Books about torture and the strength of the human spirit
Great fiction helps explain why torture is a heinous war crime, as well as why torture doesn’t yield much usable information. But torture always creates two victims. The soldiers currently being ordered to commit acts of torture against prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are deeply damaged by their acts, at least in the loss of some of their ability to sympathize with their fellow humans. Here are three books I recommend to those wanting to understand the depths of torture, the strength of the human spirit to rise above degradation inflicted by a captor, and to learn about the U.S. government’s role in torture around the globe.
First, two works of fiction from South African authors. You’ll probably have to look for these in a used book shop. The world has much to learn from the struggle for freedom in South Africa. Heinous crimes were committed on both sides of the struggle, with those in the underground sometimes murdering people for cooperating with the aparteid government. The full implications are still being worked out, but a civil war of vengeance was avoided in part by the ‘truth and reconciliation’ process. In contrast, Iraq is now dissolving into a civil war of revenge and greed, while the U.S. pretends that the kangaroo court attempting to try Saddam Hussein can accomplish some form of justice when a legitimate government has not yet been formed. Now to the books.
Alex La Guma’s novel, “In the Fog of the Season’s End” (1972) is a moving portrayal of the underground movement against aparteid in South Africa. LaGuma himself had been arrested for treason by the aparteid government. In one of the last few chapters, the main character is tortured for information. “We’re at war ... if you don’t tell us, we’ll kill you,” say the torturers. LaGuma’s hero reaches back to the ancestors: “Pain was there, yes, but somehow something apart, a satellite revolving the planet of his being, his mind, which was full of the faraway ululations, the rattle of spears on shields, the tramp of thousands of feet.” Then the South African security police apply electrical shocks to the genitals, and his flesh burns: “He had anticipated violence, but not this, not this. Talk, talk, talk, his mind told him while his body jerked and jigged like a broken puppet. . . But far, far away, the ghosts gathered, the feathers bobbed and swayed . . . and the sun . . . glanced like lightening from the hammered spearblades.”
D. M. Zwelonke’s “Robben Island” (1973) is set in the infamous prison of the same name in South Africa, where Zwelonke himself had been a prisoner for a time. Pertinent to the current situation in Guantanamo, Zwelonke describes a mass hunger strike by the already starving prisoners. There is forced labor, no toilet facilities, starvation rations, flea-infested and louse-infested bedding, inadequate clothing, physical and psychological torture. I’ll go easy on you, fair blog-reader. Here’s a scene in which the hero is merely taunted by the interrogator: “’Do you want to see your family? . . . Look here [in this photograph]: your child, completely neglected. Look how the disease is eating his skin. The whole body, filled with blemishes.’ Bekimpi heard these words and saw the photo. He wanted to be cut off. The child in the photo became just another child, any child in a magazine--one of those starving children wasted by nutrition and disease. Such as the starving children of the Congo, for whom he felt no direct stab of pain, but merely disgust at the depravity of mankind. In this state of mind he was taken back to his cell.” In a later scene Bekimpi wants to talk but the captors are asking him for information about the location of the underground headquarters when no such place exists. And so the interrogators torture him to death in a most grotesque manner.
And third, a recent offering from a UW-Madison professor of history:
“A Question of Torture” (2006) is Alfred McCoy’s documents the U.S. government’s role in the development of psychological techniques of torture. McCoy says the use of ‘stress positions’ and sensory deprivation such as ‘hooding’ go back to research during the cold war intended to help the CIA develop techniques that don’t leave external wounds. These techniques are described in LaGuma’s and Zwelonke’s novels, and one of the fictional interrogators in Zwelonke’s work prides himself on having read many books about torture. It is easy to speculate about CIA involvement in propping up the regime of aparteid.
Mar 9, 2006
