MuseumDESCRIPTION:
James Dawes is a professor of English at Macalester College and the author of That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. He discusses with guest host Bridget Conley-Zilkic the role of storytelling in making atrocities known to the world.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. I’m sitting in for Jerry Fowler. My guest today is James Dawes, Professor of U.S. and Comparative Literature at Macalester College. We’ve invited him today to discuss his recently published book That The World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Professor Dawes, welcome to the program.
JAMES DAWES: Thanks for having me.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So I want to start with a very basic question: how does the study of literature relate to the work of documenting or bearing witness to atrocities?
JAMES DAWES: For me, they are inseparable. In all of the years I’ve spent involved with human rights and humanitarian workers, what’s become clear to me is that storytelling and narrative is the very heart of the work. Many of the most important organizations that do this work don’t do it by, you know, delivering supplies or medicine or things like that. But rather just by using language, writing reports, asking questions, evaluating answers, telling stories. And most importantly, pleading with all of us who are watching from a distance. It’s their job to make comprehensible stories out of incomprehensible atrocities in order to move us to action.
There’s two kind of examples that fit this: one that’s sort of uplifting and one’s that sort of depressing. The uplifting example is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was explicitly an exercise in storytelling. In fact, when the commission wrote its final report of itself, talking about its processes, it continually referred to the healing power of narrative and talked about the therapeutic process of giving the survivors a chance to tell their story. At one point, in fact, they detailed how people came into the commission in almost fetal postures but left standing tall.
The sort of inverse of that, the negative example, is what happens when these stories aren’t told or when the stories fail to capture the imagination of the world. When that happens the very worst is made possible and Rwanda is a perfect case of that. The world either didn’t hear the stories or didn’t react to the stories. So in a very brief period of time, four months, 800,000 people were killed really up close, you know, with machetes while the world watched. And a story that’s told sometimes to illuminate the failure of the story of Rwanda is about a group of scavenging dogs that were found by the invading army that eventually stopped the genocide. They were coming into the city and they saw these dogs and these dogs were fed well and fierce, which was unusual for this part of Africa. And it became quickly clear that they were fierce and well fed because they’d been eating humans that were littering the roadways. So the soldiers, sort of sickened at this indignity, started to shoot the dogs so that they could preserve as much as possible of the corpses for burial. And it was a this point, finally, that the story broke through into the western imagination and the world was shaken out of its torpor. And at this point that they reacted by protesting the killing of the dogs. So I think that kind of sums what happens when narrative fails in this work.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: One-- you made an interesting comment there in Rwanda. You said that people either didn’t hear the stories or they didn’t listen. And I guess I wanted to ask you about the difference as well as in hearing the story and listening.
JAMES DAWES: I think there are all kinds of ways we can have these stories told to us and find ourselves not really, really reacting to them, tuning them out or filtering them out. And, you know, social psychologists study this, journalists study this. There’s a list. There’s compassion fatigue, there’s diffusion of responsibility. Maybe the clearest example I could give is from someone I know who was a refugee in Africa during the Congolese civil war. And he feels his life was saved by humanitarian workers. The lives of the people he was with were saved by humanitarian workers who came in. Because he was going to die and they delivered what he needed. And he knew when this was happening, he knew that they were able to come because the stories had been told and outreach had been kind of arranged and funding had been arranged. And he knew, in a sense, they were trading the stories of their abjection for their lives. But he thought this was a good trade at the time.
However, after being in America for awhile and looking at the accumulation of these stories, how we can be forced to continually hear these stories, he began to feel like this drive to reveal people at their most abject, to make people reveal themselves at their most abject, was having a pervasively negative influence. And he thinks in the end that these humanitarian workers and their work does more harm than good because precisely what you’re saying. We have become so accustomed to hearing stories of suffering in Africa that we no longer listen. And it becomes almost like it’s a natural state for Africans to suffer. And in some way that they’re less than fully human because we associate them so fully with these repetitive stories.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And sort of following up on that, you-- in the book you mention a range of different ways in which human rights or humanitarian professionals document stories. I wondered if you could also talk a little bit about what the audience is? Who’s the intended audience for these stories? And are there different ways in which stories are told to reflect different goals of the stories?
JAMES DAWES: That’s a really complicated question and it often depends upon the organization you’re talking about. So, for instance, Human Rights Watch has a very different audience than Amnesty International. But in the end I think the basic truth behind all of this is the final target for all these stories is-- it’s people like you and people like me, just average citizens. And there’s a kind of paradox to this because average citizens like you and me, when we hear these stories of what’s happening, say, in Darfur or Burma our-- I think our pervasive reaction across the country, across the world, is to feel helpless and impotent, that there’s nothing we can do about these things. And yet there is something about the collective of all these helpless reactions that represents the thin wedge between life and death for people around the globe.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And what had some of the effects on documenting atrocity on the internationals or be they nationals that sometimes who are collecting the stories? I think that was one of the more interesting parts of your book is some of the costs for people who are narrating the stories.
JAMES DAWES: It’s an astonishing psychic cost. I have some friends who work for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Turkey. And their job is to essentially record the stories of people who are coming and seeking refugee status. Not simply to record them, actually, but to judge them, to see if they’re lying, to see if they actually fit the specific definitions of refugee status. So it’s an amazingly stressful job, not simply because you see suffering but because you have to be in a kind of, not an antagonistic relationship, to it, but a judgmental relationship, to it. And these are people who suffered terribly. I remember one legal officer telling me about how she was interviewing a woman who’d been so badly burned during her torture that the only recognizably human features that remained were the holes where her eyes and her mouth should have been. And she said it was really hard to know where and if she should look while she was talking to her.
So the result of this is often really physiological. This same woman talked about another case she heard, a sexual torture, and how the next day she came into work and her body was covered in these red psychosomatic lesions. A translator she worked with was telling her about how after she took the job, she noticed her kids were complaining about how much she was sleeping, which was kind of her unselfconscious depressive reaction to her work. In this case, actually, it even gets worse because these people have to judge cases and then face the reactions of those they’re judging. So not only is it stressful, but it’s often dangerous. They’re threatened. They witness really horrible reactions. One person sewed his mouth shut with a needle and thread when his case was rejected. And another person actually waited outside the building until his legal officer came out and then took his own baby and threw it under an oncoming car crying out, “This is your fault.” So it’s important work, it’s amazing work and I just don’t know how they do it.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And the effects on the victim or the witness, you also talk a little bit about that, about being in the position particularly for survivors of torture, of being forced to, again, recount their story and respond to probing questions, trying to discern what the truth is. Could you talk a little bit more, though, about how these victims and witnesses react to that kind of questioning and probing relationship?
JAMES DAWES: It can be really difficult. I remember talking to one person who was working at a border and they were interviewing people who came over who’d been tortured. And they were trying to-- this was not a judgmental process, this was just a supportive process, lawyers and others who were trying to help these people get citizenship and be rescued, essentially. And their first reaction was to have doctors present because these people were injured and they were suffering and you want to have doctors available. The unforeseen consequence was that this terrified all of the people who came because they were coming from a place where doctors had participated in the torture, you know. Checking to make sure that they could take a little more pain, reviving them when the pain had become too much, making sure the injuries weren’t lethal but almost lethal. So there was all kinds of ways that torture victims, when you’re walking in such delicate territory, you can injure them tremendously.
There’s a cartoonishly brutal example of the way getting people to tell their story can hurt them which sometimes gets told about this massacre took place in Africa. And there was this journalist who needed to get the story out on deadline and he was late. So he was rushing through the recovery area and really just horrible things had happened including the rape of a group of nuns. He went rushing through the recovery area and yelled out, “Anybody here been raped who speaks English?” I think that’s an extreme example but it is representative of the pervasive problem of what might be called the paradox of representing suffering, which is that to stop people from being injured you have to tell their stories. But in telling their stories, you often end up injuring them.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: At one point in the book you quote someone who’d written a book about the mothers of Argentina and he admitted some of what you just suggested. And he knew that his work might have intruded on the women’s lives. But he concluded that it was worthwhile to document their stories because the opposite is silence. And I just wanted your thoughts on if this is true. Is the choice between reawakening trauma or silence or is there some other choice?
JAMES DAWES: I think ideally, no, that’s not the choice. I think practically it often is. But there is a thin shelf of space between these two abysses, so to speak, and there’s lots of examples of successful work in that thin shelf of space. One example is an artistic one. It’s about how aesthetics really helps you negotiate that territory. It’s this theatre series “Children of War” by an artist named Ping Chong. And it’s really an amazing series. What he did in this process was he recruited children who came to the U.S. as war refugees. And he interviewed them about the really traumatic details of their personal histories, then turned these interviews into a play which the children themselves then performed publicly. And it’s a really amazingly painful play. I actually have a snippet of his play here, just a couple of lines, to give you an example. “We hear screaming in the market. Everybody runs. ‘Do you want a short sleeve or a long sleeve?’ That is what the boy killers ask. If you say ‘long sleeve’ they chop off your entire arm. If you say ‘short sleeve’ they chop off your arm at the elbow. People run past me screaming with no arms.”
So when I heard about this project my first reaction was negative. I was troubled because this was children and public catharsis is quite risky psychologically for anybody but I think especially for children. And I was also troubled because it seemed that there was a high likelihood that the audience for this play would be composed of voyeurists of terror or bored, purposeless people looking for an authentic moment. But after talking to Chong and reading the accounts of the children and talking to some of the people in the play, it seemed this was actually a really powerfully therapeutic and affirming process for everybody involved. In part because Chong was uniquely sensitive and he incorporated social workers and counselors in the process. And in part because the children were really eager to tell their story. They’d spent all their time in the U.S. thinking not only that people couldn’t understand them but that people wouldn’t believe them. And so in becoming co-creators of this artistic artifact, this play, they developed a sense of control that I think is absent in a lot of human rights work. They weren’t the subjects of analysis but they were the creators of something. And I think this was all the difference between feeling exposed and feeling validated.
One of the-- the only adult to perform in this play was a Persian woman who’d been imprisoned in Iran for speaking out against the Ayatollah Khomeini. And she described it as a sort of art and narrative as in a sense the opposite of torture. So she told me about how when she was detained and she was being tortured, it was essentially aesthetics that saved her and helped her survive. She would walk these gravel pathways to her interrogation each day and pick up little pebbles which she’d take back to her cell and carve into pleasing shapes with a bobby pin. When she was put in these sensory deprivation spaces called “the graves” she would design buildings in her head. And she was, of course, forced to listen to the Koran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And she was able to bear it because she converted it in her mind into an opera in a foreign language. So it gave her a sense of control, this creation of art. She talked about how when she was in prison they controlled everything, you know, your language, the dreams that you have. They can manipulate pain and they can manipulate your body to make you speak words you don’t want to speak, to give names out, to do whatever they want you to do. And she said it was only when she was able to do things like participate in the making of this play that this self-erasing experience, this theft of her autonomy began to be healed. Because she for once could say the words she wanted to say and not the words the torturer wanted her to say.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: That’s an extraordinary example. I just have one final question. As a professor you obviously work with young people and students who are trying to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives. So I was curious after the work that you’ve done talking to professionals in this field and understanding the dilemmas, not only ethical dilemmas but then also the cost for them of this kind of work. Do you recommend to students that they pursue a career in human rights work or humanitarian?
JAMES DAWES: I like to both discourage and encourage them. I want to encourage them because I think this is, you know, we live in essentially a compromised world and this is a chance for heroism as a sort. It’s the kind of work that can make a life meaningful. But I wouldn’t want them simply to bring their idealism and their passion and their excitement to it. I’d want them also to bring their sadness to it and their sense of tragedy. I’d want them to know right away that this the kind of work that involves horrible moral compromises and kind of catastrophic consequences to good intentions.
One story that sticks out in my mind as an example of that is a humanitarian worker who was involved in tracing the disappeared in a country where the government was essentially stuffing people into dungeons and just leaving them there and nobody knew what had happened to them. This seemed to him like an unambiguous good. You want to find out where these people are. You want to demand accountability. You want to do something to help the families that just have this void. But about halfway through the process he had this chilling realization that the government wasn’t going to want to have to deal with the fallout of being caught out if they eventually made the connections with the disappeared. And it would be much easier for them just to kill everybody and disappear them forever. And this was the consequence of his good intentions.
So I think if you go into this work idealistically, if you go into this work expecting to make a big difference, you burn out incredibly quickly. It is ironically those who go in not expecting to make a big difference who do end up making a big difference because they can survive. They can last. And they don’t focus on changing the world but rather just on changing the square meter they’re standing on which I think is the way you should go into it.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Professor Dawes, thank you, very much for sitting with us today.
JAMES DAWES: Thanks for having me.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
