I wrote Translations in my early-20s while I was figuring out how to explain who I was, both to myself and to others. The hyper-specific language available to me through Western identity politics felt both excessive and reductive. There was also, within that oversupply, a noticeable vacuum where my life should have had linguistic or literary precedent.

Translations functioned like a scientific experiment for me, an investigation into how best to fill that vacuum. I prepared my reactants: in my Palestinian farmhand, I instilled the virtues of holding fast to identity politics (resisting erasure, celebrating difference); in my protagonist’s childhood friend, I instilled the opposite properties (evading definition, the fruits of uncertainty). I then hurled these forces into my protagonist, Aliyah, and watched her experience a chemical cascade of repulsions, attractions, sublimations and, ultimately, elemental change.

To see Aliyah learn to moderate extremes, even occasionally transcend them and conceive possibilities beyond the dichotomy altogether, was freeing. Through writing about her, sitting with her, I came to feel that connection is founded not in some final comprehension, but in the difficult, lifelong process of translation.