Translator of Nightmares

The Horrors of Darfur Defied Description, But Daoud Hari Found a Way to Tell the Story

Sleepless during nights of exile in Chad, Daoud Hari stared at cracks in his room's mud walls. The lines formed random shapes that reminded him of drawings from thousands of years ago -- of horned beasts, of women, men and children. He had seen them in the cool mountain caves of Darfur, where he played as a boy. They triggered an urge to sketch scenes of the savagery and starvation he had witnessed in the once-tranquil lands of his childhood.

During those uneasy nights, he picked up pencil and paper to turn his torment into tolerable numbness.

He drew the woman who had hanged herself from a tree with her shawl because she could not feed her children. Hari had found their tiny corpses around her, their skin like "delicate brown paper, so wrinkled."

He drew the story he had heard of a militiaman lowering his bayonet into the belly of a 4-year-old girl as she ran toward him, impaling her. The gunman pranced around as her blood drained down upon him.

He remembered the girl's father, his sobbing, his horror, his shock: "What was he? A man? A devil? He was painted red with my little girl's blood and he was dancing. What was he?"

His wakeful consciousness felt the pain of these images. His drawings, he says, were "stick pictures of scenes I needed to get out of my head. History. History. History. The people. The little girl. The woman," he says in his memoir, "The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur."

In an interview, Hari described how he wrestled with his memories. "I tried to put down on paper these evil-crossed events. . . . Like daytime nightmares, they stay with you. I would coax the pictures out. They stirred my pain, my anger. I would get emotional and question why I was alive. Then I could fall asleep -- a little."

* * *

Hari, 35, could have picked up a gun, could have joined the battles that have ripped the fabric of life in Darfur. But instead of joining his Zaghawa kinsmen to battle Sudanese troops and their viciously brutal militia proxies, known as the Janjaweed, his choice fell on a different path of danger within the genocidal conflict in Darfur.

He became a guide for "khawajas," an Arabic word meaning whites or gentiles. Putting to use the English he'd learned in high school, Hari served as a guide for visiting State Department investigators, relief workers and journalists traveling through the mass graveyards and smoldering villages of his ancestral lands, leading them through the devastation where Darfur tribesmen and Arab nomads once had thrived, side by side, for centuries.

In becoming the eyes, ears and translator for these outsiders, Hari experienced the conflict over and over again in the stories told to him. And he narrated his journey and his life story for Megan M. McKenna, a relief worker he met in Chad, and Dennis Michael Burke, a writer, who are the co-authors of his chillingly powerful memoir. Of all the position papers, advocacy articles and State Department reports of systematic killing and ethnic cleansing, there is no account like his, from the heart of Darfur's hell and from its poetic soul.

Sitting in the District offices of literary agent Gail Ross, Hari talked for days to Burke and McKenna. "It was like turning reality on its head," McKenna says. "I hope it was cathartic. It was difficult for him and for us, just to hear that he had gone through all this. He would sometimes come close to breaking down, telling us: 'I can't talk about that right now.' "