Trying to Find The Words.(The Arts)(The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur)(Book review)

Byline: Amber Haq

A former translator in Darfur recalls the genocide he survived.

Back in 2006, when Daoud Hari, an interpreter for American journalists in Darfur, was captured by Sudanese militia, he was suspected of being a rebel spy. The soldiers bound his ankles with tight rope and hung him upside down from a tree. "At first I thought, 'Well, this is not so bad'," he writes. "But after a few minutes, however, it gets very bad. Your eyes feel like they're going to pop out. Your head throbs and you can't breathe." That wasn't the only form of torture Hari endured during the ongoing conflict in Darfur: he also saw entire villages set alight, witnessed men lose their minds and dug the graves of family and friends. "It's hard to take these things out of our heads," he says. "It's my faith that keeps me going."

It will be hard for anyone to forget such images after reading "The Translator," Hari's account of the brutal decimation his people, the indigenous Zaghawa tribe, suffered at the hands of the government-backed Janjaweed fighters. He places the conflict, one of the bloodiest and most complicated of the 21st century, in a simple context. Darfur, an oil-richaregionain western Sudan, was for some 200ayears home to farmers of the Fur tribe, shepherds from the Zaghawa tribe and nomadic Arabs. While disagreements over land use would occur from time to time, these were typically resolved locally, by tribal leaders, according to a strict code of conduct. In the '90s, when Chinese oil corporations began investingain the fields of Darfur, they struck a deal with Khartoum over the compensation for oil. "The government of Sudan has been pushed by Chinese companies to create a problem between Arabs and blacks, but theaWest forgets this," says Hari, who now has political-refugee status in the United States. "The lands had to be emptied for the Chinese companies to come to work, but people refused to acceptathe destruction of their villages.aSo they picked up guns against Khartoum." The ensuing fighting and political unrest has led to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of more than 2.5 million since the rebel insurgency started in 2003.

In the book, Hari recounts how he learned English at school and started working as a translator for international aid workers and journalists after his village was destroyed.a"It was my way of fighting back," he says. In uncluttered prose and a soft voice, he speaks poignantly of how the conflict utterly transformed his homeland. "Growing up, I lived in a multicultural community," he says. "We are all Muslims, and as children we all played together." He describes a shared way of living based ...