As I sat sipping my slightly too expensive, slightly too small beer in Joe’s Pub, the venue for yet another PEN World Voices event, I resorted to my new time killing device: my smart phone. A BBC news tweet popped up announcing the arrival of the UN’s top humanitarian official in the deeply, and seemingly continually, troubled Democratic Republic of the Congo. The social scientist buried beneath my software engineer exterior reflected on the point of tonight’s event. If our seeming inability to play nicely together as a species is going to get resolved, won’t the peace likely come from some social science slash institutional building slash legal-type work? What part can the author—the the narrator—play in moving the topic forward? Surely only an incidental one?
Having recently taken an excellent course on the phenomena of torture and ploughed through the subject with fellow social scientist, I couldn’t quite get myself into the mindset to believe I was going to get much out of the evening. Give me a policymaker, give me a lawyer… well… maybe not… but at least give me a philosopher to help me unpack the ticking time bomb conundrum.
But over the next ninety minutes my skeptical attitude and I were swept away from this cozy NYC bar on an uncomfortable, but rewarding, journey across countries, cultures and time that left me with no doubt that the storyteller plays a critical role. The delivery was relentless—the eleven authors seemed to combine to provide a single tour de force that left me mostly sad, a little hopefully, and most definitely exhausted.
In his introduction, PEN’s Larry Siems framed the debate by reflecting that, given the abrogation of international laws, norms and mores during the Bush administration with respect to torture, are we able to learn from others on how we can deal with torturers in our midst?
There were too many stories and too rich of storytelling for me to do justice in this short piece, but each author had so much to offer that I feel it would be wrong of me not to at least touch on their work.
We started with Lawrence Weschler sharing his interview with Uruguayan General Hugo Medina, in which “vigorous interrogation” (the General’s euphemistic words, not Weschler’s) was justified to preserve the dignity of the country, which in reality was actually the dignity of the armed forces.
Reading both in her native Estonian and in English, Sofi Oksanen shared a section from Hans Luik’s My Marvelous Life where death-camp bound Poles were administered vaccinations en route. Was it to ensure they could walk to their own graves, or was it done in order to keep them compliant and optimistic of their future? After all, what sort of government would give vaccinations if it planned to kill you soon after?
Mohsin Hamid did a beautiful job of reading Margaret Atwood’s “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written”—reading the lyrics again now brings to mind his excellent delivery.
Irakli Kakabadze read Vano Akhalaia’s “Solo Conversation of a Death Squad Member” a muthafucker-laden piece that gave one account of how even the nastiest murderous thug was also part victim in Georgia’s challenging transformation from state-to-market-capitalism during the 1990s. Akhalaia’s protagonist killed almost without remorse, yet also admired the integrity of his father who never lost sight of the difference between right and wrong.
Alina Bronsky, reading in German, painted a powerful vision of racism set on a modern day, football fan-packed train in Germany. The piece, written by Gunter Wallraff entitled “Knock Their Faces In! Germany Is for Germans,” threw us into the rabble of swastika-clad skinheads as they persecuted an African man. The function sport plays in the nation building project is rarely reflected on in the press, but once again, it was driven home by the all-too-common confluence of soccer and racism, most striking in its continued presence in the European game.
Elias Khoury reading from his novel Yalo and drove home to me the futility of torture as a means of coercion. Dedicating his piece to “the 8,000 Palestinians imprisoned under the Israeli occupation” he took us on a journey involving mating cuttlefish and the smell of pine as we entered the mind of the tortured prisoner. The profoundly randomness of the beautiful dreamlike state was perfectly juxtaposed in stark contrast to the graphic reality of the act of torture.
Our next stop was Dirty War Argentina in 1976 where Rodrigo Fresán read two letters from Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh, whose daughter took her own life rather than face the inhumane barbarism. The piece was very touching, driving home the nature of inhumanity as a father attempts to balance his feeling of grief and pride as his daughter took “one last victory over barbarism” by being the architect of her own destiny, and thus robbing the junta of that.
We were then taken halfway around the world and half a century earlier as Aleksandar Hemon read from A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis. We hear the tale of a revolutionary in the Soviet Union as he participants in a long game of cat and mouse with his torturer—attempting to ensure his legacy was respected by carefully crafting his own confession letter to be so full of contradictions that it would be self-evidentially coerced. Only the act of torturing, and subsequently killing, his daughter broke the man.
This cat and mouse game continued with the next author, Peter Schneider, as he read excerpts from the Stasi files. Using an “enlightened” approach to torture, the East German government would use advanced psychology techniques in order to break a prisoner. Tricks such as the systematic discrediting of people’s character through the use of loud music and uncomfortable room temperatures served to disorient and mentally destabilize the victim. This was, without a doubt, the most subtle form of torture discussed during the evening.
The final speaker of the evening was Randa Jarrar who read a wonderful poem by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali entitled “Revenge.” It described the anger the author felt about the burning of his family home; what started off as a poem about revenge beautifully and seamlessly transformed into a poem of forgiveness. The poet recognized that his desire to kill the perpetrator would have to be reined in if just a single person, a mother, father, daughter, wife, or friend, loved him. And should he discover the perpetrator was like a broken “tree branch,” loveless and all alone, he should not wish to add to his pain further by doing him harm.
Although Randa was the final author of the night, there is actually one that I skipped along the way, as he was the one that, amongst all these amazing pieces, seemed to touch the audience most deeply. Valter Hugo Mãe, Portuguese by way of Angola, read from his piece “Against Everyone.” A beautiful and touching account of him being presented with pictures of Pakistani women disfigured after having acid thrown in their faces. The “impossible portraits” were held up to the audience in an effort to “dignify [these] people by caring.” In his culture, women who had had large families would be given the mantle mama by all that knew her in order to recognize the heroic nature of her motherhood, and to acknowledge that—to some degree—she is the mother of many. One of the women burned with acid, who incidentally seemed to be one of the few that never had surgery, had seven children: she would be a mama in his land. His style of transforming the Pakistani woman into all of our mother’s was more powerful than I am able to do justice with my limited capacity for writing, but he left us with both an amazingly told story and a good message: maybe one day soon the first human will be born, instead of us creative apes with bad tempers.
ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer wrapped up proceedings by bringing our journey back to contemporary U.S.A. He pointed out that ordinary people are the only ones that will have the power to ensure that truths about the Bush era government are revealed. If we sit back and expect our governments to do the right thing, we will have a long wait. Jaffer encouraged everyone in the room to write to the Attorney General and to review the evidence at http://www.thetorturereport.org. We owe it to the victims to do so.
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