Deux langues, une voix

I am a paralegal at an immigration firm in Flatbush. Monday through Friday I translate people's situations into the language the system will accept. It is not the same as translation. It is more like compression, and something is always lost. My mother came from Jacmel in 1989. She arrived speaking Kreyòl, French, and a little English she had practiced from a book called *Speak English in 30 Days* that she bought at the march in Pétion-Ville before she left. I grew up translating for her and translating myself, depending on which room I was standing in. The memoir I'm writing is about that. Not the immigration story in the version where it resolves. The version where it stays complicated. *Mwen pa konprann* is the phrase I keep returning to, those three words meaning roughly 'I don't understand', which I heard my mother say in so many contexts that they became a kind of refrain. The chapter I'm working on now is about the first time I heard her say them and know she was not talking about language. Edwidge Danticat is the writer who showed me that Haitian diaspora experience could be literature, not just testimony. I read *Brother I'm Dying* at seventeen in a public library on Nostrand Avenue. My book is not that book. I have to find my own sentences for what I know.