Chronology

Zahra Patterson’s a book of essays Chronology explores, in fragments, her experience as she fails to translate a short story from the Sesotho language. The book is organized as a series of fragments that deal with themes of colonialism and language, relationships, power, death, and more. The book includes many images, documents, and words that lack chronology in order to create a greater piece about the nature of language and experience.

Chronology begins with a backstory. Zahra Patterson began the book as a translation of a short story she admired, which was written in Sesotho language, a tribal dialect based in South Africa. For many reasons, mostly involving colonialism, power structures, and the forgotten histories of many people of color and native peoples, Patterson failed at her task. In its place, she made the decision to create a series of documents, fragments of language, and images, that convey that failure and the causes of it. She also tells her personal story as a translator and a person living within these power dynamics.

Structured as a series of micro-memoirs that use media and found language to convey larger ideas about self and language, Patterson moves away from her translation experience at points to discuss colonialism and language, and the history that made it impossible for her to properly translate her short story. Essentially, Patterson argues that colonialism and its ongoing history has made it impossible for art and literature made within certain oppressed and colonized cultures to find life outside of those cultures. This leads to a lack of representation of these people and their art; something Patterson also blames on the publishing industry and its white-washed standards for seeking out and selecting texts.



In this way, the book is about language and its many complexities – some of which are wonderful and beautiful, others limiting or damaging. By writing about translation, Patterson forces the reader to consider the many ways that translation is taken for granted or not considered among the greater population. Because language is such a subjective and often physical or personal system, translation becomes a uniquely challenging practice of conveying subjective experience in new ways. In this way, translation is all about relationships, and the way they are formed – through speech, experience, place, and culture, among thousands of other mediums.

Patterson also writes about place in relation to her own identity and the identity of the author of the short story she is attempting to translate. She goes to Cape Town, South Africa because it is a significant location in her own cultural history, and it has meaning for the author of the short story as well. Patterson writes about how, in Cape Town, Africa and Europe existed both separately and simultaneously – she declares that she is the city, in this way, because she has also had to strike a balance in herself between her African and Europe heritage.

Finally, Patterson writes significantly about otherness. In many ways, this conversation is about the otherness of language and of the translator, but Patterson also writes about how a reader can be othered, and how this alienation can lead to nuances in reading and interpretation. In this way, Patterson ties together threads about identity and language into the actual reading experience.



Zahra Patterson is the author of Chronology, which was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2018. The book won a Lambda Literary Award in 2019. Patterson has also published many shorter works in a number of literary magazines. She has worked in youth literary arts organizations, and has been supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council, The Pratt Center, and other institutions. She lives in Philadelphia.