The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman is another author whom I checked out after seeing him at PEN. The Art of Political Murder is a nonfiction account of the murder of Bishop Gerardi in Guatemala City in 1998. Goldman reported the case on spec for The New Yorker, returning to Guatemala repeatedly over a number of years.

Gerardi was beaten to death on the grounds of the parish house of the church of San Sebastian (which was Goldman’s own church as a child). The killing came shortly after Gerardi released a massive report holding the former military regime responsible for the vast majority of the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans in the country’s civil war.

The motive and the culprits might seem obvious, but complications quickly arose. Why should the bishop be killed after the report appeared and not before? Wouldn’t military killers have done the job more cleanly? And what about the strange behavior of Father Mario?

Goldman tells a complicated story in clean journalistic prose, though fairly close attention is needed to keep the movements and identities of the characters straight. (Helpful maps and lists are provided.) Though the killing and disappearance of witnesses are a recurring theme, Goldman doesn’t dwell much on the danger he is running himself. One exception comes when he receives a frightening phone call from the powerful Colonel Lima, one of the main suspects in the killing. The call is even more unsettling because static makes most of it undecipherable.

Knowing that I’d put myself on Colonel Lima’s radar make me uneasy, although I didn’t really think that anything was going to happen to me, an American citizen.... But when I came home at night I was frightened by the darkness of my room at the Spring, whose only window opened onto a small patio, and I worried about the flimsy lock on the door. Stuck in traffic on gray afternoons in late September, I’d feel overwhelmed by a very particular sadness, something that seemed to come from the unconscious memory of the street itself, of all the people who were driving or just walking to or from someplace — an office, a church, the movies, school — and must have had a last moment of panic or grief or resignation, realizing that there was no escape and that they would never get home.

The Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret

I hadn’t heard of the Israeli writer Etgar Keret until I attended the session on short stories at this year’s PEN World Voices festival. He impressed me with his energy and his strong opinions on the state of the short story (including a wicked parody of the sort of New Yorker story in which nothing much happens but the sentences are beautiful). I picked up The Nimrod Flipout mostly because of a dinner-table rave from Bud Parr (though The Girl on the Fridge apparently doesn’t measure up to that one).

As I’d heard, Keret’s stories are very short. (“Dirt,” for instance, is barely a page long.) Many of them work like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in that one strange thing happens and the routines of life adjust to that thing. Unlike Kafka, though, Keret is determinedly mundane in tone. (It’s doubtful that Kafka would ever write a story called “The Tits on an Eighteen-Year-Old.”) Most of his stories seem to be narrated by the same guy: a young Israeli, not too ambitious, who drinks and smokes quite a bit and whose emotional life is a bit flattened, perhaps by past trauma. But within these limitations, the stories manage to be funny, unsettling, and moving.

Despite what Keret said at PEN about his lack of interest in craft, some of the stories are neatly structured. “For Only 9.99 (Inc. Tax and Postage)” is an extended Jewish joke, and “Your Man” (one of my favorites) has the fatedness of Poe or the Brothers Grimm. But there are others, like “My Girlfriend’s Naked,” that simply offer something strange and the narrator’s ruminations over it.

PEN World Voices: Rian Malan

I read My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan not long after it came out in 1990. It was recommended by my ex-boss, a white South African exile who headed up the US office of the International Defense and Aid Fund. The book was frighteningly honest, he said, and when I read it I agreed.

Malan wrote about growing up in an Afrikaner family, rebelling against the prejudice that surrounded him, playing in a rock band, losing his virginity to an African woman, and becoming a crime reporter in Johannesburg. But none of this was simple. Malan wanted to feel solidarity with the Africans, but he was afraid of Africans. He witnessed terrible crimes by the security forces but other atrocities committed by anti-apartheid activists, and even some motivated by witchcraft.

Malan’s thoughts about race in South Africa remain complicated and uncomfortable, and his statements at the PEN panels on Memoir and Reportage and on Truth and Reconciliation reflected that.

It would take more thought, a rereading of My Traitor’s Heart, and research into Malan’s later writings for me to reach any real conclusions. In the meantime, hearing him prompted questions:

What is the value of honesty? Malan doesn’t spare himself in his memoirs, and the result is a compelling, even harrowing picture of a conflicted man. It is even, in its own way, a work of art. But honesty doesn’t guarantee correctness, and it doesn’t necessarily advance relations between the races. As Malan said about the South African truth commission, it opens up old wounds.

Should the crimes of freedom fighters be regarded in the same way as the crimes of the regime? This was a question that moderator Paul van Zyl touched on in the Truth and Reconciliation panel. Maybe the crimes of freedom fighters should be treated more leniently, because their cause is just. Maybe they should be treated more harshly, because the perpetrators should know better, and they don’t have the excuse of being trapped in the belly of an oppressive regime. Or maybe a line needs to be drawn between the justice of a cause and the actions of those who fight for that cause, as Michael Walzer argues in his book Just and Unjust Wars.

Does it distort reality to examine oneself too deeply or critically? Malan tells how, during his years in America, he would present himself as a just South African, an Afrikaner who couldn’t stomach defending apartheid by force. He said that he was “lying through my teeth,” but reading him or listening to him forces you to conclude that it was least partly true.

By owning his negative impulses and not his positive ones, and by focusing on the worst deeds of the best people, Malan’s vision of the future turned dark. This habit of mind may have been one reason why Malan expected an all-out race war in his country that never came (he describes how he found himself peddling “my little blood pudding” just as Nelson Mandela was being released from 27 years in prison) and why he seems so dissatisfied by the work of the truth commission.

PEN World Voices: African Wars

The panel for African Wars brought together two writers whose work I had known and respected for years – Nuruddin Farah and Chenjerai Hove – with another, Abdourahman Waberi, whom I had met the day before and found sharp and engaging. I expected some harrowing stories, stinging denunciations, and tough proposed solutions. What I didn’t expect was the aimless, detached, abstract quality of the discussion and the troubling racial undercurrents that seemed to surface in the room.

The discussion got off track almost at once, after moderator Violaine Huisman threw out for reaction a quotation from Ryszard Kapuscinski. “Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say ‘Africa,’” he had written in The Shadow of the Sun. “In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.”

“Africa does not exist?” retorted Hove. “Where is the man coming from?”

Farah and Waberi, quickly showing themselves to be more subtle than the plain-spoken Hove, said that of course Kapuscinski was referring to the immense diversity of the continent.

“Africa is too complex for the likes of Kapuscinski,” said Farah, dismissing the work of a man who covered twenty-seven revolutions and coups between 1958 and 1980. “Because it exists, that’s why we have wars.”

Hove tried to deal with the problem of war more substantively, but his comments covered familiar ground. The national borders established by the Berlin conference in the 19th century had no meaning for ordinary people, he said, and led to conflict. War is about the distribution of power and its benefits. Everything is political: even the chairs we sit on and the trees planted along the streets outside are there because of decisions made by human beings.

Hove’s points were valid, if a bit obvious, and could have been the basis for a deeper discussion. But perhaps because he presented himself more as a man of the people than an academic, and because he illustrated his points with homely anecdotes (one of them about a war that allegedly broke out between Botswana and Zimbabwe when a hunter chased an elephant across the border), the mostly white audience laughed for what seemed the wrong reasons. Those crazy Africans, fighting over elephants!

Farah’s contributions were more sophisticated but less helpful. Each reason for war that he offered seemed to carry the message that there was little we could do about it. War is a part of the national development of African countries, he said. The conflict in the Congo is the equivalent of the 30 Years’ War in Germany. Every form of industrial and mechanical development in Africa had been interrupted and frustrated by slavery and colonialism. However much you love your child, you must be willing to see it fall before it learns to walk. Wars, he said, do not happen overnight. They gestate in the hearts and minds of people.

What about Zimbabwe? asked a black woman in the audience. The chimurenga war of the 1890s was against colonialism, but the struggle today is for democracy.

Oh no, said Farah. Democracy is not something you fight for. It is something that happens at the end of a long process by which you grow and develop and eventually become a whole person. (Not a message likely to inspire those struggling to end the dictatorship of Mugabe.)

Though I have lived and worked in Zimbabwe, I don’t always enjoy the way my fellow white people talk about Africa at events like this one: sometimes trying too hard to show their expertise in all things African, but more often self-righteous or apologetic, trying to make plain that they are not like those other white folks with their backward ideas.

At this point a white woman spoke up to say that on a visit to Africa (I forget if she said exactly where) she had met many people whose voices were not being heard. What could be done to help them express themselves, to find their voices? I cringed a little at the tone – what can be done to help these poor people? – but waited with real interest for the answer.

“What kind of question is that?” broke in a black woman from the back of the auditorium. Farah seemed to agree, brushing away the question as meaningless, but Hove objected, defending not so much the question itself, but the woman’s democratic right to ask it.

However naïve the attitude of the questioner might have been, I didn’t see what was wrong with the question. And indeed, as I learned later, in another session going on simultaneously at the French Institute, the Nigerian novelist Uzodinma Iweala was describing how he had brought video cameras to an AIDS center in Africa, and the delight of the residents in using the technology to express themselves.

Maybe the quashing of the woman’s question was driven by an irritation in the audience that I felt myself. More than five million people have died in the Congo since 1998, in a war that, if it were happening in Europe, would be referred to as World War III. But by the end of an hour and a half nobody had made any practical suggestions to help stop the wars of the future. More African Union troops or UN peacekeepers? A crackdown on international arms trading? More funding of microfinance initiatives to increase prosperity?

And more to the point (since these were writers, after all, and not policy wonks), nobody had told a story that might inject the topic with the urgency it deserves – nothing that would render intimate and specific the familiar, easily ignored image of anonymous Africans dying in endless and meaningless wars.

PEN World Voices: Truth and Reconciliation: A National Reckoning

The panel on Truth and Reconciliation had all the substance and detail I had hoped for from the panel on African Wars – in part, perhaps, because the subject was more specific, and in part because of the efforts of moderator Paul van Zyl.

Van Zyl, formerly a key figure in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now with the International Center for Transitional Justice, had the expertise necessary to ask pointed questions, the tact to focus discussion when it went off course, and the patience to listen to attacks on South Africa’s truth commission without becoming defensive.

Most of these attacks came from Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart, which was published in 1990 as apartheid was entering its last throes. Malan, a crime report in Johannesburg, had seen the worst of South Africa’s political and nonpolitical violence, and he expected an all-out race war in those days. “I thought the wounds of history were too deep – the chasms of class and history.”

The idea of a truth commission to address these wounds of history was a good one, he said, but could have been better executed. The commission succeeded in opening old wounds, he said. Its process was biased and distorted and therefore made white South Africans feel resentful. The “sentimental soft-focus human rights context” set up a Manichaean opposition between fascist whites and progressive, nonracial blacks. (The ANC, he said, didn’t admit whites as members until 1985.)

Van Zyl responded to these points, but only after letting Malan have his say. It was the ANC and not the white nationalists, he said, who sued the truth commission to prevent its report from being released – one sign that the commission was hardly pro-ANC. And just as the Nazis and the French Resistance were not on the same moral plane, a distinction had to be drawn between violence committed in defense of injustice and in the attempt to end it.

Having worked for several years as an anti-apartheid activist, the dialogue on South Africa was the most compelling to me, but there was much else to appreciate.

Lieve Joris, author of The Rebels’ Hour, spoke about the child soldiers of the Congo and the violence that spilled over the border from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Alexandra Fuller, the Rhodesian-born author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, asked, “Who cares about truth and reconciliation when there’s no reparations? You’ve got the farm and the Mercedes Benz, and I’m stuck in a scrubby piece of desert with a goat.” (I remembered, from my time in Zimbabwe in 1990, that you could see a straight line, as if drawn by a ruler, between the lush green of the white commercial farms and the dusty blight of the “communal areas” where native Zimbabweans scratched out a living.)

During the Q&A a woman asked one of those questions that make me cringe: whether it might be helpful for countries like South Africa and Guatemala to send young people to the US to study democracy before returning to their homelands. Van Zyl noted what many must have been thinking: that America since 2000 is not the ideal laboratory for democratic principles.

Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder, had already spoken of what happened after many American-educated Guatemalans returned with dreams of reform. The military regime said that reform would open the door to Communism, and the regime’s US government backers agreed. About 70% of these young people, Goldman said, were killed by the regime.