Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli: the Interpreter Confronted with “Grievable Lives”

Abstract

In 2015, Valeria Luiselli worked in New York as a volunteer interpreter for dozens of children from Central America who had crossed through Mexico, hoping to receive refugee status in the USA. In her essay, the author describes the difficulties she encountered in translating the traumatic stories of these unaccompanied children. Although the text has documentary elements, it interweaves the stories of the undocumented children with Luiselli’s own story and struggles with migration. Tell Me How It Ends emphasizes the performativity of the task of the interpreter and the breakdown of the notion of community in globalized societies – societies in which some lives are considered “precarious” and “ungrievable”. In doing so, the book goes beyond a mere depiction of reality and “affects” the reader.