The Interpreter
For the last four years, most of my food advocacy has been on a college campus. I worked in my community. I had a stake in the aesthetics, the educational priorities, the social and environmental footprint, and, of course, the food itself. No one questioned if I had a right to be there, voicing my opinions and fighting for my views.
Then I graduated, moved to a new town, and began to work as a community outreach coordinator for a community health clinic. Community outreach coordinator. I remember trying on the title, wondering, What does that even mean? I imagined myself as a sort of translator, making sure that people involved at every level of the clinic could actually have their voices heard. It made a pretty picture in my mind. Translators, though, cannot add their own ideas and opinions. As part of a progressive clinic, whose patients also suffer at higher levels than average of chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol, how could I work to advocate for better access to safe, healthy, but still convenient foods? What if the people I was “translating” or “interpreting” for had other priorities? Suddenly, I was struggling with my role, my place as an advocate in a neighborhood that was not mine.
As I struggled, I kept coming back to the image of the translator. Translating or interpreting requires a high level of training—much higher than merely communicating. As a Spanish-speaker with no training in interpretation, I marveled as I listened to our recently trained medical interpreters relay, word for word, um for um, what patient and doctor were saying to each other. They stood off to the side, a disembodied voice except when they mimicked a gesture, to ensure that the conversation was always between the patient and the doctor. In fact, the interpreters told me, their goal was to disappear and just let the conversation happen.
The idea of an invisible, yet important, role struck me. On the most basic level, we like to be recognized and appreciated for what we do. We like to leave our mark on the world. Moreover, a friend and I realized last week, being recognized as the service provider allows us to separate ourselves from the people we are serving.
Every Wednesday, people from all walks of life gather for a pay-what-you-can meal, music, free blood pressure and blood sugar screenings, and acupuncture. We had gone to events with free food before, both during and after college, but this was different. Many of the people in the room were somewhat disheveled, some dancing slowly to the music, and, my friend pointed out, quite possibly homeless. Just that idea in my head made the event feel more like what I envisioned a soup kitchen to be than a college food-bribe. I refused to eat, despite the fact that I had skipped lunch. I didn’t have the $5 suggested donation for the meal but didn’t feel poor enough to take the food without paying. I’m not that poor, I thought. Meanwhile, my friend talked mostly to the service providers at the event. Afterwards, as my friend and I talked about our unexpected reactions, we realized how desperately we sought some way to separate ourselves from the people we thought might not have eaten a meal that day, from the situation that we thought of as a soup kitchen. It was the first time, my friend pointed out, that she had been at this type of event but had not been providing services. She was on equal footing with everyone else there. Here in the United States, society tells us that if we work hard enough and are good, upstanding people, we will become prosperous. If I were to need the free food, really need it, then, it would mean something about me—maybe I am lazy, or just plain worthless.
This idea that needing something basic like food means something about me as a person was so basic, so ingrained, that I didn’t even question it. And what about everyone for whom that need is constant, because they grew up in an area with worse schools or no job opportunities or a whole host of factors? A workshop I recently participated in investigated the subtle, and not so subtle, ways that racism has been institutionalized in the United States. We looked at the history I never learned in school, starting from the use of racism to keep indentured servants from uniting with black slaves to better their lot. We examined the history of redlining, and the disinvestment that plagues economically poor neighborhoods. We examined how blame for being poor is often placed on the poor, and how this impacts everyone’s confidence, hopes, even abilities. On top of all this, the workshop was given in Spanish, with simultaneous interpretation in English. Sitting outside the circle, straining forward to catch what was being said, talking quietly and constantly into the microphones, taking off their headpieces to translate comments from English back into Spanish for the group, the interpreters were impossible to forget, and yet somehow invisible to us.
That invisibility comes from another interesting thing that interpreters do—they take on the voice of the person they are interpreting for. When the doctor says “I,” the interpreter says “I.” When the patient says “my foot,” the interpreter also says “my foot.” The interpreter, as far as grammar is concerned, doesn’t even exist as a separate person. Our first week here, I remember noticing how former AVODAH corps member, David Eber, talked about the history of the Ninth Ward where he worked as “our history.” As long as I had to prove that I was somehow a provider, that I was different, I would not be able to interpret needs and visions between the patients, the doctors, the staff members at my job. Even the way that the workshop defined and understood poverty and racism felt like it needed to be interpreted, communicated to people who saw the world a different way, who talked about the world in different terms. I had to get the two parties sitting together at the same table, had to take on both of their opinions, and work to make sure they could understand one another.
Interpreting is an important, but frustrating job. You allow discussions to happen that would not otherwise happen, but you cannot add your own opinion into the mix. In my house, at the grocery stores where I shop, I can say what I want. But what is my role as a white, middle-class girl working in a historic black neighborhood? And how do I translate a language I do not speak? For now I don’t have an answer. New Orleans itself, though, seems to be leaving me hints.
Stapled to telephone poles throughout New Orleans is a somewhat ambiguous command: Think that you might be wrong. They do not read “Get Out,” or “Don’t do anything.” They merely request, don’t be too sure. Think that you might be wrong. Be willing to be challenged. Blunder with grace.
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