Arguing while American -- E.L. Doctorow, my mother, and arrogance

Last year, as the genocide trial of former General Efraín Rios Montt unfolded in Guatemala, I was glued to the proceedings. I live streamed enough hours of the trial that the witness of the indigenous Ixil and K’iche’ people who testified will be seared in my consciousness probably for the rest of my life. When I wasn’t watching live stream, I was reading analysis of the trial written by observers from across the world; following the tweets about it from the dozens of Guatemalans I followed even before the trial started, and adding another dozen or so Guatemalan tweeple after #sihubogenocidio became my default hashtag search. I reached out to have a Guatemalan journalist write an opinion piece in AL DÍA, and gave one of our staff reporters some contacts of Guatemalans in diaspora, in Philadelphia and nationally, for her to interview for the cover story we ran.

When Rios Montt was found guilty and sentenced to 80 years, I cried. When the trial was retroactively deemed unconstitutional and annulled, I cried again. Different tears, same heart filled with the country I’ve always loved, that I’ve lost and will never be able to fully reclaim again.

I shared much of this with my friends and family on Facebook, as is my wont. One of my cousins, who lives in Guatemala, commented — in a caring way — that I was completely and utterly wrong. About the trial, the witnesses, the meaning I was attributing to actions and counteractions. I argued. She argued. We went back and forth for bit, and then eventually dropped it and went back to sharing photos of our loved ones and updates about the work that we each feel passionately about.

But before I post anything about Guatemala these days, I think about her.

The thing is, I haven’t changed my mind, nor my politics, nor one sentiment or belief about the fundamental injustice, ruthless repression and endemic racism that drove 30+ years of horrific undeclared civil war into an even more unbearable and horrific genocide. But the country that haunts my memories and my dreams and my stories, doesn’t haunt my days — and it hasn’t for almost 40 years now.

My cousin, on the other hand, lives there. Always has. That’s where her children were born, and recently, a grandchild. It’s where her mother and grandmother are buried. Her life is there — during the worst days and the best — in what is still one of the most violent countries of the western hemisphere.

And I live in the country whose policy toward Guatemala historically included deposing a popularly-elected president, shoring up a series of dictators and repressive military governments with arms and counterinsurgency experts that, as documents released through the freedom of information act show, came this close to participation in the genocide. Guatemala’s current violence is in large part the result of narcotraffic and organized crime but grew directly from the history of impunity for crimes our American government facilitated from the mid 1950s through the early 1990s.

No matter how just the cause we Americans espouse when raising our individual voices about international issues these days, we need to keep our arrogance in check. Too often when we have these conversations (informally or formally) we accord ultimate authority to organizations and voices from outside the country in question, instead of those working to draw attention to the matter from within. We too often adopt strategies for activism that seem brave and audacious in our own cultural context but that bulldoze the far more complicated activism of those in whose name we’re presumably advocating. Femen is a good example of this, with their topless marches that insult and trivialize homegrown women’s rights activism in Muslim countries.

It’s not that we don’t do it with the best of intentions, but it is also an aspect of our American exceptionalism (and the European Union equivalent) that we believe we are “ripping the blinders off” those who are actually living through whatever we’re protesting. We need — really need — to understand how arrogant this seems to those who have more than just metaphoric skin in the game.

Years and years ago, at my college graduation, E. L. Doctorow spoke to the commencement crowd about the undeclared civil wars raging at that very moment in El Salvador and Guatemala. I remember being glad he was doing so, because I hated Ronald Reagan and hoped enough people would get riled and vote him out of office before a second term. But as Doctorow’s speech wore on my mother became more and more agitated.

My mother was Guatemalan. She had lost some  friends to the violent armed internal conflict, and seen others turned paraplegic or chased into exile because of it. In truth, she had lost her country to it as well, because it was the rampant, uncontrollable violence of that era that prompted us to leave. She spent much of her time in the United States discussing with other Guatemalans in diaspora what needed to happen for real change to take place in their country. She would, several years after Doctorow’s commencement speech, host a then-candidate for the presidency (the first civilian in 30 years to try to wrest the post away from military strongmen) in our home, and contribute to his campaign, in an effort to do something concrete from here. (That candidate was popularly elected and despite initial efforts to end human rights abuses, ended up in a test of wills against the military that culminated in his becoming a strawman — but that’s the topic for another blog post).

Anyway, back to Doctorow and my mom ... after commencement was over, I remember asking her why she was upset — after all I had heard her go on and on about the brutality of what was happening in Guatemala in much more specific and heartfelt ways than Doctorow had.

“What time would you guess he’s actually spent in Central America?” she asked me, each word hard and clipped even as her eyes glittered with tears. “A week? Two? His speech was pure arrogance.”

And she was right. It was a white savior speech: easier to swallow, certainly, than the white savior propaganda that had “justified” the U.S meddling in Guatemala in the first place, but at heart it was the very same narrative. We — Americans — would fix it. We’d decry and hector and lecture and politic, and because of our focus on it the dysfunction would disappear ... because now we saw it.

Honestly, I don’t intend to stop advocating for human and civil rights anytime soon, but thinking about this has made me realize how readily I — not even really “white” nor wholly American culturally — put on the cape of savior when I write about the world's injustices in tweet, comment section, blog, column, editorial. I realize how often I choose to speak instead of listening to the homegrown voices that are already raised in discussion about it.

Some of those are voices I like hearing, others not. But all of them have earned their opinions by living in their own country, and nothing I say from the outside — no matter how righteous I think it — should carry the same weight.

Time for a little humility.

Wordless Wednesday, Miercoles Mudo: The art of belief

18th century, Central American school, oil on linen.

What’s in a name?

The letter comes like most of our letters to the editor still do, via snail mail. It’s signed, has a local return address. Good. We don’t publish unsigned letters, and rarely publish those sent from outside our readership area.

Angela opens it, but I take it out of her hands before she gets to read it – I have a small space to fill on the editorial page and if the letter is short enough, or readily edited without sacrificing its essence, I can lay it out and call the page done.

As I scan the first couple of sentences I’m hopeful.

Its impetus, the writer says upfront, is a column that appeared several weeks ago on the bilingual page of the paper, written by Moises Sandoval, a veteran editor, writer and Catholic News Service columnist.

If it’s criticism, I think to myself before continuing to read it, at least I won’t have to console any of the local columnists I’ve encouraged-cajoled-bullied into writing for us. Sandoval’s probably a lot tougher than my guys, I think. He can take it.

Turns out, I’m the one who can’t take it.

The writer is disturbed about the Church’s insistence on humane treatment for “illegals” and tired of the U.S. Bishops’ calls for comprehensive reform of existing immigration laws. That’s disheartening, but not completely unexpected. The results of the poll currently up at the Catholic Standard & Times web site’s homepage (www.cst-phl.com) indicates that a large number of our readers feel similarly, if perhaps not quite so strongly.

But the letter goes downhill from there. It is evident from the statistics quoted in it that the writer uses illegal as a synonym for Latino. And later in the letter, the people crossing into the nation from the southern border are assigned other epithets: Criminals. Leeches. Parasites.

When I hand the letter back to Angela, I am uncharacteristically subdued.

“Don’t people get that we all bleed the same color?” she says after she reads it.

Angela is African American and Native American and I know she doesn’t expect an answer to her question.

“Have you ever seen ‘Stardust?’” I ask after a moment, seeking refuge in non sequitur. “You know, the movie based on the novel by Neil Gaiman?”

She nods.

“Remember how when the prince’s throat is cut, he bleeds blue instead of red?”

We laugh together at the visual pun, then go back to the unending stream of tasks necessary to ensure that a newspaper goes to press on time.

I should probably confess at this point that I have an abiding love of fairy-tales and folktales. I admire the way these stories work – flights of fancy that nevertheless hold real insights. So it’s no surprise that my mind has flown straight from that letter to the editor to a filmed fairy-tale like “Stardust.” Many fantastical stories have as a central conceit the theft, discovery or bestowal of a name. Remember Rumpelstiltskin?

But it’s not only in fairy-tales where names mean something.

When we strip people of their human dignity, we take their names along with it. It allows us to think of people as some collective other. They become “illegals and criminals.” Or “leeches and parasites.” Not made of the same flesh, bone and blood as we are. Not prey to the same worries and needs; not filled by the same joys.

This week the 18-year-old who put a noose around Robert Cantu’s neck, dragged him behind a pick-up truck and threatened to hang him in the town square while yelling “spic” and “border jumper” at the teen, pled no contest to charges of ethnic intimidation (he was sentenced to 10 days in an Ohio jail). The killers of Marcelo Lucero, José Sucuzhañay and Luis Ramirez all attacked their victims as representatives of some fearsome, collective “other” – Hispanic, undocumented, gay.

We’re seeing this unnaming play out in Iran as well.

Governments can be good at turning human beings into a collective “other” to be subdued or jailed or exiled or eliminated. I am reminded of Central America during the bloody, undeclared civil wars of the 1980s – and of how, even beyond those who lost their lives, hundreds of thousands lost their names.

Ah, but then, as in my beloved fairy-tales, something quite unexpected happens.

El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero reads the names of the dead during broadcasts on the Catholic radio station. The day the first civilian president of Guatemala is elected after 30 years of military rule, thousands gather at a silent protest holding up placards with the names of the disappeared. At prayer vigils, neighbors and family read out the names of the 137 victims of homicide in Philadelphia this year. And perhaps most spectacularly – despite the jailing of Iranian journalists (33 to date according to Reporters without Borders) and despite controls on every major form of information dissemination – we all learn Neda Soltan’s name.

At the end of the workday in which I read the letter to the editor, I’m still thinking about names, the words that are substituted for names, and the way a name – given even one person to hold it higher than fear, higher than circumstance – can help us remember our shared humanity.

We all bleed, Angela says. We all hope, I say.

On the way in to the train station I see three homeless people who regularly sit at the entrance I favor. They ask, unobtrusively, for money. Unbidden, a line from Isaiah 49 pushes its way into my thoughts: “The Lord called me from birth, from my mother’s womb He gave me my name.”

I’ve never asked their names.

I’m not so different from the letter writer who precipitated this blog post.

I rummage around for change, then drop the coins into their separate cups as I ask.

Cathy smiles when she tells me.

Earl stammers through his beard.

Poor Boy explains that his is a nickname his mother gave him as a boy, but that it doesn’t mean they were poor.

Next time, I’ll remember.


Photo of immigration rally CS&T file photo. Rumpelstiltskin engraving by Anne Anderson from Wikimedia Commons. Photo of homeless person by Sarah Webb for the CS&T.