Documentary: Discovering Dominga (2002)

Directed by Patricia Flynn, Discovering Dominga premiered on PBS on July 8, 2003. It is a story about Denese Becker, a survivor Guatemala's Rio Negro massacre in 1982, who returns to her native village to discover how and why here parents were killed while also exploring who "Denese" would have become had she been raised "Dominga." I think I am seeing a case of Mignolo's decolonial thinking.  The crisis that Denese experiences -- I am talking about the crisis of discovering Dominga more than the trauma of the actual massacre in her village -- prompts a process of delinking for Denese whereby she sees the rhetoric of modernity that has covered up the atrocities (with a lake). She sees the Maya as already questioning the logic of coloniality by reclaiming their language, teaching the traditions that were silenced by colonialism, establishing memorials to name the victims of massacres, and demanding justice by exhuming remains and testifying in human rights trials. And Dense was to be a part of the delinking.

Dominga escaped the Maya highlands massacre of 70 women and 107 children by the Guatemalan army. The Rio Negro villagers were labeled "subversives"  for resisting their forced removal to make way for the World Bank-funded dam  (the river is now a lake).  Dominga was taken to an orphanage in Rabinal and was later adopted by a baptist minister from Iowa. The trauma of her childhood, however was minimized as "a wild imagination" of a child by the small town community and suppressed  until the memories returned as she was raising her own family.

With the help of her adoptive cousin, Denese researched her family in Guatemala and returned to Rabinal to meet them sharing memories of the village, her family, and also the massacres. The trauma of witnessing, surviving, forgetting, and remembering is captured in this documentary as a struggle to

• Dad went to the market. Dominga, nine years old,  waited for him by the river to return. A woman reported the men of Rio Negro had been killed. This was one month before the village had been attacked by government soldiers.  
• About a month after her dad was killed, the village was attacked. It was early in the morning, and the soldiers appeared in the doorway of the house putting a noose around her mother's neck. Her mother strapped a baby to her back and told her to run. She hid in the fields and watched as they marched the woman and children up a mountain -- she heard lots of gunshots. 
• Dominga came to Iowa at age eleven. She was put in second grade. Some thought she was Chinese, and they called her "chink." When she told her story, people told her she had a "vivid imagination," so she "closed up." 
• In high school, Denese began to feel like a typical American teenager. She met her husband on a blind date,and he was the first person she told her real name. She would wake up from nightmares as her memory returned.  Denese says she tried to make peace in her heart with her family. She told her cousin her story who did research on the Internet and found "massacres in Rabinal." Another survivor called Denese who knew her and her father told her about her family in Rabinal who had been looking for her, so Denese went to Guatemala. 
• What began as looking for her family, turned into a quest to bury her parents together, to uncover the motivation behind the massacres and to seek justice for the atrocities. 
• The images of Denese returning to Rabinal capture the moments when she meets her aunts, uncles and cousins. She is shown hugging her father's brother as she is surrounded by wailing women in  colorfully woven huipils. They take her to the monument of the 70 women and 100 children murdered on March 12, 1982; she finds the name of her mother, #59, on the list of victims. We see Denese crying as the monument holds her up. 
• A reenactment reveals Dominga carrying her sister through the mountains as Denese narrates her memory of trying to find a place to sleep, hiding in caves, squeezing berry juice in her sister's mouth; she got weak and so Dominga buried her under a big tree on a hill. She talks about how she thought maybe Rio Negro dis something wrong, but this was during the genocide when the government was hunting leftist rebels and killed Mayas forcing them out of their villages. viewed as potential guerrilla supporters.  Men were, perhaps, killed to prevent them from joining the guerrillas.
• Denese tells us she had forgotten her language I 'che. 
• The film then shows a conversation with a priest who explains that the village resisted the building of the dam in the river and that a peasant committee promoting land rights was also going on at the time, so the army concluded the Rio Negro was breeding guerrillas and this became a death sentence for Rio Negro. 
• We see Denese exploring her native lands -- images of fishing, mango trees, coconut trees - -and we see re-enactments of this as well. Then Denese goes to a market place, another memory of her and her mother smelling the cloth,  to try on  woven skirt, the same type of skirt her mother wore; she is brought to tears by the experience as she wishes she could be a "normal I'che Mayan woman."  
• Dedication of Survivors' Community Museum: The film moves to the museum where black and white photographs of the victims are hung on the wall. Denese finds her father's photograph with the date of death as  February 13, 1982. At this dedication, Denese gives a speech in English translated by her white cousin who speaks Spanish. She says her two names and how she wants to find out what happened to the innocent people who were killed. 
• The film cuts back to the scene of Iowa, and her husband talks about his searches for understanding the U.S. involvement in overthrowing the 1954 democratic government to a military government; the U.S. trained their military and gave financial backing to the government that killed the Maya in 1982.  We see Denese in Maya clothing speaking at her church in Iowa about her memories and the nuns who took her to an orphanage. The audience talks about the ignorance of the U.S. role in international affairs, especially atrocities. 
• Denese returns to Rio Negro, 5 miles up the side of the mountain in Guatemala for the commemoration of her mother's memory.  What was once a river is now a lake; the dam was built. We see the people doing a ritual for the spirits as Denese narrates her memory of the smells and how her parents used to mourn the dead. We see Denese looking into the fire in the dark of night listening to the chants as she narrates her wonderment: Is this what it is like to be these people, and if so, I think I would have liked it.  In the light of morning, we see Denese and her cousin putting on make up and talking (perhaps for the camera) while her husband stands off to the side. They meet an eyewitness to the massacre as he recounts the event. At 2-3 pm the patrollers were attaching a woman. She resisted and thew a rock. The patroller got angry and struck her in the back with a machete. She had a baby on her back, and the other half of the baby stayed on her back. He takes Dense to the spot on the mountain near the ravine that was covered in blood, hair, and human flesh.  He says, " Sometimes it hard for us humans to bear seeing such things, but these trees have more memories than we do. They saw everything thing and so did Mother Earth."
• In 1996, peace accords brought Guatemala "civil war" to a close. In 1999, A United Nations Truth Commission declared the massacre at Rio Negro a "genocide"; across the country, over 200,000 killed up to 1.5 displaced, raped, tortured, mutilated with the knowledge of the highest authorities of the state.  The Commission found the Guatemalan army responsible for 93 percent  of total war crimes. However, the perpetrators had not been punished at the time of the filming.
• The priest tells us they tried to exterminate the Maya and that it was form the racism that started with the Spanish. the 2001 charges were filed against the state and survivors demanded remains be exhumed as evidence. They wanedt to seek justice, but the system of justice is problematic. There are 75 secret graves, but only 17 have been exhumed. 
• In Guatemala, we see Denese preparing to go to court to get her father exhumed along with another survivor, and she talks about the realization that she needs to get involved politically. She decides to testify in a genocide case. The survivors organized themselves into a Widows and Orphans Committee  to document the massacre and speak out for justice. They want the commanders to go to court for murder. We see Denese and her husband talking to a Human Rights attorney about the risks in testifying. She says "my people" and talks about how she is torn between two worlds. She wants a home but hasn't found it; her white American husband makes it more difficult for her to fit in, and we hear and see the tension growing in their marriage as Denese struggles to make sense of her identity.
• The film moves to a family reunion without her husband's presence, and we hear Denese and her cousin talking about the unraveling of her identity and marriage -- torn between wanting to be in Guatemala and wanting to raise her children in Iowa, Denese is looking for answers.
• The exhumation of her father was approved, so Denese returns to Guatemala, and we see a scene in a Christian mass, in Spanish (rather than Maya language), with the sermon about exhuming the remains of the dead to rebury them with family. The priest explains that the process can be a few days of slow digging and that the forensic anthropologists have to examine the remains; there is talk about how some of the sites are empty and talk about one site in  Xococ where they found no remains but evidence it had been dug up by the people of that town who were the murderers --  innocent people who were forced to do the murders and who are now sorry, but Denese says "they are my enemy...I am very bitter."  The priest calls this her "inner violence." 
• A parade of people walk to the exhumation site with colorful baskets and flowers, across a ravine, through a cornfield  to a large tree where they begin the digging -- two police standing guard. We see Denese crying and a old woman attending to her with herbs and prayers. Denese narrates her struggle to forgive as a "pastor's kid" when her heart is tortured. The digging is arduous until they get six feet deep; the anthropologists sift through the dirt looking for bones and carefully carving away a at cloth remnants to uncover a rope that was tightened using a stick around the neck of the skeletal remains of the men in the mass grave.  We see the burial site after each day of digging where colorful clothing hides the skeletal remains of the men of Rio Negro. The forensic work begins while family members light candles and hover around the site drying their tears. 
• The voice of the anthropologist says out of 168 cases, only 3 have been brought to court. The prosecutors are afraid. We see the parade walk back across the ravine with boxes of the remains and Denese walking along the water saying : I hope my dad knows I am fighting for him and that he did not die for no reason. 
• Back in Iowa,  she talks about how  "something has to happen to change her mind" or possibly give her answers about who she is; having her father's body helps her feel more brave and independent. We see her teaching her Iowa friends how to make tortillas. She says, "The secret my mother told me...." She talks about her interviews and talk shows as the beginning of her efforts to raise awareness. She says it will be a lifetime of work for her -- as we see clips of newspapers flash across the screen. She talks about her separation from her husband who, she says, wanted the "old Denese back who covered up." He talks about how a war that happened so long ago and so far away is still affecting us today -- it took his family apart.
• She says, I have not come to terms with the American Denese and Dominga just that she needs both to survive.
• The film ends with text scrolling over a new burial site. We learn that Denese did return to bury her father with her mother and the genocide cases are ongoing.
•  

When the Mountains Tremble (1983)

When the Mountains Tremble
 http://video.pbs.org/video/2248970541/

This documentary was filmed in 1982 at the height of Guatemalan Army's repression against the Maya indigenous people.

1954 -- opportunity for democracy away from the colonial dependence -- alarm in Washington -- problem is United Fruit a forcing corp. that owned the best last -- ships, train, land owned by the country and has paid not taxes -- but gov't cannot support communism --

• organized small cooperatives, Christian 
• movement for national liberation -- communists arrested, all United Fruit land seized by the gov't is returned -- overthrow of Arbenz -- presidents since -- 10?
• Mayas had so little land, they could not survive on what they could grow, had to migrate from highlands to the southern plantations -- sugar, cotton -- land oligarchy
• majority Indian -- unity of the peasants from the 70s in the city and countryside -- 1977 -- highland workers marched in Guatemala city -- peasants coming down from the mountains to support them
• pressure from the mass movement brought the country to a tension -- military attacked the movement rather than negotiating socialist changes chosing repression -- union members would disappear; no more open organization destroyed by terror, so the movement went underground;  Mayas in the highlands forced Mayas off their land plots, speaking Spanish, so many went to the Spanish embassy to protest in 1980 to protest land ownership issues and the disappearing persons in the hopes media would help; protesters trapped in a fire in the embassy
• 38 died, army stepped up repression in the  entire country; soldiers told they were looking for subversives but were not sure why; peasants had to witness the torture of the "guerrillas" but some were peasants in the cooperative and were being accused of being guerrillas;
• religious leaders became community leaders -- teaching literacy to read the bible, starting schools -- religious leaders persecuted under the onus of communism; gov't saw priests as leaders of the guerrillas, but priests say the taught them how to think for themselves and organize and so many priests fled and the Catholic Church was problematic making space for evangelicals to work in Guatemala with General Rios Montt; bank of the army developed because the military ran the country and made investments for itself; US investment controls argi, pharm, banking and tourism in Guatemala; many parts of the country are living in abject poverty but when they organize for change, they are intimidated by the gov't and portrayed as subversives. some went to the mountains to make their own villages with lookouts for soldiers when they would move on;  others joined the armed guerrilla resistance to learn to use weapons and learn what they are fighting for Guatemala National Revolutionary  Unity -- Indios and non indios treated equally; guerrillas went to the villages to talk about their goals and recruit support and to ask for food ; the army says they killed guerrillas but they kill peasants;and when the army goes to the villages they say they are guerrillas; army is sending pamphlets to the peasants saying the guerrillas are lying to them and to not help the guerrillas;
• guerrilla needed the people, so the gov't wants to not only kill the guerrillas but the people who support them; gov't implemented permits for carrying food, for property, etc -- they have a list of people who are registered and stamped who are okay -- if they carry too much food it might be for the guerrillas and so if they are not on the list they are killed; army forced peasants to go to strategic hamlets to control them; only permitted to move with permission; act like they came voluntarily; Reagan, during this time, asked for reprogramming of funds for economic support in Guatemala; they aided the gov't like helicopters, training, guns; to maintain the political structure of the country because of economic structure; this contributed directly to the massacres;

A project by Pamela Yates, director of Granito, to collect memories using When the Mountains Tremble -- awakening memory in the youth and resurrecting memory in the elders.  70% are 30 or younger, so they were not alive during the violence of the 1982 genocide. So, the young people will use technology to recreate, to represent using the image of a "granito" (a grain of salt) or a pixel. This is an act of memory but also an act of justice to teach the young people about the genocide that was never taught to them in school. 

"Literature of Atrocities": The Armenian Genocide

A. Overview: The Hunger, Nobody's Child, Daughter of War	B. Narratorial Mode of the Trilogy	C. The Series and Plot
D. The Hunger and Trauma	E. Nobody's Child and the Ambivalence of Hope	F. Daughter of War and the Wider Context of Atrocity

A. Overview of Novels


The Hunger:  A realistic, modern day novel about fifteen-year-old Paula's struggle with an eating disorder fractured by a fantasy element of time travel and  a historical fiction plot set during the 1915, deportation and genocide of Armenians including Paula's great-grandmother by the Young Turks. Paula's pursuit of perfectionism in all facts of her life cause her take drastic measure to get her tall, average frame into the 110 pound physique of models like Kate Moss. Caught up in the "power" of thin, she reaches a "skeletal" frame, which she hides until a savvy doctor uncovers the disorder hiding beneath the baggy clothes. During treatment, Paula falls into a coma and is somehow transported to the 1915 Armenian deportations that she had been researching for school and her Gramma, taking up the "body" of Marta, her great grandmother as she . Marta posed as a boy to join Kevork, her betrothed during the deportation but was later discovered but was able to run away. Marta was "saved" by Adila who was another Armenia posing as a Turk. Marta became part of a harem until the first wife had her

Nobody's Child:   Divided in to two books --  Book I, the 1909 Adana Massacre and  Book II, 1915, deportation and genocide of Armenians -- this historical fiction novel follows Mariam (10) and her siblings Marta (7) and Onnig (4) as they survive the Adana massacre and join two other survivors, Kevork (7) and his aunt, Anna. They find work and later a new life as orphans in a German Missionary Orphanage. Six years later, the Armenia  deportations by the YoungTurks separate the new "family." This novel follows Mariam as she is sold  on the slave market as a concubine and Kevork as he is saved by an Arab nomadic group. Both Mariam, Marta's sister, and Kevork, Marta's betrothed must hide their culture to survive and find their way back to Marta.


 Daughter of War: A historical fiction novel set between 1916-1918 in Turkey. This novel explores how Armenians escaped deportation and lived disguised and in constant fear of being discovered by the Turks. This novel follow's Kevork's journey as a courier for American missionaries as he searches for his betrothed, Marta. Meanwhile, Marta is living in the orphanage, pregnant with Paula's grandmother from The Hunger teaching and taking care of the children the American missionaries smuggled in -- other children, "urchins," prevented from services by Turk soldiers. Mariam, Marta's sister, was in a harem as well and was later brought to the orphanage after the first wife of the house had other Armenian "slaves" in her household killed.


  B. Narratorial Mode of the Trilogy

All three  novels are written in third person omniscient, which is different than many children's literature of atrocity; this narrative mode distances the narratorial voice from the plot, which may serve to distance the reader from the trauma of the atrocity. While Jordan (see Never Fall Down) suggests a first person narrator is an important authorial strategy that personalizes the plot for the reader, Skrypuch has chosen third person. What does this narrative mode offer? This mode may "protect" the young reader, but it also provides access to different points of view and experiences in a narratorial voice that can provide historical context and insight that the child protagonist cannot. Sullivan might say that the text can do more instructing, but Langer would say that the text can provide a framework for responding with this added contextual element. Because the three books work together to fill in narrative gaps of each installment, the third person narrator also offers some comfort for the reader -- the reliability of an omniscient narrator can confront the reader with questions while also comforting him or her with answers and explanations.The parallel stories present the reader with multiple imaginative accounts of Armenian victims and survivors along with Turks and Arabs who hid Armenians but also Turk soldiers (both trained and untrained inmates from the prisons) as well as German and American missionaries. What can first person do? Third person? Which is better for children? Which is better for history? Which is better for art/literature?

C. The Series and Plot

Skrypuch initially wrote The Hunger as a stand-alone that included much of the three novels which, during revisions, became a "single story." However, Skrypuch says, "As it happened, Marta, Kevork, and Mariam would not let me go" (personal email), and so Nobody's Child became her break out book. She says that no other Dundurn novel had ever sold more copies, and this novel was nominated for awards prompting an increase from 12 to 160 presentations by the author that year. Because more research was available on the Armenian genocide  (Shoshana in Testimony says that history is a never ending story), Skrypuch had material from scholars and genocide descendents to help her craft subsequent novels about the atrocities.  As readers will note when reading the three novels, there are a few discrepancies because The Hunger was initially a stand-alone novel. Paula's grandmother, Pauline,  tells Paula that Mariam was her mother and that she was born in a harem. (The Hunger 183). Skrypuch admits that she "couldn't quite fit Daughter of War  to match The Hunger" but she did not want to "deny the characters the growth they had between the three novels" (email) and she thought that the theme of truth and memory in recounting a story offered her some space to shift or clarify details in the other novel. She says, "People can recount family events but over the years recounting takes on a storytelling quality. In the case of what Marta is willing to tell her daughter, the continued rapes in a Turkish home transforms itself into being born in a harem -- a less brutal explanation of an illegitimate daughter's origin" (email). Pauline, the Americanized Parantzim,  is not only the name of Marta's daughter (conceived in a harem and born in the orphanage in Daughter of War) but Mariam's adoptive daughter (who loves all things Turkish because she was partially raised in a harem in Daughter of War). This is the name of Marta and Mariam's mother, as well; therefore, the deliberate and unintentional gaps inherent in narrative work in these three novels to tell the story of the beginning, middle, and never-ending story of the Armenian genocide.


D. The Hunger  and Trauma
 
Kenneth Kidd, in his article "'A' is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma, Theory, and 'The Children's Literature of Atrocities,'' argues that psychoanalysis and children's literature are mutually enabling. He sees the two discourses as enmeshed as one discourse is used to discover in the other analogous truths.  Kidd asks Why not use narrative as a sort of therapy? and even goes so far as to ask if it might be time to leave psychoanalysis behind. Kidd discusses The Hunger in his article as a story of personal trauma and historical trauma -- separate subjects, separate traumas; however, Skrypuch creates an element of  "split subjectivity" when Paula, the protagonist, falls into a coma as the result of severe anorexia and takes up the persona of her grandmother's aunt, Marta, in 1915 Turkey during the deportation of Armenians into the desert. Published in 1999, The Hunger, was a consciousness raising novel about the Turkish massacre of Armenians, that, at the time, was not discussed nor acknowledged as a genocide. Kidd's criticism of this novel is that its historicity seems presentist," a mode of literary or historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past." The danger of presentism is that it creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter, and so it suggests that history is open to invention. Because Paula experience a sort of time travel or altered states in order to render an account of the deportation, Paula's consciousness must invent the story from the little research she did about the Armenian genocide for her school project and then take up the first person experience of  Marta's escape from deportation and years living in a harem, raped nightly by her "husband" (though not depicted) and enslaved by the first wife.

Kidd does suggest that children's literature must resist simple story telling and the absolutism of evil and innocence by offering a nuanced history with complexity and collectivity, rather than heroic individualism. The argument is for children's literature to be trauma testimony that while imperfect can reckon with the difficulty of memory and narrative. What is problematic with The Hunger is that Paula does not have the memory, and the strategy for giving her that memory is simplistic and makes anorexia (which begins with personal agency for the victim) analogous to genocide (that which is perpetrated).  In the following passage, Paula is coming out of her coma, and the split subject of  Marta/Paula unifies:

There stood an emaciated woman[Paula] wrapped in a stiff white sheet. Marta's throat filled with tears when she regarded the woman's hollow eyes and sunken cheeks. This woman had suffered through famine and ravages too.  Marta reached out to touch the woman's hand -- to give comfort. Then she noticed the scars on the knuckles and the needle marks on her arm. With a start, she understood that this was Paula. Marta's heart was filled with sorrow...And then Marta no longer existed.  She had stepped inside Paula. (The Hunger 157)

What Marta sees in the future is an image of emaciation, but the scarred knuckles indicate the self-inflicted trauma of starvation, something beyond Marta's imagination but not the author's and, now, not the child reader's consciousness. What does this split subjectivity do for the child reader, then? As a testimony to the personal trauma of anorexia, The Hunger  works; literature is a mode of "truth's realization beyond what is available as statement, beyond what is known" (Kidd). The historical trauma, however,  is insufficient here because it is detached from the personal trauma of the protagonist Paula). The historical trauma does, however,  develop profoundly in the acclaimed Nobody's Child and Daughter of War because the novels render personal and historical trauma -- not split but enmeshed, complex, and ambiguous narratives that explore the multiple perspectives in the same historical context.

E. Nobody's Daughter and the Ambivalence of Hope
 
While the book jacket of Nobody's Daughter  states, "One thing sustains them throughout their horrifying ordeals -- the hope that they might one day be reunited," and Jordan would suggest that hope is an important theme in children's literature of  atrocities, Kidd seems to suggest that hope is may be foolish or even unethical if such literature intends to reckon with the horrific world violence (and in many cases violence to which America contributes). And I think that Skrypuch's treatment of hope is tempered. The novel is more of a meditation on violence, a sharing of collective memories, and an exploration of the ambivalence of hope. After Mariam was sold in an auction to a Turk, Rustem Bey, whom had fallen in love with her when he delivered food the the orphanage between 1909 (after the Adana massacre) and 1915 (just before the deportations), Mariam discovers that racism knows no class. A wealthy Armenian girl, Ani, was also bought by Rustem, and she stood watch over Mariam as she was cleaned by the new harem:

The image brought a sad smile to Mariam's lips. Ani, a twelve-year-old girl from a pampered and wealthy home, had acted as a bath attendant to Mariam -- a homeless orphan. A gasp of sadness filled her throat when the realization came: now Ani was the same as she. A homeless orphan. Yet she was nobody's child. She was in control. Mariam vowed to follow Ani's lead and become stronger and in control of herself. (175)

Here we see a few things happening. First, this authorial strategy to "teach" about the class differences of Armenians helps the reader recognize the heterogeneity of a culture, and second, we see how attractive women were able to survive the genocide: by being sold into slavery and a life as a Turkish concubine. Mariam would now have to become that which she resisted at several turns in the novel. After the Adana massacre and Mariam's parents were killed, Mariam, Marta, Onnig, Kevork, and Anna found work and shelter with a Turk landowner agree to help him harvest his wheat -- wheat fields across the area were turning to seed without Armenian peasants to work the land. During this time the land owner, Abdul Hassan, offered to adopt them: "Even though she would still be with her brother and sister, and even though they would be fed and clothed, and perhaps even loved, she did not want to grow up as a Turk" (43). Mariam goes so far to say that she would rather die as an Armenian than live as a Turk. Throughout this novel, the characters experience the ambiguity of family and the ambivalence of identity. Are we our culture? Is our identity definable by blood or custom? And later, as Kevork is wandering the Syrian desert after deportation, he is "reborn" (218) with the help of an Arab woman and invited to become the son of the patriarch of the Arab camp, Ibrahim. He is given an Arab name, but to be fully accepted, he would have to become Muslim, and that "was something he would never do. In addition to the religious ceremony, there was a physical requirement for all Muslim men: circumcision. It was the one physical difference between Christians and Muslims" (232). Skrypuch does not make this decision so simply for Kevork. Kevork did not want to hurt Ibrahim who had been so kind to him, and he recognized that as an orphan he had a new father and mother. As for family, we see that family is defined not by birth but by love and that identity is not fixed by birth but rather a social construction.

F. Daughter of War and the Wider Context of Atrocity

Elizabeth Baer would be please do find the map of Turkey at the beginning of this novel. She suggests in the second of her four suggested elements of children's literature that novels need to have the proper context of complexity and recommends providing a wider context by adding maps, a glossary, and providing some sort of chronology of events. Indeed, Skrypuch obliged, and you will see the helpful map with the routes of several characters carefully mapped along with the various concentration camps.  Skrypuch even begins with an  "Historical Note"; while readers hear about the "compassionate" Muslim families and nomadic Arabs who rescued Armenians, she also notes how many younger women survived as slaves and concubines in Muslim homes. Baer comments that children's literature should avoid emphasis on rescuers, and again Skrypuch seems to be responding to this element by recounting the lives of Marta, raped by her "husband" and later giving birth to their child, and Mariam who was forced to escape the harem because the first wife had several adoptive Armenian children killed.  Although Mariam and Marta were living as Turks and Kevork was living as an Arab, they were not safe. The Turks knew about this trend during the deportations and were on the lookout for disguises. The novel explores what is might have been like to live with this uncertainty of discovery and ambivalence of identity.


Because Marta became pregnant and might give birth to a son, making her first wife, the first wife of the harem, Idris, wanted Marta out of their house, so Idris brought Marda back to the orphanage in a cart. Idris could not reveal Marta as an Armenian to the authorities, or Idris would be persecuted. However, Skrypuch crafts an imaginative truth in this passage as Idris helps Marta off the back of the cart. "Marta was struck by her [Idris] demeanor..., but there was not need for duplicity here. Did this mean that Idris was actually starting to miss her? More than likely, it was all the housecleaning Idris would miss. No, Marta thought again, that was being unfair.  Idris did not have to go through so much trouble to get rid of her. Marta owed this woman her life" (28). In this short passage, child readers will not see an overly optimistic view of human nature but rather a framework for response and a sense of consideration for multiple points of view.

What this third novel also does well, and this speaks to providing a wider context, is including the German and American contributions. Skrypuch tells her readers that the story is based on firsthand accounts of the Armenian genocide but that the characters are fictionalized with the exception of one: Leslie A. Davis, an American consul. He published his observations in the The Slaughterhouse Province: an American Diplomat's report on the Armenian Genocide: 1915-1917 (1989).  Child readers get a glimpse of the international context and international response in this novel, that I think is really important to understanding that Turkey is not an isolated event nor was it only culturally motivated. This novel does not explore the political or economic motivations of the Young Turks, but we do get a sense of America's awareness of the atrocities and their attempts to secretly provide humanitarian aid in the camps and arrange safe houses and deportations. Kevork, who we find at the beginning of the novel in Aleppo, Syria working as an Arab shoemaker, becomes a courier for the money because he is, in fact, an Armenian, the Americans can trust him, and because he looks like an Arab, he won't be arrested. However, this too is complicated. Kevork's motivation is to look for his betrothed, Marda, in the camps, while the Americans (Miss Schultz and John Coren) deliberately foil his efforts because of his value as a courier in their mission to save refugees. Kevork wants the Americans to send a message to the orphanage to see if Marta is alive, but here we see the dilemma:

In her [Miss Schultz] heart, she knew that the right thing to do was to send this telegraph. But John Coren had warned her that Kevork might ask this of her. He told her that under no circumstances should she send the message on. He explained that they needed Kevork's talent as a courier. What would happen to the thousands of starving Armenians if Kevork ran off to find his Marta? Wasn't humanity best served if he thought her dead? (73)

Baer, Elizabeth. "A New Algorithm in Evil: Children's Literature in a Post-Holocaust World." (2000).
Kidd, Kenneth. "'A' is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma, Theory, and 'The Children's Literature of Atrocities.'"  (2005).
Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk. Daughter of War: A Novel. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2008. Print.
Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk. The Hunger. Toronto: Dundurn Group, 1999. Print.
Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk. Nobody's Child. Toronto: Boardwalk, 2003. Print.

"Grasping the Unimaginable"

Although "Grasping the Unimaginable" focuses on teaching about the Holocaust with novels, Gilbert explores the role that storytelling and stories might have in "leading children toward an awareness of uncertainty and ambiguity" (355). Unlike the Jordan article discussed in my post about  Never Fall Down, Gilbert  sees the potential for stories as doing much more than implementing strategies for teaching information about global atrocities (beyond personalizing with first person or themes of hope) -- one that does not "overwhelm" children. Instead, Gilbert is suggesting that a novel can represent the ambiguity and uncertainty of such atrocities, which is a much more authentic, even phenomenological representation of the occurrence. I think this approach also respects the nature of adolescence, which is wrought with the discomfort of uncertainty.  If the novel can draw young readers into this phenomenological representation rather than being a conduit of information, the novel will actually be doing something quite remarkable: "capture the fractured nature" of global atrocities (355).

Gilbert examines the "role of silence" within the narratives of two novels about Holocaust written for young adults. Many Holocaust novels, she suggest, set out to explicitly inform young readers about the horrors of the Nazi genocide, but she challenges the "educative role" of such works citing how  "blunt didacticism"  can close down a "child reader's imaginative engagement with the ungraspable nature" of the genocide."  Instead, Gilbert suggests that novels that confront the reader with a "complex set of ideas about the relationship between narrative and subjectivity" have a more educative role.

A predominant theme in Holocaust studies, and I think in genocide studies (a new topic to education), is how to represent the unrepresentable. Of course, it is not possible, so to construct a narrative without complexity and uncertainty is problematic. Novels about atrocities and trauma should show this impossibility with "honest and insightful narrative" (356).

"Grasping the Unimaginable: Recent Holocaust Novels for Children by Morris Gleitzman and John Boyne," Ruth Gilbert

The Stone Goddess by Minfong Ho

Literature of atrocity is never wholly factual nor wholly invented.:"literature has taken as its task making such
reality possible for the imagination"(Langer).

The Stone Goddesss by Mingfong Ho is a first person novel about a middle class urban family in Phnom Penh forced into rural villages and rice fields of Cambodia  to work as peasant labor by Pol Pot's Khmer Rough as part of his communist dream of an agrarian society "free" from all evidence of modernity. Nevertheless, the state's attempt to centralize the main commodity, rice, is evidence of the centralizing force in modernity with values nationalism. The novel represents twelve-year-old Nakri's points of view during the relocation, labor in the rice fields, journey to the Thai refugee camp, and "assimilation" into American society after losing her father and sister to the genocide of anyone who did not fit in or follow the profile of Pol Pot's imagined society.

Auhorial strategies of note for this genre of atrocities: 

• "personalization": first person narrative, girl, twelve-year-old Nakri; innocent child from an upper class family hiding evidence of modernity to survive the re-education of citizenry
• "parallel experience": siblings with parallel experiences offer different coping strategies to the narrator  (Boran, Teeda, Yann)
• "filtering" (come up with a better word for this) by an older sister during possibly "overwhelming" moments; mother also filters towards the end to help the child narrator make sense of her experiences
•  "graphic material": Ho resists using confrontational graphic material to simply provoke student interest. Her treatment of the violence in dehumanization in the fields does not seem to distort history. But does it grapple directly with the evil of the Khmer Rouge (Baer)?
• "prose": poetic, narratorial voice is Ho's authorial strategy for negotiating the aesthetic problem of reconciling normalcy and horror
• "imaginative truth": arts focused --aspara dance --cultural and musical tropes as metaphors for turmoil and survival. Does Ho resist constructing an unambiguous hopeful lesson? Is there space for questions (Baer)? 
• "instruction in historical fact": Ho does provide proper context of complexity in labor camps, refugee camps, and transition to living in America exploring human agency, but Ho does not craft the story behind the guards who are working in the camps or the other agents....Is there a warning about racism and complacency? The Cambodian genocide is an autogenocide, and so it is different than genocides that have a clear "us" and "them" based on ethnicity or religion. The complacency here is in the international response, but that is not addressed in this novel. 
• What is the artist's job? to instruct? to make meaning? to create a framework for response? Is the goal, according to Sullivan, to teach the student about himself, about the hate that is within him, within us all? Is fiction a witness to memory?

Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick: Cambodia's Auto-genocide

            Patrica McCormick's newest novel, Never Fall Down, is a fictional account of Arn Chorn-Pond's story of survival in the "Killing Fields" of Cambodia.  The excerpts on the book's hard-cover jacket reveal the problem of historical fiction. Reviewers such as Peter Gabriel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Luong Ung, review not McCormick's characterization of the protagonist but the actual survivor; not how music saved the character's life or provided opportunities for human generosity, but say  Arn is "one of the most gentle and inspiring people I have ever met" (Gabriel). And here we see one problematic of this genre, a genre which actually has potential to highlight what a "novel" can do that an "autobiography" or a "biography" cannot. In these quotes, we see readers conflating the survivor's story from the narrator's story in what McCormick makes clear is a novel. While the authorial strategy to use child's point of view is powerful, it offers a subject for critical review.

An article by Sarah D. Jordan, "Educating Without Overwhelming: Authorial Strategies in Children's Holocaust Literature" (2004) offers some insight as to how McCormick negotiated fictionalizing a historical account of the Cambodian genocide (1975-9). While I hesitate and do not actually intend to compare the Holocaust to genocide, as some research suggests there is a distinct difference, there is no critical body of work about young adult genocide literature as there is "Children's Holocaust Literature."  Jordan reviews several works of fiction about the Holocaust in her article and discusses the strategies used by authors to educate their readers without overwhelming them with "highly emotional information." Jordan's concern here is with the use of "sensitive and age-appropriate literature" as method in educating children about the Holocaust. It is here that I am interested in Jordan's work. As an English teacher, I do think that literature is a form of art to be appreciated for its aesthetic value but I also think that this art has pedagogical potential to not only teach about something but enact the problematic of trying to teach about something. What I mean is that literature is a narrative that accounts for voices and experience while inevitably leaving gaps for the reader -- spaces that cannot actually be known or accounted. Teaching and learning is always partial knowing (Kumashiro's Against Common Sense) and not this myth of having the facts and testing what is the right answer.

Baer (2000) firmly believes that "we" must teach children about the world's atrocities to provide children with a "framework for consciousness" and is that not a powerful ideological stance for all teachers in this post-Holocaust world?  How can teacher contextualize the atrocities and construct this framework  for making moral choices and taking personal and social responsibility. Bauer, however, makes explicit that this is, indeed, a paradox to try to make known something that is beyond knowing or understanding.

Jordan suggests that an authorial strategy, and for our purposes I would like to consider the author as a teacher, is to use a fictionalized first person account from a child's point of view. In doing so, the young reader will be able to take on "for a moment, the perspective of a child who lived during the Holocaust and perhaps begin to address their own question of what it was like and how it could have happened" (200).  While Jordan cites Totten  as saying that literature can help personalize history as way of facing inhumanity in a human way, she  neglects to note that Totten also says that it may not be appropriate; in fact, it is insufficient to seek empathy for that which is impossible to imagine let alone experience vicariously. Perhaps for this reason Jordan suggests that effective literature about the Holocaust should do much more than edit the graphic details or tell about what happened. What then can novel do?

If the objective is for today's children to identify with children of the past, self-narrated stories that show the similarities in growing up -- interest in ice cream, love of games, being sweet on the cute girl in class, sibling rivalry -- personalize history and make the events  more believable. Furthermore, child narrators often accurately do not know much about what is happening or why,  beyond what they see and experience. In Never Fall Down. Arn, the narrator/protagonist,  talks to us about how he sells ice cream for extra money and how he spies on his rich neighbor: "But one girl in the window, the same age as me, the one with eyeglass, sometime she stick her tongue at me. And now I think maybe I love her a little bit"  (16). He also has some sense of the political unrest in Cambodia at the beginning of the novel: "Truck full of soldier ride down the street shouting in a bullhorn. 'We are Khmer Rouge,' they say. 'We are Red Cambodia.' Also they say the prince is coming back, that all government soldier should come meet him at the airport" (12). But like most of the people in Cambodia at the time, Arn has no idea what the Khmer Rough is planning. As the plan unfolds, Arn learns the rules for survival, and his readers learn, too, but the ignorance does not last long, and Arn begins to piece together what he has heard and what he sees. There is no one there, no adult or omniscient narrator to help Arn,  for Arn to tell the "truth" of what is happening; he must be telling and experiencing at the same time. There is no narratorial or experiential distance in this novel.

I think Arn's account will pose a problem for some educators hoping to use Never Fall Down to teach about the Cambodian genocide because while it is realistic and powerful, it  might overwhelm young readers with its graphic detail, a key criticism in young adult novels. Arn, the narrator, does not edit what he sees for his listener nor does he make any apologies. We know that adolescents mature at different times and different ways, and so while some novels hint at the truth behind details such as mass graves or gas chambers, e.g.,  likening them to piles of dirt or showers, Arn tells his listener exactly what he witnesses, thus allowing his listener to also bear witness (Felman, Testimony):

 In the square I see this new guy, white shorts, no shirt, and six soldier. Also ten guys down on knees, hands tied, all naked, in a row.  The guy in the white shorts, he has a gun with a knife attach, a bayonet.  He point the bayonet at the chest of one guy in the row. Then very quick, he slice the skin and pull out the liver. So quick, so neat, the liver , it stick on the end of the knife. The kneeling guy, he's still living; his liver not inside him anymore -- in front of his face. Crying, only saying,"No, no, no," Then he fall down. (76)

What is the authorial strategy here? McCormick is not allowing Arn to be ignorant here nor veiling the event as some authors of Holocaust literature do to make it age-appropriate (and as Jordan notes). The narrator, Arn, is not unaware nor is there an adult to filter or interpret the details; he presents the event as an eye witness to the atrocities without interpretation. This seems like an authorial risk for McCormick. Jordan's selections for Holocaust literature celebrate texts that do not quite engage with the "harsh reality outside the imagined adventure" (204) keeping the child hidden physically and emotionally from the events to teach about life, death, and survival by resisting graphic images.  I think Arn's narratorial voice, one that is somewhat detached emotionally, is McCormick's strategy for teaching about survival, but McCormick includes the graphic images. Why?

Jordan suggests that the authorial strategy of telling a story from the child's point of view is effective because "their gradual understanding and growing knowledge of what is happening around them mirrors that of young readers" (205). She suggests that children are "largely ignorant of the horrors of the Holocaust and are only slowly beginning to learn of them." While I agree that the child's points of view is an effective authorial strategy, I think that children are eye witnesses or rather bear witness in their own lives and need to share and hear those stories -- imagine all the children living in America who experience cancer, live through a tsunami or hurricane, or even have to face a bully at school. Thus, when children read a first person novel, they see an example of bearing witness, and as listeners, they, too, bear witness. To allow the story of the Holocaust or a genocide to be told as an adventure without proper perspective, to be filtered with misinformation or occluded information, or to always be hopeful  is problematic.  I am thinking more about middle school readers here -- , and I believe Totten would argue that the Holocaust as well as genocide should not be taught in elementary school --  nevertheless, a framework for consciousness (critical pedagogy) cannot be built upon a weak foundation, and I think most teens are capable of grappling with complexity. For really young readers, it may be best to stick to themes of group discrimination but even so, educators must be careful not to present overly simple definitions and solutions to even young readers.

(We will return to Jordan's analysis of allegorical depictions of the Holocaust when we look at Stassen's Deogratias, a graphic novel about the Rwandan genocide.)

In chapter six of Never Fall Down, readers (or listeners) see what I think is a shift in the story that may cause  middle and high school educators pause when considering this as a class novel. (At this point, I am not sure where I stand on this.) The authorial strategy of using the first person narrator as an eye-witness  to the Khmer Rouge's "Year Zero" and four years of methodical murder trying to "never fall down," reports this scene about a "wandering boy" who leaves the hut at night:

I look for him everywhere. By the side of the hut, in the kitchen. I see a light, a small light, in the mango grove. A bad smell there, and sometimes the bodies get bloat and blow up and pop out of the ground. I'm scared of that place, scared of ghost, but I go anyway. 

And I see the wandering boy. I see him crouching, holding arm of a dead guy, chewing. I don't know how long he been doing that, eating the flesh, the human flesh; but now I know why he always asleep in the morning. (87)

khim

While this scene is of the graphic nature that Jordan considers overwhelming for young readers -- and again I am not sure the age range she is considering -- it is essential in moving the protagonist to a realization. Up until this point, Arn has slowly become "famous" in the camp for his ability to sing, play the khim and lead a group of musicians in Angkar songs. He has some power to be out at night because of his "fame," a power of voice to speak up and even save his fellow musicians who would otherwise be killed because of their poor musical skills. But even though he sees this wandering boy near the mangrove trees, Arn cannot use his power to save; the image unveiled some truth of humanity for Arn, a hopelessness:  he says, " now I am a ghost."

What is this novel doing, then, that an autobiography can not? Why didn't Arn write his own story, give his own testimony? Why has McCormick mediated his story and rendered it as a novel? It is clear that the first person account is something that a non-fiction book or essay cannot do. What is the value of an listener/artist/author in telling a history?  What does is this novel doing for our understanding of history? Let us take a look at an excerpt to observe the work of a listener/artist/author:

New prisoner coming to the cap all the time. No hiding them anymore. Now the Khmer Rouge take them right through the square. Tie together, head low. They beat them in front of us so we can see what happens to people with bad character. Always the Khmer Rouge watch us, all the time. They watch to see if you show any emotion to the victim. You do, they will kill you. (90).

"These people, they no good," says one Khmer Rouge. "They old; they don't work so hard. They gonna die soon anyway." Then , very quick, he take the ax and hit them in the back of the head. Blood fly everywhere. The wall of the temple, beautiful tile, beautiful painting, now all dripping with blood....Then the Khmer Rouge says to us, "It's time for your job. You pee on them. You pee on their head."  I think: I will not do this terrible thing, I will not do this...But then I look down , and I see the urine coming out of me. (101)

The text resists emotion in its abrupt phrasing, declarative sentence structure, and present tense mimicking the way that the survivors had to act swiftly and resist emotion in order to survive. We witness the body detached from the mind here as though Arn is a ghost detached from his Khmer body.

But Arn is not a ghost, and while he has "acted tough" to survive, McCormicks's authorial strategy is to then juxtapose haunting automaticity of terror with Arn's humanity. Arn is called to a leader's home to play music and later asked to ride a horse to deliver a letter:

Strange thing is happening now. Nice thing. But very strange. Smile on my face. Not fake smile like when we sing song about Angka, but real smile, and laughing. Also wetness on my cheek like rain, but it's tear. For three years, laughing not allowed, crying not allowed. Now, on this horse, I am laughing so much I am also crying. (106).

While this juxtaposition is not one of the authorial strategies Jordan discusses, hope is one of them (as I mentioned above). And McCormick does explicitly develop this theme using Arn's narratorial voice. After the Vietnamese invade Cambodia, Arn takes up arms with the Khmer Rouge; he and his small platoon of child soldiers or "bait" as he discovers come upon a high ranking Khmer Rouge group with a little rice girl: "My little sister, Sophea, ten year old, now like tiny old woman, bent over from carrying the rice sack: (128). While Arn knows it is too dangerous to show that they are family, he goes to his little sister during the night:

Long time ago I kill all hope in myself. And live only like animal, survive one day, then one day more.  Now here is my little sister. My family. Someone who love me. Alive. And I say, " Now I know you are living, I will live, too." (129)

Is this the truth? Did this "happen"?' Can there be this kind of seredipity and hope in a story about genocide? The all-too-famous phrase "Never Again" that followed the movement to prevent and punish genocide after the Holocaust was, and has been,  an empty promise that allowed the Khmer Rouge invasion to escalate to a genocide, and the hope that Arn felt here is just as hollow, for after several more days of wandering the jungle of Cambodia with Khmer Rouge soldiers he came upon his sister's platoon once again. McCormick need not honor Jordan's rules at this point, as a fiction writer, she could wrap up this story with a happy ending where Arn and Sophia make it to Thailand safely, and the find the American dream awaiting them, but she doesn't, and I think this authorial decision makes Never Fall Down authentically rather than didactic, gesturing at the complexity of history and survival and the potential for fiction and young readers to grasp the messiness of history and the need for historical fiction to disrupt the neat accounts we find in textbooks. Instead of the didactic ending of traditional children's stories,  after four years of surviving alone, Arn finds his sister near death and susceptible to abuses much worse than death itself:

Now my hand is on my gun. Because I know I should kill her by my own. So she won't get rape, get eaten by tiger. I touch her cheek and push close her eyes with my hand. I touch the trigger and pray to our ancestor for help, to forgive me for killing this little girl, this only person left for me in the world...but I don't do it. I just walk away. (138)

 While Arn, did make it to the Thailand refugee camp, his story did not end there, and here McCormick further complicates the "neat" storytelling of children's literature. Surviving the genocide was not the end of the story for McCormick's protagonist or for survivors of genocide. They must now survive their survival, and this is where the dramatic and graphic elements that engage many young readers is juxtaposed with a much messier survival set in the day-to-day struggles of coping with past and facing the present and future. Arn makes it to America and starts high school only to face the challenges of learning a new culture and language and unlearning the "tough act" that became his best survival tool. Here Arn is telling his readers about learning English with his "special teacher":

Very important sound this th. But we don't have this sound in Khmer. So my tongue can't do it. But Pat, she say it over and over and over. Get close to my face, closer and closer she get; her tongue, she show it to me, pushing on her teeth, like she gonna eat me. And I spit her. Right in the face, I spit....And I think: why I spit at this person, only one trying to help me? Why I'm so bad? Why? (196)

In  "Author's Note," McCormick talks about her in-depth interviews with the people for whom the characters were named and from whom the novel derived. She says that she crafted a novel from her interviews because of the gaps in the memories of the participants in her research, and she wrote the character using Arn's "own distinct and beautiful voice" to make up for the "light" lost with grammar and syntax. I am not sure if this final authorial strategy works here. McCormick's recreation of Arn's voice distances the reader at first; I think it only works because it is combined with the present-tense narration. Had it been past tense, we would have expected even the fictional character to have improved grammar.  This is most effective in the end of the novel when Arn does not have the language to express to his adopted family the shame he feels for all that he experienced in the camps:

My heart like, like a tiger inside, clawing my rib to get out. So much hate in there it hurt. Hate for the people who kill my family, hate for the people who kill my friend, hate for myself...." Why I live?" I ask Peter. "Why I live and so many people die?" (207)

Decolonial Thinking

The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011)
Walter D. Mignolo
 
"But of course history is not an agent in itself. It moves because of the doing of human beings"(xxvii). This quote is essential to my interests here. The nature of history is never-ending and ever-changing because of human agency, and I argue that our work as teachers is to facilitate opportunities to bear witness, to be listeners of testimony and thus live through a history and in doing so move history's course.I think to do this, we have to go to the darker side of history. I think we can take our students there. I think our students need to bear witness to the darker side.

"'Modernity' is a complex narrative whose point of origination was Europe; a narrative that builds Western civilization by celebrating its achievements while hiding at the same time its darker side, 'coloniality'"(3). Thus, there is no modernity without coloniality (which means that there can not really be a "post" colonial state because we cannot extract the coloniality from history nor from human beings). The colonial matrix of power is shared and disputed by many contenders. Therefore,Mignolo argues that decolonial thinking emerged and unfolded as responses to the ideals projected to and enacted in the non-European world. So to counter the logic of coloniality, we must intervene with the logic of decoloniality, which seems to mean logics that stem from subjects, and from people perhaps, that have been subjugated by coloniality. I think history has shown that this is possible,
 and perhaps Guatemala's peasant/working class revolutionary efforts demonstrate this (see Grandin). Would Mignolo see U.S, interventions in the politics of Guatemala in 1954 and on as a colonial logic, a rhetoric of modernity, of Western dominance and hegemony? Is this a logic?  Does this power actually oppress those it has excluded or has it, in fact, created a situation in which those colonized can internalize the logic and then enact a form of decolonial thinking and action? If we look at Grandin's book, The Last Colonial Massacre, I think we can see how the logic of coloniality created a plantation economy in which, and only because of which, the laborers organized and found new meaning  in self and solidarity. However, did the "new meaning" evolve out of a similar colonial logic, a hierarchy of power?

The modern state and the colonial state are managed  by this matrix of power. The colonial matrix of power is a matrix used by all the colonial bodies;  the states have been organized,  and  they manage control in and through a structure that began and emerged during western expansion, creating colonies. 


The links (knowledge and subjectivity, gender and sexuality, economy, authority, and racism and patriarchy) are maintained  because there is a structure of annunciation (it dictates the parameters) of knowledge; there are specific insitutions (church, state, university), actors, categories of thought, and specific languages that control knowledge. To delink means to delink from that colonial matrix of power, but you do not delink all at once.

Delinking is a process -- a conscientious, political and epistemic process --  that involves a lot of people in different temporaltities. You have to delink from the categories of knowledge that have been created by Christian, European, heterosexual, white men. This colonial power was able to create knowledge and also delegitimize all others' knowledge. People were made to believe that their knowledge was not legitimate because they were linked to this matrix, but they can now see that, in fact,  it was a fallacy of sorts -- Africans, Indians, Mairos are realizing that they have been classified by patriarchy and/or racism and epistemically undermined as well -- the Global Politcal Society. Western modernity is working in this same matrix.

Mignolo talks about The Colonial Misunderstanding (2004) in an interview. It is  a documentary after the Congo Berlin Conference 1884 when all the European countries argued about their right to possess Africa. The discourse here is the German critiquing his own people from Germany to German public and academia. The African historian makes a critique of the same event when Germany slaughtered Hereros.  The question is : what are the differences in the kinds of knowledge by the white German and African historians? The African historian is producing knowledge not just to correct history, but he wants to delink it from European's version of history and produce an African Renaissance, a realization that Europe dispossesed us from our land and from our soul. The task of delinking, decolonialiity,  cannot be guided by Germans. It can't be a German saying, "you've been robbed of your land and soul."  The Africans don't need the help; they can delink. If the white want to become decolonialized, they have to follow the lead of the third world people or the people of the colonial state.

The response of the second and third world to being deligitimized- was an emergence of geo-political knowledge  from Third World intellectuals (Fanon 1961, Cabral 1973, Ghandi 1948,  Senghor 2001, Cesaire 2008, Kwasi Wiredu, Enrigue Dussel, Anibal Quijano). It is an epistemic war --focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification. Intellectuals of the Third World realized they did not need to wait for an idea from France or England to decide what to do "here" but by delinking, they found new options.  As Rodolfo Kusch said, "We are afraid of thinking for ourselves." This emergent of knowledge from Third World intellectuals showed that  colonial history is not just economic and political but that it is epistemic. They saw that their knowledge was indeed valuable, and so this geopolitical knowledge emerged in third world intellectuals. 


The body-politic knowledge emerged in the US because of the Civil Rights Movement.  New ideas flourished in the 60s: Women Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Chicano Studies.  What knowledge that was being claimed in these new ideas was a knowledge that had been taken away. Knowledge about African Americans and Chicano/as had been written by the whites and so this new knowledge was about writing their own history -- it is a struggle, an epistemic war to delink because coloniality dominates everything from  humanities to social sciences to natural sciences. The diverse system of the west has its power because it is based on the same colonial matrix of power; western modernity is the based on the same matrix as the colonial matrix of power. Thus, the second and third worlds are the geo-politic, it seems like the first world is actually a body-politic within and outside western modernity, which, again,  is controlled by the colonial matrix of power. To delink means to engage in this epistemic war.


How do we delink if we are in the matrix? Advocacy -- if you really want a minority student to do well, you need faculty who can produce decolonial knowledge; show the students options how to delink -- going to the university to be a doctor or lawyer is one option, but there are other options in education; decoloniality is not a field of study, but it permeates all the disciplines where you make students aware of options; the ultimate decision is not epistemic or political but is ethical because what you choose, whichever option you choose, you are responsible for your option. Ethics is about responsibility in whatever you choose to do, all your acts. You have to be aware of the decisions you make and the consequences. 

A decolonial education is making a student aware that they are living among options. You cannot force a student to take an option, but you can say that you have to be aware and responsible for that option. We are conditioned by modernity not to question our actions -- we don't question the messages of accumulation. What is hidden is how we arrived at this state of accumulation. You start with your own personal ethics. Create a space whereby we question eachothers frameworks of what is right and wrong -- begin to dialgoue. If the ethics is controlled by hegemony, how is a student to see options? The colonial education limits this, but a decolonial education has to provide how communication functions, how we have been conditioned to accumulate, talking to them about their own life and what they know to show how they have been conditioned; a decolonial education needs questions; it is not about information but it is about being able to understand the world in which they are living unconciously.  We don't have to live unconsciously. The teacher opted to bring this to the classroom and now students have to think about options, but they are not always rational choices. Rational argumentation for why you chose an irrational option locates your ethical decision. Ino ther words, advocating for others and making ethcical choices may seem irrational but that is a good sign that you are delinking from the age old systems of control that dehumanize our global society AND that system that is now dressed in a modern garb.

What is justice and how does decoloniality bring forth justice? Mignolo first suggests that there be a shift in the meaning of justice to "economic justice." Next, we have to think about what it means to live within the law. Civilians are living within the law, but the state and corporations are not. What kind of justice can we talk about when the people in the army and with the money are living beyond the law? So what is a decolonial sense of justice? If the rhetoric of modernity is the defense and rationalization of the use of the matrix, and justice, human rights and democracy are being used to preserve acting beyond the law, then justice will be in the delinking -- to thoughtfully engage the Global Society to practice inclusivity, but I think it is fundamentally to show options.


Delinking epistimology from capital is decolonization -- to produce decolonial knowledge that will put us in a different concept of life, but what is that concept of life?

Society is modern; economy is capitalism but it is linked with racism which has a dispensibility of human life. The massive enslavement of Africans; it is an economic concept. Human life is dispensible because once a body does not produce, we throw it away and bring more bodies. The body becomes a commodity; human life became a commodity. They were slaves before, but once capitalist economy existed, it became a commodity -- the mercantilization of human life (children, women, organs). What are the consequences of making human life dispensible?

Economy is based on an extraction of gold and silver - -coffee and cotton. But now because of technological advancement, there is a possiblity of environmental catastrophe. Mignolo says that there is a rhetoric of modernity -- salvation, progress, triumph - that hides the logic of colonialism. You have to have both; there is no modernity without coloniality. The new technology and the rhetoric of modernity -- save paper, save trees, put people in contact, no need to get into a car because you have the Internet -- but how do you make technology? Mining. Where are the mines? What are the consequences of the mines and the technology that improves your life? You need copper. So you need water to separate the copper from the stone; water which was a human right becomes a commodity. So when you are exploding mines to produce cell phones, you need to reduce costs to produce more and serve more using the rhetoric of modernity while using the logic of colonialism -- that is the consequences of progress! They won't tell you what is behind modernity. The rhetoric of modernity always goes with colonialism -- the problem is because knowledge is being controlled by those making decisions and building, so we criticize but we are always working at the level of the annuciated (semiotic term ?): racism and patriarchy. The system of values in which life became dispensible in the 16th century came from the logic of Eurpean enlightenment which was transformed into the US corporate world --they had to classify a system of inferior people that was racist and and use a system patriarchy to decide who was normal and who was not normal. This is where the control of knowledge is secured.

The moment in which we start questioning the kind of issues that have been put in front of us to discuss is the moment of delinking-- we should change the terms of the conversation and not the content of the conversation.