Description
Katie Kitamura’s 2021 novel, Intimacies, portrays the life of an interpreter working at a fictional international criminal court based in The Hague. At work, the interpreter translates the words of a former president accused of instigating mass violence and the words of a witness testifying to the deaths of her family and community members. Outside of the courtroom, the interpreter is in a relationship with a man separated, but not yet divorced, from his wife. Over the course of the novel, Kitamura explores themes of belonging, truth, and violence through the interpreter’s private and work lives.
In this paper, I offer a reading of international criminal justice through Kitamura’s imagining of the interpreter’s life. I argue that the liminality and ambiguity depicted in the interpreter’s private life mirrors that of the imagined international court. The interpreter lives and works in the space of the in-between. She is the linguistic intermediary between the accused, the witness, and the court, and she is also in the middle of her lover’s marriage, living in his apartment among the décor chosen by his estranged wife. Not of The Hague, she is between worlds and uncertain of her place. Throughout the novel, the interpreter encounters threats and intimations of violence, but they remain distant and unresolved. There are suggestions of what is past and what is to come, but these are uncertain, passed on as hearsay from person to person. I argue that the private life of the interpreter suggests questions pertinent for international criminal justice, about the promise of what Phil Clark terms “distant justice”, the role of the truth in post-conflict justice processes, and the complexity of reckoning with violence.
