Yara Rodrigues Fowler - 3 - We believe that we will win.

3 November 2023

Yara Rodrigues Fowler - 2 - Thickened history

There is this idea, coined by Mark Bessinger, of ‘thickened history’, which is when a lot of history happens very quickly. Historians and survivors return to these moments as they try to understand the present, and yearn for alternative presents. They are the moments you’d go to in a time machine. When my ferry to Amsterdam port began moving away from the Tyne into the North Sea, I felt that I was travelling in the wrong direction, away from the sit ins and protests and the people I knew who were organising for a ceasefire in Gaza.

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28 October 2023

Yara Rodrigues Fowler - 1 - Prologue: Translation as survival

When the children of migrants translate it is because something needs to be done and their parents are powerless to do it. Food ordered from a restaurant menu. Paperwork submitted to avoid deportation. Translation, we learn, is always a negotiation, always about power and, sometimes, a question of survival. Translation often occurs — or does not occur — at the interface with the state. In 2010s, when a right-wing government implemented austerity policies across the UK, one of the first services cut was translation. At the time, I was the trustee of a women’s refuge for Latin Americans. Without translation, migrant women escaping abusive partners, often with their children, could not access the UK justice system, the UK housing benefit system or UK schools.

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