The Last Colonial Massacre (Grandin)

 "Empire rather than fortifying democracy, weakened it to the fragile degree that democracy and human rights exist today in Latin America, they have been achieved not through the mercy of the US empire but through resistance to that empire." ( Grandin, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/305724in.html)

Greg Grandin's book, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (2004), focuses on 20th century Guatemala. The book examines the history of Maya political activism, specifically the Guatemalan Communist Party and variations of it between the 1920s and 70s. His methods are ethnographic in nature -- interviews/life stories.  Post 1954 -- the removal of the Arbenz -- the support for his research and corroboration of the interviews has been criticized as "tougher to swallow" (Woodward, dissentmagazine.org). Grandin's argument is a challenge to imperialism ultimately citing US's support of repressive governments in Latin America, specifically Guatemala here (see When Mountains Tremble and my notes from that on this blog). Woodward, fellow at the Center for Humanistic Enquiry at Emory University,  challenges Grandin's assertions about  the US as an enemy of regional democracy citing a few instances of US's efforts to advance civil rights in Puerto Rico, take down leaders like Diaz, Heurta and Somoza and then challenging Grandin on asserting Latin American liberals who also abandoned democratization in Latin America asking " Who were these 'liberals'?"

The overthrow of Arbenz convinced many Latin American reformers,
democrats, and nationalists that the United States was less a model to be
emulated than a danger to be feared. Che Guevara, for example, was in
Guatemala working as a doctor and witnessed firsthand the effects of US
intervention. He fled to Mexico, where he would meet Fidel Castro and go
on to lead the Cuban Revolution. He taunted the United States repeatedly
in his speeches by saying that ‘Cuba will not be Guatemala.’ [2]

Woodward states that Che Guevara was not a reformer, democrat or nationalist and "would have reacted with particular scorn to the suggestion that he ever was a 'democrat'" (92). However, of interest to Grandin, according to Woodward, is suggesting that the armed guerrillas of 1960s were an extension of the socialist, nationalist and communist parties of working-class and even peasants "driven by the frustration of efforts to consolidate post-World War II social democracies" (Grandin 3).  This is an argument that Woodward suggests conflates Guatemala with Latin America citing 1) a Cuban-backed insurgency aimed not at a US installed dictatorship but an elected reformist government; 2) Venezuela's President Betancourt exiled by a miltary coup later returned to power in an election in 1959 who later turned over power democratically in 1964 (Woodward 93).Woodwards is not alone in this criticism as Murray also sees Grandin as offering Guatemala as a "microcosm" of Latin American history.



In addition to challenging Grandin's assertion about the old left and new left, Woodward argues that Grandin is critical of human agency and a dependency on capitalism, it seems rather than a social movement or unity:

Violence had the effect of dissolving the affiliation between individual activists and their wider social network…. Repression severed alliances between reforming elites and popular classes, disaggregated powerful collective movements into individual survival strategies, extracted leaders from their communities, and redefined the relationship between human beings and society. … The key to counterinsurgent triumph lay in the creation of a new way of thinking. Terror trained citizens to turn their political passions inward, to receive sustenance from their families, to focus on personal pursuits, and
to draw strength from faiths less concerned with history and politics. Such conversions were the routine manifestations of the larger reinterpretation of democracy…: the idea, widely held in different forms at the end of World War II, that freedom and equality are mutually fulfilling has been replaced by a more vigilant definition, one that stresses personal liberties and free markets and sees any attempt to achieve social equity as leading to at best declining productivity and at worst political turmoil. (Grandin 196-97)

Ultimately, Woodward concludes that Granding "refuses to consider the broader context in which the apparent exhaustion of alternatives occurred, specifically the degree to which the horrors (at worst) and inefficiency (at best) of 'real existing socialism' served to discredit any socialist project. How else to explain the seeming absence of an alternative to neoliberal capitalism in societies the world over that never experieced the kind of state terror describe in The Last Colonial Massacre?" (94).  What's more is that because the participants in Grandin's study talk about leaving political activism for Christianity, Grandin suggests that hope and activism for social justice has been abandoned, but Woodward offers that the next generation may take up that movement. History is never ending; the stories are just now being told and so those who hear those stories are bearing witness, are listeners, are companions to the survivors and their efforts who are now "living through" a history that was not available to them because of silence (see posts on this blog about Felman and Laub's Testimony for a discussion/notes).

 Robin, in his review,  begins with an account of Ronald Reagan's meeting with Guatemala's president Efrain Rios Montt in Honduras on December 5, 1982 after which Reagan declared Rios Montt to be "dedicated to democracy," a meeting which was followed, the next day, by a massacre of 162 Las Dos Erres villagers by  a Guatemalan platoon (see below for two accounts of this recently published). Robin brings this up to point out Americans' misconceptions about the Cold War -- that it was a US/Soviet struggle, about nuclear weapons, and situated in the memory of Berlin wall's fall. As far as Latin America, he argues, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua might be associated with the Cold War in the eyes of Americans, but Guatemala is certainly outside that scope. In fact, as Grandin shows, Guatemala  in the 1954 was where the US "fought its first major contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had worked closely with the country's small but influential Communist Party" (Robin).  This "cold war" continued in 1966 when in Guatemala the "disappearances" from US-trained officials "captured some thirty leftist, tortured and executed them, and then dropped their corpses into the Pacific," disappearances common in Argentina, Uraguay, Chile, and Brazil. By 1996, a peace accord between the leftest guerrillas and the Guatemalan military ended the Latin American Cold War -- most of the 200, 000 dead were Mayas deeming the the "civil war" acts genocide. Robin's contribution here is to articulate that America's victory in the Cold War includes Guatemala where Communism was defeated by mass slaughter of civilians.  Therefore, Grandin's book is  a "modest act of restorative justice: it allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words."

While the US did defeat Communism, it defeated much more, according to Grandin. The democracy which would allow citizens to share power and to free themselves from oppression were also defeated, the dream of Englightenment. Grandin argues that the US offered a counter-Enlightenment by supporting military power and oppressing access to individual liberties. What Grandin suggests is that the Latin America left brought feudualism (through capitalism?)  with Guatemala's coffee planters enforcing forced labor, vagrancy laws and credit -- essentially owning the peasants. Robin writes that "it is a view of political power as a form of private property which confirms [Grandin's] observattion that by 1944 'only five Latin American countries -- Mexico, Uraguay, Chile, Costa Rica and Columbia -- could nominally call themselves democracies.'" In the 1950 election of Arbenz with the help of the Agrarian Reform of 1952, this land was redistributed  to families bypassing the planter-dominated municipal government. What Grandin offers here is an irony: the socialism was really capitalism: "The Agrarian Reform turned landless peasants into property owners, giving them the bargaining power to demand higher wages from their employers -- in the hope that they would become 'consumers of national manufacturers,' while 'planters, historically addicted to cheap, often free labor and land,' would be forced to 'invest in new technologies' and thereby 'make a profit'." So what Grandin is showing is how the leftist ideologies "awakened peasants to their own power, giving them extensive opportunities to speak for themselves and to act on their own behalf."

However, the 1954 coup to oust Arbenz began ten years of US support of a anti-communist, democratic left movement in Guatemala prompting the organization of armed guerrillas in rural areas of the country. The response was a Guatemalan army modernized, trained and equipped by the US that by 1981 it conducted "the first colour-coded genocide in history" and "an internationalization of Guatemala's traditional struggles over land and labor" (Robin):

‘Military analysts marked communities and regions according to colours. White spared those thought to have no rebel influence. Pink identified areas in which the insurgents had limited presence; suspected guerrillas and their supporters were to be killed but the communities left standing. Red gave no quarter: all were to be executed and villages razed.’ (Grandin)

Such drastic measures are the basis of Grandin's argument that America, the ideology of an America that it is a country of liberty, of equality, of social justice, was lost in the Cold War. Robin writes, " With the market -- and now religion -- displacing social democracy as the language of public life, writers are no longer compelled by the requirements of the historical imagination...When Marxism was banished from the political scene in 1989, it left behind no successor language -- save religion itself -- to grapple with the twinned fortunes of the individual and the collective, the personal and the political, the present and the past."

I think that what will be most useful for my argument about what stories can do for history, or more importantly what a novel can do, is how a novel can capture the resilience of a people. The novel can capture the "complex architecture manifestations of that oppression"(DeStigter email). As we see in Grandin's book, "Repression severed alliances between reforming elites and popular classes, disaggregated powerful collective movements into individual survival strategies, extracted leaders from their communities, and redefined the relationship between human beings and society" (Grandin 196). However, individuals, especially activists, while extracted did not remain isolated. Out of such manifestations grew a new way of thinking that resisted oppression. The state sanctioned terror in Guatemala actually ignited a consciousness.The politics of the plantation economy created forced migration and even the formation of new communities -- for a people firmly rooted in tradition and defined by their land, this altered the way individuals related to each other and to the state. The institutions of parties, unions, and legislation  and ideas like Marxism provided the people a means to resist  -- again, a people historically situated in subjugation.  While Grandin weaves research and testimony into an account of Latin America in the Cold War, we do not hear but a few excerpts from his interviews with activists, and we do not get a sense of the landscape save names of towns and regions.  Gradin argues that Guatemala advanced democracy not through autonomy or isolated freedom but rather a "collective action laid bare the social foundations of self" (181). This, I think, is what is worth knowing and teaching in our schools. This notion of democracy is worth contemplating, and so how can we make this story accessible to adolescents.  How can we make this known? A novel. But how would an artist show or make known this resiliance?


"What Happened at Los Dos Erres," This American Life
"Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory, and Justice in Guatemala," ProPublic.org 

The Relationship Between Narrative and History

Narrative: "verbal acts consisting of someone telling someone else that something happened" -- Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories" 228

"The term history unites the objective and the subjective side, and denotes...not less what happened than the narration of what happened. The union of the two meanings we must regard as of a higher order than mere outward accident; we must suppose historical narrations to have appeared contemporaneously  with historical deeds and events." -- Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 60

"The insistence on historical perspective seems to be more than a mere recommendation of the attitude of objectivity...It is at least in part a claim that for the historical understanding of an event one must know its consequences as well as its antecedents; that the historians must look before and after....; that in some sense we may understand a particular event by locating it correctly in a narrative sequence." Louis Mink,"The Autonomy of Historical Understanding," 24

"The writer's function is not without its arduous duties.  By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it" (Camus, Nobel acceptance speech).

"The specific task of the literary testimony is, in other words, to open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative capability of perceiving history -- what is happening to others -- in ones own body, with the power of sight (of insight)  usually afforded only by one's own immediate physical involvement" (Felman, Testimony,  108). 

Felman writes that "something happened" is the stuff of history and "someone is telling someone else" is the stuff of narrative.   She considers literature as a new form of  narrative as testimony "not merely to record, but to rethink, and, in the act of its rethinking, in effect transform history by bearing literary witness" (95). Felman wants to look at "bearing literary witness" as reading to try to find out about the atrocity rather than coming to know what the atrocity, in this case the Holocaust, is. Elie Wiesel wrote in Confronting the Holocaust that "there is no such thing as a literature of the Holocaust, nor can there be."  And I think Felman takes this to mean that one cannot ever know that which is unknowable or read about that which language will forever be insufficient.

What literature can do is that which the literality of history cannot. That something happened and the telling of that something is insufficient. In Camus' The Plague, his use of metaphor, the plague, in lieu of the historic referent, the Holocaust, is not what Felman calls a "metaphorically substitutive event, but an event that is historically impossible: an event without a referent" (102). In other words, the plague was an impossible event and so Camus novel is a testimony not to the literality of history, "but to is unreality, the historical vanishing  point of its unbelievability" (103), and this "unreality" is based on ones frame of reference: "Because our perception of reality is molded by frames of reference, what is outside them, however imminent and otherwise conspicuous , remains historically invisible, unreal, and can only be encountered by systematic disbelief" (103). Genocide is beyond human imagination. Felman says that "Since we can literally witness only that which is within the reach of the conceptual frame of reference we inhabit, the Holocaust is testified to by The Plague  as an event whose specificity resides, precisely , in the fact that it cannot, historically, be witnessed" (104).  Thus, is an imaginative medium necessary if we are to try to understand, if we are to bear witness and experience a crisis and transformation?

In Felman's chapter, "Camus' The Fall," we get a little closer to what I was hoping to discover in this book -- an understanding of the novel as testimony. Camus' The Fall, as argued by Felman, asks "What does it mean to inhabit the (exterminated) Jewish quarter of Amsterdam (of Europe)? What does it mean to inhabit history  as crime, as the space of the annihilation of the Other?" (189). 

• the suicide episode is an evocation of the bystander's silence (as the narrator witnesses yet continues his itinerary) -- an allegory for the "muteness of the world facing the extermination of the Jews"
• Camus' allusion to the betrayal of the "allies"or the friends of the woman who drowned  is a reference to the Western allies (in addition to Sartre's betrayal as a friend)
• the setting is in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam
• "The suicide scene becomes a figure for historical occasions in which silence reasserts itself , a metaphor for history as the assertion and the reassertion -- as the displacement and the repetition -- of a silence" (192). 
• a story of complicity but it is a complicity to a secret narrative, a silent narrative, and so the novel must embody the struggle to articulate what it means to be living on the site of a great atrocity
• the narrator bears witness from the position of a lawyer whose story is the history of what failed to be done (whereas the narrator in The Plague was a doctor who told the story of had to be done); the lawyer represents the victim, but a failed representation in the sense of truly speaking for the victim, whose voicelessness no voice can represent (197)
• a witness's inability to witness; the impossible historical narrative of an event without a witness, an event eliminating its own witness; narrative  -- the very writing of the impossibility of writing history

Felman reminds us later in the book, as she is exploring the film Shoah,

To understand Shoah is not to know  the Holocaust, but to gain new insights into what not knowing means, to grasp the ways in which erasure is itself part of the functioning of our history. The journey of Shoah  thus paves the way toward new possibilities of understanding history, and toward new pragmatic  acts  of historicizing history's erasure. (253)

So when we are thinking about narrative and history, we can see that testimony can work against common understanding of history - -that history is knowing -- and instead perform a narrative that resists literality and in doing supports the witness's inability to witness by providing listeners or companions for the stories. (hmmm more on this...)

The Listener

To bear witness --

To testify --

Trauma -- 

Crisis -- 

If teachers are to see teaching as testimony as Shoshana Felman suggestions in Testimony, and if we are teaching children, then we must consider the child listener as we assess how to access the crisis and how much crisis the class can sustain.

Dori Laub, M.D., the co-author of Testimony,  testimonial interviewer of Holocaust survivors, and child survivor of the Holocaust,  examines what it means to bear witness to a testimony, and here I would like to suggest, because I am interested in thinking about what a novel can do, that we think of the listener as the artist or novelist. And this is important because I think if the artist is the listener, the he or she can render it for the child reader, can align the witness for material evidence of an event in a way that one testimony cannot. And we can also think of the listener as the child or adolescent reader, the listener to the narrative of human pain. In both the novelist and child reader, the testimony to the trauma of the victim is inscribed anew; despite the historical documents and artifacts about an event, in the hearing of a narrative the "knowing of the event," Laub explains, "is given birth to" (57). The listener, our student, comes to be what Laub calls a "co-owner" of the event and thus partially experiences it. The listener then has to address all the feelings that the victim experiences if the trauma is to emerge and for witnessing to take place. How can a child reader address the "bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread and conflicts that the trauma victim feels"? How can the child reader assume the testimony (and maintain perspective that he/she is not the victim) -- the enabler of the testimony and the guardian of its process? Here is that with which the listener is charged:

• trauma survivor has no prior knowledge, no comprehension, and no memory of what happened
• he or she fears the knowledge
• knowledge dissolves all barriers, breaks all boundaries of time and place
• speakers of trauma prefer silence to protect themselves; silence as as a sanctuary and as a place of bondage.

The listener, thus, is a companion for the survivor. The reader is also a companion listening to the speaker in his or her silence and speech, the testifying to the reality of something unimaginable. Laub cautions the listener when he recounts an experience interviewing a Holocaust survivor. The historians viewed her testimony as incomplete and potentially misleading but Laub, a psychoanalyst, found value in her silence or that which she did not know.  He talks about having to listen to her testimony careful not to impose an agenda or shape her story with questions about that which she was silent. The women did not convey knowledge that existed, knowledge was becoming as she was testifying. She came to know the event by the very process of bearing witness. The tension with the historians was that because she did not know about the betrayal of the Polish underground or the number of chimneys that blew up in the defeat of the Auschwitz inmate rebellion, they say she knew nothing. However, Laub suggests that her testimony of the removal of the dead and her memory of helping people and of surviving was her way of breaking out of Auschwitz, that her testimony was reenacting (63); this was knowing something. And so is this the same for the reader. Does the reader or listener reenact in his or her roles as a companion for the survivor? What is happening in this dialectic between what the listener and the survivor knows and does not know, for no testimony occurs in solitude?

Laub talks about the "secret password." He says this is "a signal that we both share the knowledge of the trauma, the knowledge of what facing it and living in its shadow are really all about" (64).The trauma, he writes, "has no beginning,no ending, no before, no during and no after"; therefore,"trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, had no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect" (69). This is a new trauma -- the survivor is entrapped in the sense that constructing a narrative  is reconstructing a history. The telling is "a reassertion of the hegemony of reality and of a re-externalization of the evil that affected and contaminated the trauma victim " ( 69). So we see that because of testimony, history is never ending.

Listening, however, has its hazards. Once the listener engages authentically, he or she cannot ignore

the question of death; of facing time and its passage; of the meaning and purpose of living; of the limits of one's omnipotence; of losing the ones that are close to us; the great question of our ultimate aloneness; our otherness from any other; our responsibilty to and for our destiny; the question of loving and its limits; of parents and children; and so on. (72)

 And so Laub lists a series of listening defenses: paralysis, outrage, withdrawal, awe avoiding intimacy, foreclosure through facts (obsession with fact finding or knows it all), and hyperemotionally. While the defenses may be conscious or unconscious, there is this awareness as a listener that we are frightened by the testimony. Laub asks, "What can we learn from the realization of our fear? What can we learn from the trauma,from the testimony and from the very process of our listening?" (74).  There is, indeed, a history that threatens the present, because we know that history is never ending; we can never know its implications and what discoveries will be made in time because of a survivor has chosen now to tell his or her story, because you will be the listener while another survivor will choose another time and another listener.  We can never know the implications.

In Laub's chapter, "An Event Without a Witness," he explains how the survivors could not bear witness during the actual occurrence. And this seems so fascinating to me and helpful in understanding why we should read about history and why history -- and historical fiction -- is essential to modern education. History is not in the past. The survivors did not have the capacity to be aware or to comprehend the event during the occurrence -- "its dimensions, consequences,and above all, its radical otherness to all known frames of reference" (84). To give and to listen to the testimonies -- some forty years after the Holocaust, for example -- calls attention to the human will to live and desire to know the "circumstances designed for its obliteration and destruction" (84).  What was the totality of the event?

A novel might be considered a historical endeavor much like the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies from Yale. If the Video Archive was designed to enable the survivors to bear witness, then what is a historical novel about genocide designed to do?  The Video Archive sets the "stage for a reliving, a re-occurrence  of the event, in the presence of a witness." In the series of books by Skrypuch and Never Fall Down by McCormick, both authors listened to testimony of survivors as part of a historical endeavor, but beyond listening, they aligned the testimonies and crafted a novel. Laub suggests that the video project can  or might be able to be the witness that "opens up historical conceivability" or what he calls a "historical retroaction" that is much more than establishing facts. The experience of the historical endeavor like the Video Project, I think he is saying, is "the experience itself of living through testimony, of giving testimony" (85), so can a novel do the same thing? Can an artist craft testimony into experience for the child reader so that he or she can be the listener, can be the companion to the survivor? Can an author create the crisis for his or her child reader that helps him or her bear witness to the testimony that allows for a transformative experience but does so in a way more appropriate for a child listener?

Laub ends his chapter with what I think is going to be incredibly important in arguing for a literature of atrocities in our schools for what it can do for human beings and our citizenry:

It is the realization that the lost ones are not coming back; the realization that what life is all about is precisely living with an unfulfilled hope; only this time with the sense that you are not alone any longer -- that someone can be there as your companion -- knowing you, living with you through the unfulfilled hope, someone saying, 'I'll be with you in the very process of your losing me. I am your witness.'" (92)

Teaching With and Through Crisis

In Felman's "Story of a Class" in Testimony she tells us that she had two objectives for her literature course:

1) to make the class feel, and progressively discover, how testimony is indeed pervasive, how it is implicated -- sometimes unexpectedly -- in almost every kind of writing; 2) to make the class feel, on the other hand, and -- there again - progressively discover, how the testimony cannot be subsumed by its familiar notion, how the texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter -- and make us encounter - strangeness; how the concept of testimony, speaking from a stance of superimposition of literature, psychoanalysis and history, is in fact quite unfamiliar and estranging, and how, the more we look closely at texts, the more they show us that, unwittingly, we do not even know what testimony is and that, in any case, it is not simply what we thought we knew it was. (7)

 The key question for Felman, and for me as I pursue my work in literature of atrocities is this: "Is the testimony, therefore, a simply medium of historical transmission, or is it, in obscure ways, the unsuspected medium of a healing? If history has clinical dimensions, how can testimony intervene, pragmatically and efficaciously, at once historically (politically) and clinically" (9)?  So here, I am wondering if Felman is asking whether or not literature can be a sort of cognitive intervention of sorts. Can we use literature as something more than art, as a social intervention to raise consciousness? Can we use literature, the "alignment between witnesses," to enact history -- a complex, or thick historicity beyond places and dates?

Felman, in the context of a classroom, discusses the unpredictability of testimony. She says that the class itself "broke out into a crisis" (47).  After screening testimony from Holocaust videotapes, the students were silent, but "what was unusual was that the experience did not end in silence, but instead, fermented into endless and relentless talking in the days and weeks to come" and  outside the walls of the classroom. She notes phone calls from students at odd hours and a need to talk  without knowing quite what to say, and the students turned to each other  and yet "felt they could not reach each other. They felt alone, suddenly deprived of their bonding to the world and to one another" (48).

Pedagogically, the teacher had to support the students as they worked through the crisis. (And Kumsahiro will have more to say about this in Against Common Sense.) What was the significance of the event of witnessing testimony? Language was insufficient in processing the experience. Felman calls it a suspension of the knowledge -- that somehow the access to the knowledge that would help make sense of the content was lost. However, the discovery seems to be that knowledge "does not exist" but can"only happen through the testimony: it cannot be separated from it" (51). Therefore, the students wrote about their own experience of the testimony, of the experience of the class. Felman concludes that teaching takes place only through a crisis:

If it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness  of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught: it has perhaps passed on some facts, passed on some information and some documents, with which the students or the audience -- the recipients -- can for instance do what people during the occurrence  of the Holocaust precisely did with information that kept coming forth but that no one could recognize, and that no one could therefore truly learn, read,  or put to use. (Felman 53)

Teaching has to do more than transmit or bank (as Freire would argue as well). And this text, this book, seeks to make the parallel between teaching and psychoanalysis in that in both, one must "live through a crisis. Both are called upon to be performative, and not just cognitive, insofar as they both strive to produce, and to enable, change. Both this kind of teaching and psychoanalysis are interested not merely in new information, but, primarily, in the capacity of their recipients to transform themselves in function of the newness of that information" (53). Teaching the literature of atrocities offers this transformative experience because students can witness something that may be "cognitively dissonant." It can help us move from "oh, that's so sad" to a much more authentic response that only comes from crisis. The question for the teacher according to Felman (and others like Kumashiro) is how to access the crisis and how much can the class take on?  When we are talking about adolescents and children/young adult literature that question seems that much more essential.

Testimony and Democracy

Testimony, by Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, examines pedagogical and clinical lessons on listening to human suffering and listening to traumatic narratives. They askWhat are the possibilities for liberation from traumatic human experiences? How can we keep memories alive so that we can learn from them? Instead of erasing memory and forgetting history (or selectively sharing some memories while silencing others), the harsh realities of the ideology that drives our history, the history of America's violence and domination, need a place in the classroom. In the classroom, we generally ignore the voices and experiences of students, many of whom have their own traumatic narratives. How can we, teachers, bring testimony -- what Felman and Laub call bearing witness to a crisis or trauma -- to the classroom? By reading and telling stories.

 Claude Lefort, in Democracy and Political Theory  (1988), writes that modern democracy is a contested space of power, knowledge, and the law arguing that modernity is marked by the loss of all "markers of certainty," which means that knowledge and the law depend up on the contested discourses that articulate them. In the larger project of my work about thick democratic pedagogy and using the novel to teach about atrocities, I see this notion of democracy playing out in the classroom. It may seem an unfair analogy to define the classroom as a microcosm of the state, but traditionally the teacher has claimed a near totalizing power in the classroom speaking over the voices of the students. Lefort argues that the only remedy to totalitarianism in the state is a democratic space "wherein no one can claim to know the truth, no one can claim to occupy the space of power"; in other words, the plurality of voices debate "what has been established and what ought to be established" (Lefort 18). Arendt, on the other hand, challenges this remedy suggesting a "factual truth" as the foundation of this debate, which can be established only through testimony of witnesses. (This testimony, you will see in the gacaca of the Rwanda genocide trials where witnesses testify in community courts.)

Birmingham argues that "by testifying to factual reality and thereby making its impact felt, bearing witness breaks into the passive "spectatorship" of those who view this suffering, awakening them to the shock of reality" (212). How do most people understand testimony, however? Felman, in Testimony, explains:

In its most traditional, routine use in the legal context -- in the courtroom situation -- testimony is provided, and is called for, when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question.  The legal model of the trial dramatizes, in this way, a contained, and culturally channeled, institutionalized, crisis of truth. (Felman 7)

Birmingham, however, clarifies that the "crisis of truth" is not the "crisis of relativism." What is relative is the "unpredictability and unprecedented nature of the events themselves," so bearing witness works to make known that which exceeds our frame of reference and challenges cultural values, political institutions, and social mores because we are asked to bear witness to a testimony for which we, ourselves could not give. We can see the trauma of bearing witness to the event and the trauma of hearing the testimony. Birmingham writes of Arendt, "To bear consciously the burden of our century is to bear the shock of reality that, she argues, has exploded our traditional categories of understanding" (213).  Only by bearing witness to the unprecedented, will we be able to 'take our bearings in the world' (Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem 322). What is useful about Felman's explanation of testimony is her notice that language is in process. Testimony is not the verdict or the knowledge but is rather a discursive practice -- to testify is to tell, to promise, to produce a speech as material evidence for truth. It is a speech act. Birmingham writes, "As a discursive practice, testimony requires a plurality of witnesses who testify to the event, to what happened, and yet there is not definitive or conclusive account: (213). And this is why I see narrative as so valuable to the thick democratic pedagogy and fiction as one way of weaving together the plurality of witnesses who testify to the event. Democracy is as Lefort said "marked uncertainty" and a democratic space must embrace the discursive practice of bearing witness rather than the comfort of a historical fact or plot so ubiquitous in textbooks and encyclopedic sources.  Of course, this brings up the relation between testimony and history. LaCapra suggests that all memory is "both more and less than history" because traumatic memory is difficult to assimiliate into a speech act and thus a historical discourse. The language will remain insufficient for rendering a memory that is unrepresentable and incomprehensible. Can a witness craft a testimony that situates the individual testimony within a larger narrative framework so that "we" can derive meaning?  For this reason the artistic skills of a novelist can support this process, but then is it any less than history once a memory is re-rendered? Does the production of a novel constitute an act of witness? And can that production facilitate the construction of a global education?

Martin Jay presents a distinction between "first order narrative" and a "second order narrative" ( "Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgements"). First order narratives are testimonies that provide material evidence for factual reality. Second order narratives  rely on this material evidence for their accounts.  He states that there are no "linguistically unmediated facts" in that facts require a witness and the language of testimony is discursive; in other words, facts are narrated by witnesses. To hear the first order narrative, requires that one has a voice and that this voice has space to speak testimony.  Does the novel create a fiction from these voices much as America has silenced voices in its history? How can we help students to distinguish between truth and a lie? If we can create a thick democratic space of learning  -- and by thick I mean beyond thin democratic approaches of majority rules and certainty -- students can learn the discipline of bearing witness to events and bearing witness to testimony"what is and appears to them because it is" (Arendt, "Truth and Politics" 229).

Felman suggests that literature can be an alignment between witnesses.  In her research about the response of American graduate students to videotaped testimony of Holocaust survivors, Felman discovers how the symptoms of trauma appear to be mirrored in the students to demonstrate how traumatic narrative affects both the writer and reader. Felman argues that traumatic narrative does that work that few other mediums can -- it erases differences of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, cultural and national to unite humanity to some degree. There is a material of truth in this testimony that creates a material of humanity -- one that is complex and powerful and, in many ways, undeniable. Perhaps this is a utopian vision of community because even thought in testimony the silenced or marginalized voices can speak their stories of trauma, the question remains who is authorized to hear and interpret those stories. What if the listener is to distant from the trauma to have this response that Felman examines?  The question is "how can the witness be heard"?  How should the listener or the witness to the witness listen? Is this question too deep? Is it possible that there will be a visceral response much like that which Felman describes in her graduate students witnessing the stories of Holocaust survivors? Can teachers and students do what Spivak asks in The Post-Colonial Critic?

What we are asking for is that....the holders of hegemonic discourse would de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other rather than simply say, 'O.K., sorry we are just very good white people, therefore we do not speak for the blacks.' That's the kind of breast-beating that is left behind at the threshold and then business goes on as usual. ( 121 )

I think this where we, teachers and students, have to go if we are to engage in thick democratic practice. We do a lot of "this is so awful" and "this makes me want to cry" only to go home to our lives, which are not all without trauma, but we certainly move on to the usual.  Can trauma be a universal signifier? Are there democratic conditions we need to satisfy in the classroom to welcome testimony, or is the ability to beat witness inherent in humanity?

• Arendt, Hannah.  "Truth and Politics,” 227–264. In Between Past and Future. Enlarged edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Penguin, 1963.
• Birmingham, Peg. "Elated Citizenry: Deception And The Democratic Task Of Bearing Witness." Research In Phenomenology 38.2 (2008): 198-215. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 July 2012.
• Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and  History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.
• Jay, Martin. “Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments,” 97–107. In Probing the Limits of Representation.
• LaCapara,  Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 20.
• Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988. Print.
• Spivak,  Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 121.

Maya: Lords of the Jungle (1995) and The Blood of Kings (1995)

When teaching about genocide, where do we begin? How far back do we have to go to understand an atrocity? Is there such a thing as a modern atrocity, or it a 20th century genocide evidence of a never-ending history?

This documentary is one of several that I viewed to prepare for my trip to Guatemala with Tulane University's  Summer Institute on the Maya, Guatemala 20102. The theme of the institute is "Signs of Change: A Glimpse of Past and Present Cultural Landscapes of Guatemala," and because of my interest in the genocide of 1982 where approximately 200,000 Maya were massacred at the hands of the Guatemala military government, I thought this institute would support my efforts in understanding how best to teach about atrocities to children. My work is founded on the power of stories, but specifically what rendering a history in a novel can do, but in order to understand what a novel is doing, I need to see what the documentary is trying to do, what nonfiction texts are trying to do, what an institute can do, for that matter.   The institute is a guide through an exploration of Guatemala and its geography, people, and culture. I hope to engage in the complex issues of identity, globalization, language, and cultural inheritance while on this trip. As you will see in my work with Tree Girl, a novel by Ben Mikaelsen about the Guatemala genocide all the above issues are at work in the plot.

In this post, and possibly others, I will simply input notes from the documentaries I see thinking about what is "necessary" in creating a context for a story, for "literature of atrocities."

Maya: Lords of the Jungle (1995, PBS)

This documentary explores the ruins of the Maya empire looking for clues as to why the empire disappeared and the ruins were "swallowed by the jungle centuries ago." The Maya were successful  in creating an empire that spanned five countries, thriving for thousands of years, yet while the empire disappeared, the people did not.

• Tikal, Guatemala -- English archaeologist traveled from the ruins and used a camera to record the results of the excavations (across 5 countries, too)
• Palenque Palaces
• forgotten Maya rulers brought to life and secret rituals revealed
• Merida, capital of Yucatan in Mexico -- Spanish founded the cathedral 450 years ago, but the people who founded the pyramids are still here
• Maya village life continues much as it has for 3000 years; unlike Aztecs and Incas, Maya had not gold, so the Spanish lost interest in their Maya subjects, but one conquerer, Diego Delanda -- 3rd bishop of Merida studied the Maya and celebrated its design rather than lack of gold
• Maya glory spread in the 1840s because of John Lloyd Stevens, American explorer, published an account of their discovery of the ruined sites; an artist accompanied him and his work astonished readers in America and Europe (picture is a story)
• monuments discovered supported a theory that the Maya were interested in time and not worldly events of history; records 9 periods -- 4 dots and one bar of 400 years each; the monument recorded so much energy carving time on the sides of its monuments
• devoted priests worshipping time
• two social classes -- peasants living in the jungle supporting the priests living in the center; until the 1950s when a project at Tikal concentrated more on the support population rather than the elite and started mapping it (12 square kilometers), discovering the concept of the Maya city was wrong. It was about 100, 000 people at AD 800, twice the size of Rome at that time. They uncovered a busy and rich ancient city with a variety of house sizes suggesting a range of social classes -- not just peasant and elite. ;
• Maya tomb, 1962 discovered in Palenque after 4 years of excavating a stairwell, the burial of a ruler -- Pacal. Interpreting  "glifs,' they discovered less time worship and more emphasis on history in "the temple of inscriptions." Ten portraits of the rulers who preceded this ruler in office are carved on the side of the sarcophagus. 603 AD. Gifs also on the sarcophagus reveal that the Maya counted in groups of 20, so the glifs reveal it was 80 years between the birth and deal of this ruler or "lord." What is "incredible" is that  because of this find is not the beauty or labor of their monuments but that we are now talking about the Maya in terms of the personal history of  individuals who we can name: children, parents, ancestors.
• AD 900 most of the cities were abandoned. The people did not keep up the buildings (lacked maintenance). Tikal thrived for 600 years -- the classic period in Maya history. Theories about this might be 1) agriculture failed to keep up with the demands of the population. The Maya today are slash and burn farmers (see Living Maya, 1982), meaning the forest is cut down and the cuttings are burned. The ash fertilizes the soil in which corn had been planted, and the field provides 2-3 crops before the farmer has to move on to another field. The planted field will then need to rest for 8 years; thus, on family will need at least 20 acres to survive. Mayanists conclude this has been the method of ancient Maya, and so that is one theory for the abandonment of Tikal and other cities -- the land became exhausted.
•  A lake near Tikal: Today a research team is studying the effects of Maya agriculture.Survey parties clear the forest on a per-arranged grid pattern.  Biologists take sample to trace the history of the lake sediments for evidence. Maya house mounds are revealed and mapped to check population counts. They determined that the land was overused and that the population did fall dramatically, but it is impossible to make conclusions without knowing the trading relationships between people here and elsewhere considering how the Maya supplemented their food supply and other materials. Thus, this theory is too simple.
• Merida, 300 miles north of Tikal: Discoveries of trade patterns reveal some information to shed light on the issue of trade among the Maya. A map of ancient settlements show the Yucatan with low rain fall and poor soil, so there is no jungle obscuring the ruins. The number of sites is high (1 every 80 square miles), but how could the northern Maya survive with such poor soil?  Komchen, a site near Merida, reveals a settlement of 900 house mounds and excavated about 50 to see how the community had developed. Looking at a residential platform, base for perishable dwellings or houses made of wood and thatch; they show at least 5 periods of platform construction. A long period of continuous growth.  The ceramics tell us that all of the growth in the platforms took place 500 BC to 200 AD (pre-classic), so this northern site reached its growth before the classic period of Tikal and Palenque without agriculture. Trade goods were found -- knives, jade beads, glass; seashells suggested their livelihood was a coastal and inland trade taking advantage of a natural resource of the coast: salt. They believe that they were traders -- not dependent on slash and burn agriculture -- so it makes not sense to attribute the collapse at  the end of the classic period to the failure of agriculture. 
• Pulltrouser Swamp: The fertile land of the south show the Maya perfected a more sophisticated method of cultivation. 1974, regular patterns in the jungle vegetation were noticed (Belize). Bill Turner excavated on undulation seeing water, man made field raised from swampy ground. They looked for evidence of artificial fields -- limestone brought in and evidence of tools that were used in the construction of the field (bi-faced pick lost during the construction). One third of the area is swamp, so by raising the field, the Maya were able to use the rich soil for agriculture. The system is studied in a Mexican agricultural college now -- water plans periodically brought up from the canals and spread on the raised field. As they decompose, they created fertilizer for crops. This also shows that the fields produce much more crop (corn, yucca, chili peppers) than needed for the area, so a surplus was available for export. This new discovery of large-scale trade, we see Maya highly organized and complex at an early date (500 BC) -- so we see less speculation on the collapse of the empire.
• Cuello: Earliest Maya have just been discovered, perhaps the earliest building in the new world. How did they develop into traders, farmers and architects? 
• late pre-classice period: Cerros brings all the elements of Maya civilization together. It was a coastal settlement and provides evidence of fishing (net weights), but they were more than fisherman. There were raised fields with canals of artificial rock linings. This provides a point of comparison between these fields and those of Pulltrouser.  The Pulltrouser swamps system is not as intricately connected to the community the way Cerros is. The field system at Cerros is connected to the building of the pyramids; the authorities used their power to have such systems build meaning the politicians had ownership of land, water, and the surplus produce of the field system. We can view the Maya has having a political economy. What did they need civilization for if they were slash and burn agriculturalists? What do you need priest for -- not to tell you when to plant? What were the practical consequences of a social hierarchy of the Maya. This, intensive agriculture,  explains why the Maya were civilized in the first place. It was also need to operate a large scale trade system -- taking salt from Komchen to the city of Tikal.
• What was the value of Tikal? The economic purpose of a Maya city like Cerros was not likely to be a purpose in Tikal because of its location, but you can see Tikal is center between the rivers of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. They were not isolated priests but rich merchants. 
• The new river in Belize was an artery of the ancient Maya trading route -- salt for chili peppers. Lamanai reveals the canoe traders beginning their portage to Tikal. David Pendergast shows how the ancient Maya bring in supplies by boat up the New River. He runs a camp of 35 Maya workers. For 6 months, he lives at the site supervising work in about 6 areas -- uncovering offerings in front of a building such a pot, which is reassemble and dated at 100 BC.  He sees 5-6 phases of construction, so excavation is a process of removing the layers of Maya's constant rebuilding. In 1980, the discovery of masks, reached by tunneling through later buildings, reveals glifs. In the pre-classic, the masks on the pyramids represent the gods, but the masks at Lamanai are a face of a real human being who is becoming a divine king -- ruler of a world not just farmers and traders.
• Maya ritual painting in Guatemala is analyzed. They show that actual Maya engaged in a dance with human sacrifice -- death images and actors dressed in character (bat). Real people enactment in the plaza -- a death ritual for an unknown reason. These scenes re-occur in their paintings showing the real people -- farmers and traders -- and unreal with thinking and wondering about their position in life after death. It seems more time thinking about after life than the moment. We see hallucination -- smoking, drinking, injecting -- using their bodies to engage their minds in communication with their gods.
• Symbols in Palenque reveal, 792 AD, a scene of decapitation at the death of Pacal or the rituals conducted in his memory. The scene is on the surface of water. The water lily marks a transition of the underworld, below the water, and the world in which we live, above the water. We see a portrait of Pacal's son carved in the monument. We see a little fish nibbling water lily. The fish and water lily are part of the royal costume and the underworld. We also see a tablet and pictures of why Conchul had the right to the throne. There is also a Maya book. The glif shows a king ripping a water lily out of the water, but the word for water lily is the same as standing water (lake, canal).  The water plants are non-native and crucial to the way raised fields work. Many of the fish are herbivores, so they fertilize the soil and feed the fish and are thus a natural origin for the expression of power and authority by the rulers. The ecology of the raised fields and the symbolism explains why the Maya would configure their world through the manipulation of the water lily and the environmental things associated with it.
• Today, ancient Maya rituals still persist. The crosses are not Christian but symbolize the tree of life. On the alter, there are offerings of maize and cigars. There is much ceremonial drinking to bring you closer to the gods as did the ancestors. The rulers are gone, but the village culture remains. 

Maya: The Blood of Kings (1995, Time LIFE)

This documentary is set in AD 650 during the powerful and sophisticated Maya civilization and explores the the social hierarchy that made possible a culture that could fashion innovations such as a complex writing system, mathematics, astrological calculations and sites across Central America. Again, this documentary seeks an understanding of the demise of the empire while discovering the inner-workings of the complex civilization.

• 750 AD -- a ball court, a game they played for their lives in front of crowds; 
• Tikal -- reached its peak in 750 AD and covered the size of Manhattan. Less than a century later, it was empty. We feel the fragility of civilization when we see the Maya ruins. We see how high a civilization can achieve and then how quickly it can disintegrate. It did not fall to armies, disease, or famine. It was deserted rather than destroyed. The people walked away. Descendants of the Maya still live in the land of their ancestors but their empires are no more. Why did they leave the cities? Why did the desert all they created? 
• Clues hidden in pyramids of stone written in a hieroglyphic code found in ritual and sustained by sacrifice. 250-900 AD the classic Maya flourished. Hundreds of cities were built as the empire of the Maya. They thrived for six centuries before the Maya "walked away." For almost 1000 years, their ruins were lost and forgotten until the 19th century. In 1839, Catherwood (illustrator) and explorer, Stevens provided clues writing that the exotic civilization was not brought across the Atlantic but that it originated in Central America. This work began more exploration and  an adventure into the Maya past seeking answers. They found treasure but an understanding of the Maya was elusive. Hundreds of pyramids without a clear understanding of the purpose until 1957. Palenque discovered by Alberto Rus and the Temple of Inscriptions.  In the center of the burial chamber was a stone tomb that revealed the "person" for whom the pyramid had been built -- there is film evidence of the skeleton and jade mask. What is the value of a human being, this human being, to warrant the design and structure of this monument? What is the relationship between the architects, laborers and the being inside the pyramid? 
• Code breaking of the glifs to reveal the secrets. They left an abundant written record, so it should not be secretive. An independent writing record -- one of 5 produced in the world. The texts were descriptions of their cosmos and chronicles of their dreams.  The importance of the text, 1562 Diego Delanda, convinced the translation of Spanish to Maya wanting to learn the language of the people he yearned to convert. Landa discovered that the people he thought were converted to Christianity still practiced rituals, and he burned hundreds of books containing records of their (Maya) lives -- literature, science, etc. The Spanish conquest burned thousands of texts -- only 4 books survived to present day. This evidence provided remarkable insights -- their mathematical system tied to astronomy with detailed observations of the night sky. In the 1950s, Eric Thompson concluded the Maya were dedicated to celestial events; he found evidence of complex calculations and concluded the Maya as tranquil and devoted to tracking the stars -- sacred beliefs and higher learning evidenced by the pyramids and the sundials, precise alignment and design; however, the Maya priests used the calendars to predict the cycles of the moon and stars (still accurate calculations off only by 33 seconds today), which portrayed calendar priests as having  a celestial power. 
• Maya text reveal their hidden mathematics and astronomy, but there are also other revelations. Justin Kerr, a photographer, captured an image of a vase unrolled creating a new understanding of the ancient Maya - a people obsessed with the gods of the underworld (e.g, the god of decapitation). Many customs and rituals of their daily lives were also revelatory -- skulls of children reveal a flattened brown line; Maya women had teeth drilled and then set with precious stones; the use of mind altering drugs was encouraged; taking an alcoholic drink as an enema. 
• Giles Healey, a American filmmaker, in 1946 discovered a savage truth altering a utopian image of the Maya. He found a detailed depiction of the Maya as fierce warriors, believers of deities and sacrifice. It was a powerful painting of warfare and bloodletting. He finished the film focusing on the Lacondon Indians who had been his guides and who were peaceful decedents of the Maya and did not expose the images of the murals.
• 1945, Berlin invaded by the Russians and the National Library was on fire. From the thousands of books burning in the ruins, a Soviet officer took a book from the flames (Yuri...) Reproductions of the Maya Codices. He learned that the glifs were much more than a system of numerical signs (Tatiana...) and saw patterns in the signs. The images contained the lives of the kings and queens revealing names and lives of the rulers, ancestors and conquests; the images were stories. 15 years after discovering the jade mask in Palenque (Alberto Rus) we could now know who he was -- Lord Pacal, king of the city state Palenque, the 10th in a line of rulers, ruling for 70 years.  These were monarchs who commanded cities, land, and people -- ruling with arrogance and disdain. But why did the subjects submit to such tyrannical rule? 
• What was the underlying source of the king's power? Belief. The power of belief achieved great things.Every portal of every Maya temple is a doorway to the underworld. Inside the temple it is the duty of the king and queen to re-enact the mythical moment of Maya creation. The blood of gods gave life to man; the king is as a god and blood is the price of power, the debt to the god that must be paid; blood must be paid, and royal blood drawn from the tongue and genitals forever bound the life of gods to the life of man. As his subjects watch, the bloody sacrament of the king spirals to the gods and in return, the gods will cause the sun to rise, the rains to fall, and the corn to grow. 
• Linda Shealy says that the bloodletting rituals provide the key to understanding the Maya. In the new world, the people believed the soul, the part that is indestructable resides in your blood. If you wish to give an offering, you give your blood. When the king gives his blood, he is giving a powerful substance -- one that because of his ancestors is most potent. The kings had to do rituals of genital bloodletting and self lacerations on a regular basis, but all Maya gave offerings of their blood, too. There is no surrogate sacrifice. Ball games also provided a deadly purpose -- not a game at all; its losers were sacrificed to the gods. This was recorded for posterity. The king was the foundation of life -- for the Maya. So when a military defeat occurs or if there is a drought, the authority of belief in the king is undermined with any failure. Failure cannot be adjusted for; it just undermines the belief. As the authority eroded, the increase in sacrifice and bloodletting was no solution. It could not prevent war, overpopulation of cities, failure of crops, and so the king was held responsibility; the kings blood had failed them. Therefore, when you begin to understand the way their civilization was constructed, the mystery really seems to be how the Maya maintained this impressive civilization on belief in their kings. All their powers were built upon the faith of the people, so when crops failed or enemies prevailed, the beliefs wavered, and the kings lost power.  When the power vanished, the Maya abandoned their great cities. The jungle reclaimed the stone that was removed to build the cities.
• Today, Maya shamans still practice blood sacrifice, but now it is the blood of chickens. The ancient faith is in tact as a pale reflection of the classic Maya. The context of belief has changed. Christianity may have been forced upon the Maya,but it has lasted (Jesus, the king who shed is blood for mankind).

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.