Peace Literature and Pedagogy: Literature, Torture, and Human Rights (Double Session)

Session Coordinator: J.P. Song

Dept. of English, Marygrove College

csong@marygrove.edu

Panel I

“’Barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience’:

Human Rights and 20^th-century US American Literature”

This talk offers a survey of twentieth-century US American literary texts that dramatize human rights violations in prisons, mines, concentration camps, colonized spaces, classrooms, warzones, and borderlands. Drawing on works by Edward Said, Eric Sundquist, and Barbara Harlow, I argue that the English classroom should be vital to the study of the contemporary status of human rights and what Michael Taussig calls “the normality of the abnormal.” I will refer to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906); Irwin Shaw’s anti-war play, Bury the Dead (1936); Muriel Rukeyser’s poetic investigation of an industrial disaster in West Virginia, The Book of the Dead (1938); Tillie Olsen’s novella, “Tell Me a Riddle,” which returns to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and dashed progressive hopes (1957); Spaulding Gray’s performance, Swimming to Cambodia (1984); Art Spieglman's com-mix book, Maus; Tony Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987); Tony Kushner’s play, Homebody / Kabul (2001); and a documentary play on wrongful convictions in capital cases, The Exonerated (2002). These texts and performances present urgently needed questions about a standard of decency that, long before Abu Ghraib, has been neglected. The appeal to human rights calls into question fundamental matters of state power and reveals the tenuous narratives that construct and reconstruct what constitute crimes against humanity, and degrading and inhumane treatment. I conclude with a proposal for how twentieth-century literary texts—and literary studies more broadly—might advance the struggle for peace and human rights.

Katy Ryan

West Virginia University

kohearnr@wvu.edu

“Imagining a Better World: Truth, Justice and Terror”

Preemptive force and torture can be appropriate responses to terror if the story is properly told. That premise drives the prescient 1997 film Wag the Dog: A Comedy About Truth, Justice, and Other Special Effects. To save a presidency, a Hollywood producer and a Washington spin doctor convince the American public that Bulgarian terrorists threaten the free world because these exotic others “hate our freedoms and want to destroy our way of life.” The conspirators script the imagined terrorists as faceless, irrational fanatics. Four years after the film’s release, that argument became the galvanizing rallying call that precipitated the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The 911 news-coverage followed the pattern of escalation suggested by Wag the Dog leading some to criticize American journalism for cheerleading, but Wag the Dog suggests a different reading. In times of conflict, individuals blur, take on new identities, some heroic and some evil. The stories of heroism and deviltry strip individuality and impose expectations that enable inhumanity. This paper will examine key media reports during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq—the narratives of justification—against the backdrop of Wag the Dog, using that trope of defacing to argue that the American media was/is not so much caught up in cheerleading as trapped in a limited and managed perspective that left no doubt that extraordinary measures were needed to preserve the free world from the exotic other—the terrorist.

Allan R. Cook

Marygrove College

acook@marygrove.edu

“’. . . Paved with good intentions’: Re-presenting torture and disappearance in Omar Rivabella’s Requiem for a Woman’s Soul”

Requiem for a Woman’s Soul, Omar Rivabella’s fictionalised account of Argentina’s dirty war, recounts the disappearance, torture and murder of the heroine Susana through a diary she wrote on wadded scraps of paper. The diary is then smuggled out of the secret prison and left with Susana’s parish priest, Father Antonio, who then deciphers it. Finally, the deciphered and edited version of the diary is passed on to Omar Rivabella, who inserts himself into the narrative’s prologue, ensuring the dissemination of Susana’s story to a sympathetic readership who will intervene on behalf of Susana and her fellow desaparecidos. The novel’s graphic scenes of torture are reputedly based on Rivabella’s own interviews with former Latin American political prisoners. It is, however, precisely Rivabella’s rendering of torture that, upon a close reading, becomes problematic. In this paper, I read Rivabella’s novel mindful of the visual perspective from which Susana’s chilling accounts of torture are narrated, a perspective that appears to emanate from the eye of those applying, rather than receiving, the torture. I will show, that through its stereotypical staging of class, gender and religious relations, as well as its eroticised descriptions of torture, the novel inadvertently participates and reinforces the very ideological structures that it seeks to denounce, the very structures that made the horrors of Argentina’s dirty war possible.

Heidi ÓNuanáin

University of Ulster, Coleraine

Heidi_o_nuanain@hotmail.com

“Auto/Biography and the Lure of Forensics”

This presentation examines the primacy of forensics as a representational strategy in auto/biographical narratives about human rights violations, specifically state-sponsored genocide. Auto/biographies by forensic anthropologists who work with the bodily remains of genocide victims have become increasingly common, propelled by the popularity of television shows such as Forensic Files and Bones and by public and media concerns about human rights violations, torture, and justice post-9/11. This presentation asks whether and how forensic anthropologists' autobiographies narratively position the violence of genocide in a "before" that preserves the scientific, medical, and legal "after" as redemptive. That is, I consider what Allen Feldman calls "normative and moralizing periodization" in auto/biographical narratives of genocide. Specifically, I examine Clea Koff's 2004 book, The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, arguing that its narrative trajectory—"Before," "During," and "After"—relies on forensic technologies of truth that construct the medical and legal spheres as post-violent and therefore redemptive. However, Koff's narrative does not simply celebrate the author as a human rights hero but also constructs her as an empathetic secondary witness, particularly through the rhetoric of allowing the bones to speak. By examining where and how personal storytelling and forensic science converge, this presentation considers the risks and limitations of both auto/biography and forensics for representing human rights violations and their aftermath.

Theresa A. Kulbaga

Miami University of Ohio

Kulbaga.2@osu.edu

Panel II

“The Whole Pack of Us: Torture Victims’ Vengeance in Shakespeare and Shelley”

In Shelley’s drama The Cenci, tyrannical Count Cenci rapes his daughter Beatrice. Hers has been a life spent enduring countless tortures. Cenci exacts his sadistic whims on the entire family, but focuses on her. The Cenci household itself is something like an Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay: a demonstratedly cruel overseer holds total sway over a group of helpless prisoners. Beatrice is left with no resort but to hire assassins who take her father’s life. She is condemned by the same church that could all along have averted this catastrophe, that considers her actions to be the worst of anyone’s. In Twelfth Night we are treated to a scene of comical torment. The contentious Malvolio is given over to Feste the Clown, who toys with him, harasses him, and in some stage performances beats him or otherwise brings him physical harm. Olivia, the highest authority, is to all appearances ignorant of this torture. Again we see the victim who ultimately realizes some level of capability and freedom to act. Just as Beatrice finds her revenge, Malvolio promises his own, quite famously, irresolutely, and ominously. From both of these literary instances of torture comes the assertion that an essential condition for torture is negligence. Furthermore, according to Shakespeare and Shelley this course of action leads necessarily to a retribution doled out by torture’s victims. My paper explores the implications that reach us, of this concerted reprisal by literary torture victims against their reckless offenders.

Robert Long Foreman

Ohio University

foremanr@ohio.edu

“Understanding Our Guilt: Approaching Torture and Human Rights through Kafka's ‘In the Penal Colony’”

In this paper I will examine pedagogical approach to understanding torture and human rights through the literature of Franz Kafka, especially his short story, “In the Penal Colony.” In order to do accomplish this, I will conduct a close reading of Kafka’s text, paying particular attention to the nameless foreign explorer’s relationship to the officer who is showing him the torture machine. Also, this reading of the text will help us understand how human rights are an international language of ethics as we consider the foreign explorer’s refusal to say anything about the human rights violations he is about to witness. This refusal complicates our understanding of what our roll as witnesses to these abuses should be. It also opens a space in which students can begin to move their discussion beyond the text and into real world applications. Using this reading as a point of departure, I plan to show how this type of discussion can lead to an understanding of what is happening in the news today and how we can use this approach to help educate and get students to think and engage with a growing ethical problem international in scope.

Matthew Bissell

University of Denver

mbissell@du.edu

“'With the water of my tears': How Parents and Children Respond to War and Torture in Persepolis”

How do governments use propaganda? How do children and adults explain torture and repressive behavior by the state? How do governments militarize maternal sentiments?

This paper explores how Marjane Satrapi’s comic book-style autobiography, Persepolis, can illuminate public discourse on human rights. Satrapi notes that much of the discourse surrounding Islamic countries focuses on "fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism." It seems especially important as America wages its war(s) that we strive to understand those multiple voices from the Islamic world, including representatives of movements fighting repressive regimes. Persepolis depicts citizens in a secular, then religious dictatorship developing creative expressions of their desire for freedom. Satrapi emphasizes the importance of documenting government abuses. In an environment where powerful officials control access to information for the purpose of putting forward their own story, the act of bearing witness to abuses against citizens becomes a revolutionary act. Satrapi learns what it means to be a freedom-fighter early in life. She gives readers an Iranian child’s view of both armed resistance struggles and nonviolent protests. I will use Persepolis as the centerpiece in a challenge of prejudiced caricatures and condemnations of whole peoples as points in a constellation of evil needing to be destroyed. Such characterizations lead, as Satrapi points out, to the dehumanization necessary for the conduct of torture. The text demonstrates strategies for resistance to the intertwining phenomena of nationalism, religious fervor, and militarism.

T J Geiger II

Texas Woman's University

paxnow102@yahoo.com

“’Back To Heaven’: Teaching Poetry and Fiction

by Writers Who Have Been Tortured and/or Killed”

How do young people respond to literature by and about writers who have been tortured and imprisoned? How can we develop teaching materials that help our students learn more about human rights violations, while helping them to think of ways to develop their own creative and expository writing skills? During this session I plan to talk about experiences I have had introducing young people (middle school students and college students) to poetry and fiction by writers who have been tortured and murdered—especially the writings of Korean poet Ch’on Sang-Pyong and Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa. Ch’on was tortured by agents of the Korean National Security Agency (KCIA) in 1967 because the Korean government had accused him of being a communist spy. “Kwi Chon (Back to Heaven)” is one of Ch’on’s most famous poems, and many say it obliquely alludes to his traumatic experience of being tortured. What are some methods that we as educators can use to help our students to think deeply about human rights issues? I will talk about poetry writing, petition writing, and other activities with which my students have engaged as we have discussed literature that relate to torture and human rights.

Daniel Godston

Columbia College Chicago

dgodston@sbcglobal.net