What reached me was Davi Kopenawa, in La chute du ciel, but never uncarried. His words began in Yanomami, spoken over years with Bruce Albert, who set them down in French. By the time the book lay in my hands, it had already passed through more than one form of listening: each hand along the way choosing a word, smoothing a phrase, deciding what a sentence in one world might become in another. What moves me in it reaches me through a relay of hands, the shaman's and the anthropologist's, neither of them weightless, met through an ear with a training of its own.
Over time, the books I return to have gathered into a shelf. Some meet me through translation. Others I read in the language they were made in, with no translator's hand between us. That difference matters, though it settles less than it seems to. A shelf looks still from the outside, but it is full of crossings. It holds books, and it makes them touch.
To place one book beside another is already to translate a little, carrying it out of solitude and into relation. Arrangement gives a book neighbours, pressures, echoes, possible kinships, possible misunderstandings. It lets one context lean against another.
Read before Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women, Gilbert Durand's L'imagination symbolique and Christopher Lasch's La culture du narcissisme can come across to me as accounts of the human, of what images do for us and what a self becomes when its old supports give way. Read after her, with her argument that seniority, rather than bodily sex, organised social roles in precolonial Yorùbá society, they sound more situated, and I notice how far I have let their we extend. Only the order has changed.
So even with books I can read closely, in the language of their making, another hand appears the moment I gather them. The worry that a hand might flatten a book in the passing covers the hand that gathers as much as the translator's, the editor's or the anthropologist's.
And the crossing was there before any of us. Glissant wrote the Caribbean in French, a language brought to the islands rather than born there, with the speech of the place pressing up beneath it. In Césaire, the language is bent until it carries a world it had been trained to deny. Both wrote inside a language of empire and turned it, by island speech, memory, revolt and relation, towards what it was built to refuse. So even the nearest reading, even the reading that happens in the language of composition, meets something already carried. There was never an uncrossed first version to return to.
Some of these books think from a sea and a scatter of islands that are partly mine, in languages I move through unevenly, at home in some and a guest in others. In places I am reading kin, and reading them in their own words. That should make the gathering easier, and it does not. The language that brings me close was handed down by the same empire, and closeness has its own presumption. I meet these books as heir and stranger both, and the seam runs through the one doing the gathering as much as through the books.
So I keep this shelf as an open question rather than a finished collection. The writers crossed into languages handed to them; the carriers crossed to bring the words on; I cross again each time one book is made to stand near another. A shelf works less by explaining its books than by changing the relations between them, and by being changed by what it holds. The most honest thing I can do is keep the crossing visible: name the hands, admit my own, and leave the door at every end open. The ends here are languages, none of them the first.