the position. The attentive reader will also perhaps have picked upon the reference to the title in this quote in the narrator’s description of Amina characterization of translation as an act of intimacy.
The accused then—I began to scan the file more hurriedly, one eye on the officials who were filing into the courtroom below, the session would begin soon—formed an army of mercenaries and began a process of ethnic cleansing, leading to death squads and mass graves. The UN sent peacekeeping troops, the African Union demanded that the accused step down from power, he was entirely unrepentant. His opponent retaliated, civil war ensued. Eventually, in the wake of French and United Nations air strikes, the opposition forces and the UN captured the accused and placed him under house arrest.
The core of the narrator’s story is her job as interpreter for the former leader of an African country who is accused of war crimes as outlined here. In addition to ethnic cleansing, he stands accused of interfering with his country’s electoral process and attempting to violate the country’s constitutionally imposed term limits for serving as President. The emotional core of the story is the inevitable sympathy that develops when working in close proximity with someone, even if they are accused of horrific violations of humanity. The thematic notion of not quite having one’s identity firmly grounded takes shape once things begin to look brighter for the ex-President’s case as the somewhat steady relationship between them only starts going off the rails at that point.
