Today my personal essay “Our Words Will Save Us & Set Us Free,” which is part of my experimental memoir, DREAM POP ORIGAMI, was published in Longreads. This essay is also about the time I was a French interpreter for a Mauritanian refugee during his asylum interview at the I.N.S., the way I discovered the flaws, the limitations, the circularity, and the ultimate redemption of language, the way it arms us with imperfect weapons to capture the awe-inspiring sublimity & collapse of this world. This essay is also about the politics of storytelling, exploring the question of who gets to tells their stories, how do they get to tell them, in what language, and to whom. Along the way, I meditate on the metaphoricity of language itself, the cultural exchange that takes place in international development work in West Africa, the identification of language, and the impossibility and the necessity of using language to reify our struggle and to bolster our resistance.