The ICC: The Reckoning (2009)

The Reckoning

Release date: January 19th, 2009
Running Time: 95 min

Credits

Pamela Yates, Director
Peter Kinoy, Editor
Paco de Onís, Producer

Outreach Partners

International Center for Transitional Justice

International Criminal Court -- Out of concern that the most serious crimes do not go unpunished, a permanent, independent international criminal court was established in 1998. Does humanity have the possibility of preventing atrocities? Can we do something to prevent the indispensability of human life? 

At the end of WWII, 1945, confronted by the systemic killing of civilians by the Nazi regime, the Allied forces chose not to execute those responsible but to use the rule of law - international penal action to affirm man's right to live in peace and dignity regardless of race or creed. It was a plea of humanity to law in the Nuremburg Trials hoping to lay a foundation stone saying nobody is immune to such injustice. But the 20th century evidenced a century of atrocities, which accelerated the demand for a global system of justice.  Fifty years of effort led to the 1998 Rome Conference, brought the effort to establish a framework for an international criminal court. A constitution was drafted and accepted by the nations who gathered. In 2002, the ICC came into existence.  66 countries ratified the court, which took on massive crimes. 

Luis Moreno Ocampo, an ICC prosecutor; Christine Chung, trial attorny for ICC. They saw this as participating in a start-up. Would Mignolo say that this was the act of delinking -- investigating the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality? Does this court formalize an effort to expose the matrix of colonial power or is it just a matter of power? Does the ICC embody colonialism or is it an tool for delinking for deconstructing the framework and then creating a new framework for justice? 

The court was shaped by the office of the prosecutor who had to investigate the crime, gather evidence, and bring the perpetrators to trial, but faced with conflict situations around the world, the problem was where to start. The court only has the power to investigate crimes that happened after it started, after July 2002. This is a court of last resort, so they are only able to take a case if the state is unable or unwilling to prosectute the criminals themselves.  they accepted referrals from the territorial states.

Uganda: Lord's Resistance Army. President Musevani sent Dr. Rugunda, minister of internal affairs, to try to talk peace, but he was unable to establish peace, so he referred the case to ICC.  They could not get Kony to prosecute him. The way the ICC began was crucial because they had to establish their reputation while doing the work with which they were charged. In 2004, the investigators arrived in Northern Uganda to investigate the 20 year war between the LRA and the government of Uganda, investigating the victims  of this conflict. They went to a camp witnessing over a milion IDPs, internally displaced persons,  camps. the LRA attacked a camp the ICC visted, Pagak? it was clearly an attack on civilians -- women and babies. The court did not prosecute foot soldiers but rather focused on the leadership for those crimes -- Joseph Kony and Vincent Otti. The first arrest warrants were issued three years after beginning the ICC.  However, did the ICC have the capacity to make the arrests?  The power and authority of the ICC is derived from the consensus of its member states. Is this part of the rhetoric of modernity? It has no police force to make arrests. The idea to have international criminal law is so new that the case has to be used to build consensus. Lack of international support was a growing problem for the court -- China, Russia, and the US had not joined, and the US was actively opposed because of its concerns with sovereign power. The US said, "No financial support, no collaboration, and no further negotition with other governments" thus  wanting the ICC to wither and collapse. The US told governments that they would lose all economic and military assistance (Bush administration). However, because the ICC represented interests much broader than the United States, by 2004 92 countires had joined the Court.

The arrest warrants had not been executed. Kony and other LRA leaders were still at large, but the LRA expressed interest in peace talks. However, Kony would only talk if the ICC arrest warrant was dropped, so the ICC was affecting the peace process; the court, however, said that amnesty in exchange for peace was not an option. LRA came to Uganda for a public discussion about wanting the ICC to stop the arrest warrants -- taking a public vote. Talks of how to proscute developed within Uganda, within Africa. There was a discussion about what a court system would look like within so that the ICC was not needed to do work that Africans could do -- it seems like this discussion is an attempt to delink from the colonial matrix of power that Mignolo talks about.  So even if there is no case in the Hague, the idea of a rule of law has been brought into communities. 

Eastern Congo: Over 4 million people had died as a result of the war in Congo. The conflict was not binary like the LRA vs. government. In the Congo, there were many more participants. They found evidence of mass atrocities carried out by different warring factions; the ICC did an analysis of which groups were responsible for the most crimes -- the UPC Militia. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is the leader of the militia who conducted killings and abductions of kids to transform them into killers or sex slaves. He was detained, so an arrest warrant ws issued on Mary 17, 2006 for charges of child soldiers. The government of Congo cooperated and handed over Lubanga to the ICC and flown to the Hague.  This was a historic moment -- prosecuting the case of Lubanga would be a step toward fulfililng the ICC's goal to symolize the hope of ending empunity and thus prevent the occurence while contributing to the peace and well being of the world. 

Prosecutors gave them the voice by listening to their story and translating their story in the court proceedings. Sexual violence is silenced. Children's voices are silenced. They were exploited -- trained to kill, to serve Lubanga and his militia.  The measurement of the court is how the court impacts the world. The successful start of Lubanga's procescution raised expectations of what the court could do. 

After 6 months, the trial of Lubanga began. The procedure of the court had not been tested. The prosecution was accused of witholding evidence vital to the defense. The judge considered ending the case, Judge Adrian Fulford. The dilemma is real -- the due process needs to be resolved.The court is about the rule of law. 

Columbia:  Claiming rampant impunity at the highest levels of power, Columbia was reported to the ICC. 6 decades of war -a humanitarian crisis. The ICC announced that they are collecting information, which may lead to an investigation, but they want to encourage the country to use its own system to prosecute. The ICC is a last resort. The ICC found that the FARC guerrillas were responsible for massacres and kidnappings; thousands of civilians had been killed by paramilitary militias working with the Colombian army. The paramilitaries can disguise themselves as peasants; they can go into villages where the FARC are or others and do the work of the government. 

Big crimes happen because there is political or economic support. 30 members of Congress in Colombia are connected to the paramilitaires -- possibly the president, too. The ICC representative went to Colombia-- 287 assassinations by the paras or police with impunity, the complicty of the government. The ICC wants to move Columbia to prosecture and not intervene. Can the court exert enough pressure to produce an outcome better than what would have occurred without the court's pressure. Their job is to look at the cases Columbia is working on and encourage avenues of investigation -- about the political and economic support of the crimes. The ICC laws are not just for criminals but for presidents and armys that also have to stop others from committing crimes. 

Darfur: The idea that perpetrators of crimes against humanity must face justice is the foundation of the ICC -- shaped in Rome, tested in the ICC's first years, but Darfur was the "reckoning." The court had been unable to take on the case because Sudan was not a member of the court. The only way the ICC could open a case was with a referral from the United Nation's security council --March 2005. The prosecutor opens the case and begins investigating outside of Darfur. Every government has a right to use force to quell a rebellion, but it cannot be used as an excuse to attack the civilian population. The ICC determined that Ahmad Harun and Ali-Kushayb are the most responsible and issued an arrest on February 27, 2007. Sudanese government, a UN member state,  said they would not comply. It was up to the UN Security Council to enforce the warrant. Mass atrocities need to be planned; it takes commanders, money, and many people to execute the plan. Mostly, it requires that the rest of the world look away and do nothing. They cannot invoke a national sovereignty to attack their own civilians. Omar al Bashir, the president of Sudan, is the person bearing the greatest responsiblity for the atrocities - a genocide. The ICC issued an arrest warrant but al Bashir rallied allies to get the ICC to defer the case -- his allies were the African Council. This diplomatic work is part of the cover-up; it is the rhetorical of modernity and follows the logic of coloniality (does this argument work here?). 

Arrest warrants cannot be executed. The permanent international court makes it possible that a warrant can eventually be executed; however, is this system part of the logic of coloniality where the matrix of power is so tightly linked that the dispensibility of human beings can go on?  The "natural resources" or commodities that are at the heart of genocide seem so much more valuable than human life, and so while the ICC is a permanent structure for justice, it is not temporally sound; instead, it seems the international community that supports the ICC is satisfied with "temporary" impunity, which takes us back to the rhetoric of modernity, only now the rhetoric is saying "yes, we are pursuing justice...look at how we have come together."

Documentary: Living Maya (1982)

Living Maya (1982)
Hubert Smith
University of California

The filmmaker explored the Yucatan looking for a village where they could film and observe the "living Maya". They interviewed several villages in search of both a village of about 200-350 people and a family who would allow them to be a part of their community for roughly seven months. They decided on Chican. It had a town hall, a jail, a school, a basketball court. It was about six hours or twenty miles to the doctor by foot and 90 minutes by car. There were twelve deaf people in this village. What the filmmaker agreed  in exchange for access to the daily life of the village and a family is  $3000 in cash (?). Don Reymundo, a 48 year old corn farmer who also wove hammocks, and his wife Agrafina agreed to allow his family (Ronaldo, Almacrando, Jose, Santos, Margarita - deaf and in Merida) to be filmed. Don Reymundo had to sell pavo, cochino and maize to send money to Merida for the care of his daughter.

1: The first episode focused on the system of agriculture - slash and burn.  They slash their milpa or field; it dries for 6 months; they clear it by burning it after calculating the wind. The nutrients from the ash fortify the soil with the spring rains. In May they plant corn, beans, and squash seeks all in the same hole. The different seeds provide amino acids that the other needs -- all working together.  In November, the harvest the crop, and they can use this milpa for 2 years, but then they have to let the soil rest for 10 years.  There is no space for experimentation. Each village has land, and families return to the mountain's milpas after going to the city for work in between plantings. To raise corn is to live as a Maya.To understand the Maya is to understand their life in the mountains, their agriculture, the corn fields.  It is their source of life -- sacred places, fruits, spice, lumber, thatch, but corn is their food, their work, their religion in many ways.

2: The second episode begins in mid-July in Chican, 3 months into the filmmaker's  work filming the corn crop, and ends in early September at the time of harvest.  Smith talks about how he was initially interested in the archaelogical sites but then became interested in the living Maya. He noticed that while they are quite aware of the modern changes, they are ultimately a traditional people. They had a sense of mastery of living content with life and one another. The films are a quest to unravel the paradox of their happiness without the comforts of life that we tend to value. Here, Margarita's illness is putting the family into debt as she lives in Merida for her treatment. Margarita and two other sons are deaf. So it is interesting to note that the family is using traditional methods to pay for modern medicine. We see Reymundo working on the hammocks -- colorful woven pieces --that he will sell and give the money to the doctors. Margarita has to take a lot of pills and needs injections; however, Reymundo also uses a local healer for some of the ailments. We meet Margarita when Reymundo travels to a suburb of Merida, where Margarita is living with his sister. We see Reymundo looking for herbs outside of town to bring to the healer, who they will see in the morning. In the morning, Smith explains how the Yucatan plant and a European prayer from the healer are, what Reymundo perceives, as Margarita's last hope.

Collective labor, faina, begins his episode as members of the village come together to build a dance pavilion (from the money the village received for the film). The mayor, storekeepers, and village representatives, among others, are all swinging mallots to break up the rock.  The institution of faina is sustained and reinforced through conversation among the community tracking who is present working and who is absent -- 60 out of 66 attend for this project, but another project ,  a citrus orchard, suffers. The government engineer is helping the villagers develop this and already helped dig a well and and an irrigation pipe, (the engineer only speaks Spanish). The Maya work the land only in family groups, but this engineer is trying to organize a non-family centric collective.The people want to put a corn crop on the orchard land. The film shows the men negotiating: a collective of individuals will work the land that the entire village will benefit from, but how can they be sure all individuals will help? What if people don't come regularly? Will they benefit equally?  There is a suggestion to divide the plots so everyone will do equal work, but then reunite the land afterwards; however, the question remains how it will be ever be fair. The only solution seems to work for your family and to expect help from others only creates bad feelings. Later we see how the orchard was divided -- tradition used in novel instances.  The land divided into family parcels for the corn crop, but work with the engineers for survey is done collectively represented by four separate families -- surveying the land for 6000 tangerine and lime trees. Families become divided yet again because some family members have to work their milpa and cannot be doing both projects.  The irrigated fruit orchard might help the village, but it was organized without social regulations by the specific ecology of the village. The family agricultural group is the key to everyone's survival; the land is harsh and irregular; only within the family can they resolve the inequities. They will try new options but resist them if it threatens that which has sustained the Maya for centuries.


Rain ceremony in early September for the corn harvest-- 7 adult men attend and arrange the ceremony to Maya and Catholic gods to nudge the cyclical nature. The prayer is from the Catholic church, but the setting in nature and each member's harvest is represented in the offering; then, they extend communion drinking the corn water of sorts.  For the Maya, magic and religion are integrated and the people  -- fresh porridge and prayers 13 times saying 13 is customary, but there were 13 gods in ancient Maya tradition. In the morning, the chickens must drink a tree bark saying it's customary, but the ancient Maya used it as a purifying solution. Then the chickens are boiled (cooking done by men), and the women bring in corn dough to make tortillas. A paste of toasted squash seed goes between the layers of tortillas -- numbered to correspond to Christian apostles or members of the ceremony, but also the number of worlds worshipped by the ancient Maya. The tortillas are wrapped in banana leaves and then baked in the ground as bread. Then, the men distribute the bread. Each family gives an equal share of spices and candles to publicly reassure that all is being done fairly -- porridge, breads, chickens for the spirits to taste goes on the offering table. Members of the ceremony share the meal with other villagers as soon as the spirits have been fed to extend and emphasize its communion. Precise sharing -- nine buckets for nine families -- did not bring rain in the upcoming weeks, but regardless of the outcome, they had followed the ceremony precisely and their obligation to the tradition and the future had been fulfilled and reaffirmed their relationship with the spirit and village relationships.

3. In this third episode, it is early September. The specific ecology of the Yucatan asks for a strong tradition with little room for experimentation and dependent on truly significant relationships.. This episode explores two issues. Because the corn crop went in the ground a month late,  the crop could be stranded if the rainy season ends on time and is not thusly extended. This will impact the region. The other issue is particular to Don Reymundo's family because his daughter is living with family in Merida fighting a rather unfamiliar illness, causing his family deeper debt as time goes on.

The episode begins as one villager must go into last year's corn reserves for food because this year's harvest is 8 weeks away or more.  Santos 15, Bernadino 21, and Jose 26  prepare the corn. They talk about who they own and are marking out how much they must pay and to whom; are paying off their debt in corn.  ($5.50). Sometimes the corn from the milpa is used to buy seed for the next milpa planting, but here we see Reymundo taking a risk. He is using the money from the sale of corn to hire workers so that he can cut a double size milpa for next year to recoup this year's losses with a single harvest.

Audomaro, 13, and Romaldo, 10, do not help in the field  (they study and weave hammocks). Audomaro wants to go to Merida for school. Before Reymundo and his older sons (Jose, Bernadino, and Santos), begin to clear next year's milpa, he says a prayer on the land. The younger boys are not part of this tradition. We see this family begin the clearing. The new field is laid out in a grid of units, about 22 acres, before hiring workers who are paid by units they clear. The units are square, the milpa is square, and the earth and sky have four corners -- the four corners are part of the Maya's deliberate and orderly life. It seems to be less of religion and more about the spiritual life here. The communion, a corn milk, passes from man to spirit and back to man after they do the land survey.

They bring the hammocks to town to have the thread lady weigh the hammocks; she is making sure they used all the thread she gave them. We see her give Reymundo $17.50, but there is talk of her not having the full amount. It took the family about 450 hours to earn $26.00, which can be done at home and brings in cash without having to sell corn. When they go to Merida to see Margarita, Reymundo introduces hammock weaving to his family so that they have a new means of earning money. There is discussion about Audomaro and Romaldo going to school near Merida the following year, but they decide Audo will go in 8 days. A trip to Merida is about 80 hours of weaving or half a week's corn supply for the family.

For the fruit orchard, workers are being paid about fifty cents for each hole they dig (and don't have to leave home to make cash) -- sometimes they need dynamite to get through the rock.  It could take a day to dig one hole but about seven.Corn agriculture works around natural obstacles, but good orchard management requires regular distance between trees. Bernadino, Reymundo's son, is the only one from their family still in the orchard project. The paymasters came, about 3 weeks late, and we see how the workers had to speak up to get their proper pay and joke about interest on the payroll.

We hear that they owe 1500 to Merida and 1500 to Tex* and so they are using their own corn to fatten the pigs to then sell, hoping to settle the debt. The rain does come, but the corn is far from mature, and Reymundo is also committed to sending Audomaro and Romaldo to school. 

There is a sewing machine. We see Bernadino sewing his pants as they talk about Dino having to go to town for army drills.

4: In episode four, we hear about daily decisions that can radically alter the future generations. During the year they spent in the Yucatan, Smith was interested in tradition and change, specifically the father-son relationship.  While we think about development of individual potential, in Chican, the generations live by time-tested rules and tradition. That sameness is not stifling but enriching in their lives, so when Reymundo wanted to put his two youngest sons in school, it was an invitation to interrupt a way of life.

The episode begins when the two youngest boys leave Chican to go to Merida for school.Reymundo makes sure that the boys have the tools to continue their hammock weaving, and he brings a sack of corn to feed the kids while they live with their extended family. It does not take long, just a day or two, for Audo to change his mind about school. The realization that he "could not read" properly because of his Chican education and that the school supplies are costly certainly puts doubt in young Audo's mind about his future, but really seems that Audo's primary reason for wanting to return to Chican is because he is homesick. At one point, Smith offers to pay for the supplies to make things "easy," but is is clear from Audo's aunt that the decision about Audo's school (and money) must be a father-son decision. Instead, however, Reymundo sends his oldest son, Bernadino to speak for the family by going to Merida. Dino presents the social circumstances to Audo citing the "appearance" of Audo returning to Chican -- it will appear that Reymundo cannot pay for the supplies or it may appear that Audo can't learn. There is potential to disgrace the family, and the teachers and aunt in Merida also think it shows that the parent is giving into the child.

The documentary shows that Audo returns to Chican to "fell trees" with his father, but Romaldo also had to leave school in Merida, where he was quite content.  Audo;s father says that Audo has to experience the hard work on the milpa and consider the different paths. So Reymundo was willing to allow his two youngest sons a life quite different from his, from his tradition, but his sons were not ready for the change. However, because of the increasing debt, Bernadino and eventually the other boys had to go to Merida for work. In the end, the family continues their life as corn farmers, just as Reymundo took his son to the milpa to work, Bernadino is taking his son to clear the forest; however,  he is also connecting electricity to his home, and Agrifina bought a TV.

In the US, we often believe that change is better. However, much of the change in our lives is about moving away from our home and establishing new paths, which often leads to isolation. What the Maya have is a social system of interdependence that sustains their existence because there is a belonging.

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).