Saturday, November 30, 2013

No Ordinary Joe

Salman Rushdie and Scheherazade: two storytellers of destiny, two conjurors of enchantment.  Or, as he discovers with The Satanic Verses, offense.  Little does he expect the extent of displeasure to take the form of explicit, religiously sanctioned assassination.  Yet, given the rise of Islamic extremism across the world in the late eighties, is Rushdie’s claim of ingenuous, irreverent critique really defensible?  And what exactly is being defended here: a man, a way of thinking, a foundational tenet of artistic freedom?  The right to be a serious shit disturber?
In early 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini becomes the poster boy for Islamic fundamentalism by proclaiming a fatwa (religious edict) calling for the death of the author of The Satanic Verses. For nearly a decade until its lifting in 1998, Rushdie becomes a virtual prisoner, existing in a half-light of constantly enforced vigilance and relentless oversight.   Initial effects include a numbing sense of helplessness coupled with a heightened sense of vulnerability.  Not just Rushdie personally, but those around him—immediate family, his publishers, literary networks, friends and sympathizers—are viable targets.  Randomness and chance, previously benign features of everyday life, are recast in sinister shades.  Case in point: having established a regular call-in time with his son, Rushdie is driven wild with anguish after repeated failure to reach him at the appointed hour.  His paranoia triggered, Rushdie’s distress and anxiety grow to the point where police are dispatched to his ex-wife’s house.  Initial reports of an open door and house lights on goad Rushdie’s worst fears.  The result is an unfortunate series of coincidences— school play runs overtime, explanatory phone call gets missed, cops mistake one house for another—that cohere into anguish.   No one of these events in themselves is particularly remarkable or even especially sinister; but in the overheated atmosphere of murderous intent, nothing can be left to chance. 
And so it goes for Rushdie for many more years.  Nearly ten years, far longer than officialdom ever expects, never mind the unwitting fugitive at its centre.
How does Rushdie survive his prison without walls?  Does he find a way through everyday wretchedness and inevitable betrayals?  Enduring—eventually outliving the fatwa’s dead hand—becomes its own act of heroic defiance, even as Rushdie experiences shame at having to duck and hide, of conspiring in his own erasure. 
The practical necessity of an alias comes as a lifeline. He needs an alter ego to be able to conduct ordinary transactions, as much as his protectors need a safe handle for their shape shifter.   Trying on different combinations of favorite authors, Rushdie settles on Joseph Anton, pairing the chronicler of outsider shame with the observer of hapless despair. 
The “end” of the fatwa may have come in 1998, but its effects—the righteous rage and hatred it focused and sanctioned—do not magically evaporate.  By this time Rushdie is used to warily testing liberty by degrees.  Though not entirely silenced by its ordeal, Rushdie’s output as a novelist is unquestionably curtailed.  The simple—or elaborate—habits and routines a writer develops in order to write, the necessary twitches and flights of fancy (or foot) going wherever and whenever they lead—are blown away, reduced to a singular imperative: safety.
The threat of danger as everyday possibility—not literary mood or polarity to be engaged with—changes the game of fiction.  Taking on the guise of Joseph Anton might at first have seemed a quixotic gesture in the face of humorless gravity.  But over time, living through fiction—and more important—recounting its twists and turns as creative nonfiction—must have offered Rushdie some consolations of irony and absurdity.  He would have been able to exert—at least in retrospect, by arrangement and design—control over the narrative.  Through his fictional counterpart, he could approach once again speaking in his own voice.
Small comfort, maybe.  But therein lies a tale.  And a writer after all must write—a storyteller must speak a tale into being.   And Joseph Anton's tale of literary hijacking by means of fatwa is no less absorbing for being "based on a true story" than any fictional thriller.  Yet often his account—like all such necessary expiations, however expertly conjured and stylishly rendered—feels just this side of narcissistic.  The conceit of Joseph Anton as fictional anti-hero never develops beyond simple alias.  Rushdie recounts events at a third person remove to sate his confessional need and desire for justification.  But the character of Joseph Anton, for all the narrator’s confidences and humbling admissions, doesn’t fly.  It's a tricky feat to pull off: writing a memoir in the guise of fiction to tell a true story where the facts are both known and subjectively recalled.  
(David Carr, a writer with a different backstory of oblivion, draws on fact-checking journalistic tics to construct his memoir of crack-induced abasement and recovery, The Night of the Gun. Unlike Rushdie, his ordeal was lived out in relative obscurity, at his own expense.) 
Perhaps it is too much to ask Rushdie—the "I" of the storm (of his own making if not design)—to be more than subjective in his account and recall.   The fatwa’s impact on Rushdie’s career—the nagging question of being associated only with a controversy rather than a text—haunts Joseph Anton  Being notorious for all the wrong reasons brings its own bitter deserts.
True to form, Joseph Anton is rife with contradiction.  By turns, thoughtful, self-deprecatory, witty, self-absorbed, myopic, combative, engaging, inert.
It may take complete outsiders—a band of curiosity-seekers and bold fantasists—to evoke the contrarian struggle at the heart of the story.  And what characters, what flavours. Who could not see Philip Seymour Hoffman as Christopher Hitchens, Roshan Seth as Joseph, Catherine Keener as Marianne Wiggins? 
Are you there John Malkhovich?

Friday, March 01, 2013

Nowhere special


Some places get under your skin, exerting allure whatever their come-hither attractions, or spectacular lack of same.  Paris.  London.  New York.  Bombay.  Rome.  Destinations celebrated for revelry, eye candy, plunder and so much more. 

Swindon?  It's mention as must-see stop in southwest England begs the inevitable question: why?

Not so much off the beaten path as off the guidebook radar.  No quaint history, no monument of note, no picturesque setting to entice casual detours.  Whatever its other qualities, Swindon isn't one of those "finds" savvy travelers happen upon, never mind set out for.  

Unless, of course, you happen to be us.  Three sisters on a sentimental journey. 

In 2012, my two sisters and I—plus a friend I manage to drag along (the invisible shutterbug above)—set off for our father’s home in Swindon, England.  Lucky coincidence and generous happenstance conspire to create a memory-lane itinerary—highlighting Swindon and Cardiff—of our father's design.  Growing up in Trinidad, at the southern end of the archipelago known in the day as the Lesser Antilles, England was be-all, end-all mother country and cultural beacon still to colonials like us.  Years after the Queen's arrival to proclaim independence, my younger sister and I still sat common entrance exams and shared the fever dream of studying in Britain via scholarships.  America and Canada might be bright up and coming stars, but England was the sun. 

In 1973 I graduated from high school in Florida where my family had decamped after leaving Trinidad four years earlier. (See October 1970 backstory.)  That summer my parents decided to take me and my younger sister still living at home on something of a “grand tour.”  England, including our dad's old stomping grounds of London and Swindon, formed the heart of our travels. 

A lifetime later, my older sister— the one "born there"—returns to a place she's connected with incidentally, not from memory It’s an unremarkable place to include on any visit of the sceptred isle.  On arrival at our destination,  I find the hedges and lushness of distant memory literally paved over.  The small front lawns—so typically "English" in the early 70's, as in my father’s day—now parking stalls.  The elderly couple next door who came out with their middle-aged son to greet my father—their neighbour from so long ago—are themselves long gone.

What's missing in tourist pamphlets and billboard advertisements is the house's situation as my older sister’s birthplace.  That she has spent her life away from this isolated event, having been removed as a young child under the worst of circumstances, her mother’s painful demise.  My sister’s mother—our father’s first wife—had left Guyana—then British Guianafor England shortly after the War ended.  She would have met and courted her fiancé largely through photographs, family, and letters.  For all intents and purposes a latter-day picture bride, she would have found life in Swindon, then a sleepy semi-industrial town, entirely foreign.  Like the man she married, she was well past youth.  How she got along in her marriage, whether she was content, how she coped with what we now conveniently ascribe to culture shock—none of us can guess.  Not long into her marriage, however, and shortly after my sister’s birth, she developed uterine cancer.  Her husband, who had spent years carefully building up an accounting practice as a precursor to family life with a new bride, must have been devastated.   Whenever he spoke of those times to us as children, it was always with a sense of fatalism, as if no other course was possible or even thinkable.  As if the only path for him was to sell everything and take his little girl and dying wife home to her birthplace, where she could at least be in familiar surroundings, with her own family for comfort.

I can’t imagine the shock and distress he must have suffered.  Or the upheaval and disorientation my sister must have gone through.  One of the family stories regularly told was my sister’s first encounter with black people in Guyana.   Almost on cue, she asked why they didn't (just) wash.  We jeered at her ignorance then; her only contact—aside from her parents and maybe rare Chinese acquaintances—would have been with white people in England.

We arrive at 30 Langford Grove on a Friday morning to find the fondly recalled cul-de-sac of family lore mostly empty of cars and hum.  On first impression the street looks drab, less English quaint, less cared for than a lifetime ago.  This time, however, there is no garden enclosure, no barrier to the front door.  Against both my sisters’ better judgment, I knock on the door.  We have come so far, I silently insist, we will not go away quietly.  After a pause, a man appears.  He’s a scuffy, middle-aged bloke with glasses and a close-cropped head, probably stunned to be facing down no less than four Asian women on his doorstep. 

I relate who we are and why we’re here.  Assessing our threat, he essays us in.  We crowd into the large, newly renovated kitchen at the rear and listen to John recount how he came into the house from his grandfather.  The same man who built the homes of Langford Grove that sold to our dad.  John relates how his grandfather divulged details of what, apart from its coveted location at the "end" of the cul-de-sac, set this particular house apart from the others he built along the street.  A sensible, modest project for its time.  An appealing home in which to settle and raise a family.  As the compact scale of the original house reminds us, these were modest dwellings built right after the War, the likes of which are probably widespread throughout Britain.  Our dad, a Chinese bachelor, took a chance on Swindon, a quiet unassuming town near Wales, to settle into.

Swindon didn't disappoint him.  That he was accepted—even sought after in one account, by a particular divorcée—was no small feat.  Not only was he able to establish himself as an accountant —albeit under an English pseudonym—he became secure enough to acquire and operate a second business, a beauty salon.  His social stature in town was a source of fond pride; he enjoyed participating in Swindon life as a business owner, even joining the local association of beauty salons.  I picture him on his rounds at the beauty parlour—inspecting the equipment, interacting with staff, making small talk with customers. 

In all he spent more than 20 years becoming English. His wife’s untimely death forced him to a second crisis—the first left him bald not long after arrival—that saw him sell off and abandon a life he had taken great care to build.  He returned to the country he had left as a hopeful young man.  It was like stepping back in time; very little progress had occurred, nothing like the sweeping changes he had seen in England.  Here he found himself odd man out, almost a foreigner in his own country.  Gradually over time, Swindon receded into a trove of amusing vignettes of bachelor life highlighted by very occasional glimpses of withering isolation.  

John hesitantly offers tea, which we politely decline; intruders, after all, hardly guests. We are fortunate catching him, a car mechanic, home on one of his off shifts.  The room we're in, he relates, is an expansion of the small functional kitchen of the original house.  He has lived here probably longer than our dad ever did, long enough to convert the modest backyard of previous owners—where our dad grew brussell sprouts and hoped for frost to sweeten them—into a Japanese-style garden with pond and bridge.

For an unremarkable place—its depressed core showing signs of the global recession—Swindon is ordinary even shabby, a kind of nowhere young people escape from.   And perhaps more than occasionally—as with John—come back to.  Unexciting, perhaps, but more importantly, affordable.  Swindon's selling point—its safe dependability—sustains lives like John's. After the Blitz in London, and working on agricultural teams early in the war, it might have seemed a relative haven of potential to David Bennett.  Somewhere you could keep your head down and get on with the business of ordinary life.  Here he could imagine settling down, putting out a shingle, finding a wife and raising a family.   Not to pin his hopes too high, but there could be a future.  It was close to Wales, a beautiful place he was sure to visit—didn't they name a saint after him there?  With a bit of luck and hard work, he might even thrive. 


Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Body of Work


So simple and direct.  An artist agrees to sit still in a space, across from anyone who cares to sit in her presence, every day for going on 70 days.  An ordeal, a stunt, the distillation of a body of work to its most essential.  Marina Abramovic: the Artist is Present charts the progress of artist Abramovic’s title piece for her monumental retrospective of performance art held at MOMA in New York in 2010.

Near the end of the film of the same title, the show’s curator Klaus Biesenbach describes the work as self-portraiture.  The art and artist are inseparable, both are present simultaneously.  Through her physical, live presence and mute stillness, Abramovic is both art object and art maker. The human aspect of her feat is never absent; she is adamant about the mental preparation necessary for the work of being present to thousands of visitors.  And watching her with a succession of sitters, the effect is unquestioningly moving.  Many sitters find tears welling up and trickling down their faces.  Is it the cumulative exhaustion of waiting for their time with the artist?  Or does the simple act of undiminished presence—minus distraction or digression—move people in unexpected ways?

When a young woman, inspired by Abramovic’s work and example, attempts an intervention of her own, she — like another would-be art upstager — is removed.  Where the male interventionist wants to confront Abramovic wearing a screened image over his face —providing another layer of comment or response to her work—the young would-be nudist seems less calculated, more naively in thrall to what she perceives as an opportunity to be spontaneous and “in the moment.”  There’s a part of me that questions why the security guards don’t permit her to remain.  Do they fear the work becoming some sort of sideshow, with sitters using their turn with Abramovic to perform bizarre stunts?   These two viewers want to turn the gallery into an ersatz theatre, adding themselves as performers to what is already a carefully calibrated performance.

Looking at art when the art can also look back, breathe, and emote.  That’s what “The Artist is Present” is all about.  In every way, this piece is a summation of Abramovic’s work, paring back her earlier provocative, often disturbing pieces, to their minimal essence: viewer and art.   No noise, distractions, props, and only minimal movement.  By taking Biesenbach’s cue in titling the retrospective The Artist is Present, Abramovic underlines the quintessential aspect of all art: its relationship to the viewer.  In this particular case, however, it also speaks to the endurance of the artist herself, whose performance exists only in time, not space.

The conundrum of how a performance artist survives within a commodified art market is touched on by Abramovic’s gallerist.  Through the sale of stills of her performance pieces, he created a mechanism to fund her work that has since increased in demand.  In her work and on camera, Abramovic is striking, a woman fully in control of her medium and confident of her impact.  Not that she’s immune to nerves; days leading up to the exhibition’s opening, she is seen vomiting and sick in bed from anxiety about the endurance test ahead.  One of the most moving encounters during The Artist is Present occurs near the beginning when Ulay, her former partner and collaborator of twelve years, sits across from her.  As she opens her eyes and recognizes him, tears well in her eyes as they do in his.  Breaking from her posture of stillness, she reaches across the table for his outstretched hands.  Applause breaks across the gallery.  

The glimpses of their work together—along with hints at their life as a couple—are tantalizing.  Abramovic was clearly the instigator of several of the pieces.  Her strength and stamina—a legacy of her war hero parents—are acknowledged by Ulay who found himself unable to withstand the physical toll of "Nightsea Crossing."  In that piece, Ulay and Abramovic silently fasted across from each other sitting at a table, in some durations, for several weeks at a time.  Later in the film, Ulay addresses the distance Abramovic has travelled in her career, her dedication to her art, the fact that she, unlike other contemporaries, is still making demanding performances.  If there’s a touch of envy of her fame and comfortable stature—we see her delight in designer couture—there is also respect and admiration.

If she were not so seductive—Biesenbach astutely describes his relationship with Abramovic as an affair—the artist would seem dauntingly formidable.  Moments of humour and candour go far in leavening the rigorous discipline and determination that feed her work.  It’s heartening to catch a glimpse of her at play with David Blaine, a magician, who wants to stage something “special” for the exhibition.  When her gallerist hears of Blaine’s proposal, he immediately shuts it down and Abramovic agrees.  With a history of work taking performance art’s examination of the body to dangerous extremes, Abramovic is alert to her gallerist’s distinction between her work’s reputation for absolute reality and magic’s true claim to illusion.

That art was once entirely illusionistic seems largely old hat.  Yet watching footage of Abramovic’s earlier work and recreations of her historic pieces where the performers are mostly nude, connections with the-Nude-in art are hard to miss.  If the radical performance artists of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s sought to attack the nude as subject, the cumulative effect of Abramovic’s work seems to have revived what might otherwise have seemed academic.  Having to literally walk through the narrow space between a nude couple facing each other, museum visitors must come in physical contact with one or both nudes.

While the bane of performance art may always be the ease with which it can be dismissed as a stunt, The Artist is Present shows a range of viewer responses that the apparently average 30-second view of traditional paintings and sculpture does not enjoy.   Confronted by art, with the artist, present, so-called ordinary folk are moved by what is a unique and personal experience.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Pina

Spectrally thin, a woman shuffles blindly in a corner of a stage littered with black wooden cafe chairs.   More than 20 years ago Café Müller took the stage at Ryerson Theatre in Toronto.  I am with my husband in Vancouver watching a film called Pina begin on a stage in an empty theatre.  In Toronto I am the same and different, married to a different man. Diaphanous drapery parts to reveal archival and recent footage of Pina Bausch and her extraordinary company of dancers.  At intermission, loam is spread over the stage for Stravinsky's Rite of SpringOne by one dancers file past the camera, walking offstage onto a field of grass.

Le Sacre du Printemps and Café Müller—two touchstones of her remarkable repertoire—are intercut by Wim Wenders, the first of many such intrusions, by short "signature" pieces from individual dancers.  As the film progresses, it becomes clear (?) these dances—often following brief silent "interviews" dubbed with personal recollections of Bausch in voice over—are tributes to their late and much-loved mentor.
Near the end of Pina one of the dancers identifies yearning as a key emotion in Bausch's relentless search for expression.  That search yielded  breathtaking moments.  Seeing Pina tonight reminds me of what drew me to theatre.  
The way she continually pushed against what's safe and feasible.  Her refusal to acknowledge limits in her dancers, in space, in venues: Full Moon features a huge rock the dancers climb and leap from into a shallow pool of water that threatens to engulf the stage.  Elemental is how one of her dancers assesses her approach;  that's what I recall from Ryerson Theatre.

Seeing her work liberated from the confines of a black box theatre—danced literally and dangerously close to the edge of a dusty cliff, astride a natural stream, in traffic, aboard public transit—feels natural for someone who blurred the line between theatre and dance, whose interpolations of natural movement and non-dancers inhabited the dialogue between art and life.  The daring of her work springs from a personal, whole-hearted embrace of pain without glamour, her willingness to literally go up against a wall time and again.

To have seen two of her signature pieces live; what a gift.  Watching the film I look back at my younger self, for whom that performance meant so much.  And now, what's important has invariably changed as I have, unlike Pina who remains constant, forever now.   Watching Pina and her amazing dancers—each with their own tics and wholly individual cares and griefs—so many feelings arise.
 Melancholy, yes, recognition, unquestionably, and everywhere beauty.  And wonder.  Beauty born of grief, spun from exhilaration.  Beauty from ugliness, clumsiness, missteps, falling down hard and rising without counting the cost.  Her work is spare and elegant, even as she mucks about with dirt and has two male dancers spurt water from their mouths at each other.  There's nothing crude or lewd about the intense physicality of her choreography; what's evident time and again is her embrace of what can't be known: the missed moment, the forgotten love, the wrong partner relentlessly pursued, the inescapable eventuality of hurt, solitude, silence.  Yet her work is anything but dreary or ponderous; she constantly pushes against what cannot be, but must.  That's what makes her stagings so exciting: the rules are broken and the performers exult in abandon at the freedom to play.

Wenders wisely shoots the offstage dances in both contained and open spaces, reflecting Bausch's appreciation of stillness and formal geometry on the one hand, and her need to defy limits that saw her bring the natural world onstage.  So immersed in materiality, Bausch allows her dancers to soar, to kick up their heels in pools of water while sketching worlds of loss and longing brought into heartbreaking, thrilling focus.

Monday, August 29, 2011

No Exit, Deliverance


James Loney
What is captivity but a kind of living hell?  To live comfortably inside one's skin without imposed limits on spatial mobility forms the basis of individual autonomy, what we generally regard as freedom and liberty.  By contrast, the horror of entrapment coupled with physical and sexual abuse or torture forms a chilling dungeon to the larger cells of imprisonment and detention. 

To be held hostage — even intellectually to an idea — connotes a kind of injustice, being held against one’s will.   Yet self-willed captivity — seclusion, cloistering, solitude, isolation — exists as an option for religious, creative artists, hermits, misanthropes and contrarians of all stripes.  Writer and artist colonies proliferate in the belief and practice of creating conditions against habitual routine, inducing focus via isolation. 

No such illusions guide prisons, detention centres or any number of wretched locales where hostages are trapped and hidden.
Ingrid Betancourt held captive by FARC
To compare the terrifying circumstances of hostages —abductees whose lives are forcibly held — to the self-imposed isolation undertaken by creators or cloistered religious orders would be outrageous.   Yet sustained confinement— regardless of cultural/social/political context— has unmistakable, common effects.  Without the distractions of day-to-day routine, minds enclosed by physical constraints necessarily turn inward.  The dangers of enforced introspection — being trapped in one’s own consciousness from sensory or social deprivation — are frightening to contemplate.  That way madness surely lies.

In recent hostage narratives — three about several years of captivity in Colombia, one about being held in Iraq — the writers have to endure not only the constant threat represented by their captors, but also the uneasy company of fellow hostages.
My trek through these post-modern seasons in hell began with Ingrid Betancourt’s Even Silence Has an End and concluded with James Loney’s Captivity.  In between were parallel Columbian accounts: Clara Rojas’ Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle and Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle by Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell.  (As a sidebar I watched Hunger, British artist Steve McQueen’s provocative immersion into Bobby Sands and the IRA’s “dirty protest” of the ‘70’s in Belfast’s infamous Maze prison.)

What’s fascinating about the experiences of the hostages in Colombia are the jungle-specific privations, as much as the particular insights and self-reflection offered by the different narrators.  As a genre, prison memoirs derive value from the quality, range and depth of concerns their writers tackle.  The sheer duration of the Colombian hostages’ experiences taxes comprehension.  Not weeks or even months but years were logged in the Colombian jungle.  (Some hostages, contemporary with Betancourt and the others, remain under FARC control.) By contrast, James Loney’s account of four spartan months holed up in suburban Baghdad seems mercifully brief.    Externally, the two sets of circumstance could not be further apart.  Yet all the hostage accounts touch on issues of faith and the “hell of other people” that is enforced captivity with strangers.

Ingrid Betancourt's incredible ordeal — six and a half years as hostage of the FARC revolutionary paramilitary in Colombia — is related in often excruciating detail in her gripping account, Even Silence Has an End.  Opening the book, she plunges the reader immediately into the gritty struggle of day-to-day existence: an early escape attempt with Clara (Rojas), assistant on Betancourt's presidential campaign, captured at the same time in February 2002 opens the book.  The two women's shifting, wary regard of each other informs each of their books.   Given the extreme circumstances that tested their particular friendship, it’s not surprising each woman would seek to justify her conduct under duress, after the fact.

Intensely personal and necessarily introspective, Even Silence has an End finds Betancourt burrowing into experiences she would have shrunk from imagining in her previous existence as a member of Colombia's educated elite.  The degradations of near constant moves in the hostile jungle — swarming with voracious insects in all-too-real horror-movie 3-D — are chronicled from a distinctly female perspective.  Betancourt's subjective record of her captivity — the shifting society of fellow captives, FARC guards, commanders, and rangueras (guerrilla girlfriends) — provides compelling episodes easily imagined in cinematic images.
FARC rangueras
There are daring escape attempts: two (at least) with Clara as unwilling or obtuse participant that land both in a cage from which the book begins.  Much later comes an extended attempt with Lucho, a fellow politician whose friendship became a lifeline.   Their capture — after surviving hours adrift in treacherous Amazonian waters, against hunger and the danger of Lucho's lapse into diabetic shock — is heart-rending if somewhat inevitable.  Not so Pinchao, a policeman whom Bagaietancourt befriends and urges to escape, successfully.  These episodes are recounted with Mission Impossible-style details remarkable for their vivid recall.
FARC hideout
Besides the grinding despair that captivity induces, Betancourt's chief bête noire, like Loney’s, is boredom.  To relieve the endless stretches of wasted time — as days become months become years — she devises strategies to cope with the hostility of fellow captives as much as the depredations or reprisals from guards.    She finds surprising allies in some FARC guerrillas — her appraisal of the women in particular is noteworthy for the unspoken solidarity gender alone can allow— and is conversely disillusioned or disappointed in others in whom she invested more.  Betancourt's treatment of Clara's pregnancy, the birth of her child and its care by the FARC provide opaque glimpses of circumstances fraught with uncomfortable questions.  Amongst the most moving passages in the book are Betancourt's regular invocations of family: her father, whose death she uncovers inadvertently early on in captivity; her mother whose faithful radio messages and tireless diplomatic efforts provide an emotional backbone; and her own children, Melanie and Lorenzo, whose teenage milestones she is cruelly aware of missing.  Given Betancourt's heightened awareness of her own pivotal role as mother and daughter, her discomfort with Clara's desperation to have a child and her subsequent pregnancy under duress, reads as unsympathetic, yet credible.  The strains of being the only women prisoners — to say nothing of their unwilling co-habitation in the early years — etch the divides of habit, class, and personality between Betancourt and Rojas that would otherwise be overlooked in civil society.  Under the constraints and caprices of enforced captivity, their quotidian interactions degenerate into petty squabbles.  The tendency to assert dominance and control in the absence of any real self-determination becomes the source of the hostages' bitter descent into feuds and friction. 
Ecuadorean soldiers uncover abankdoned FARC camp (Rodrigo Buendia, AFP, Getty Images)
Betancourt, assuming leadership tactics time and again, becomes a target of resentment and hostility amongst the other captives.  Her refusal to capitulate to the FARC's agenda of defeat fuels her quest to improve her own condition as much as those of the other prisoners.   Aware her identity and sense of self are giving way under captivity's boot, Betancourt adopts whatever tools she can muster against derangement.  Books — a dictionary and Bible as well as Harry Potter — become touchstones and beacons to the world outside.  The radio — with its regular broadcast to the hostages of messages from families — becomes a cherished, if contentious, lifeline.  Even her status as a dual citizen of France and Colombia, itself a source of derision and division within the camps, eventually works to her advantage as she uses her fluency to teach guerilleras and prisoners alike.

What ultimately sustains Betancourt throughout her extended ordeal in the jungle is faith.  She writes of her relationship to God and the Virgin Mary as a given: faith as consolation, as constant even in anger, hard-won and tested by seemingly endless physical hardships yet never abandoned.  Betancourt's journey of faith — her practice of prayer, her insistence on the Bible as a source of spiritual as much as cultural survival — and her own privations and sufferings do not, despite their moving account, endow her conduct with irreproachable virtue.  The complexities of the story she relates — the enforced society of strangers united only by captivity, the manipulations of the guerrilla leaders in managing the hostages' profiles to the world at large, the daunting logistics of survival within and escape from the camps and relentless jungle marches — mitigate against easy binary appraisals. [Fellow captives Clara Rojas and the trio of American hostages with whom she shared prison time in the jungle —one of whom she became close to — have each published disparate, often pointedly critical accounts.  Rojas' Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle preceded Betancourt's publication by more than six months.  Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle by Marc Goncalves, Keith Stansell and Tom Howes (with Gary Brozek) was published about a year ahead of Even Silence has an End.]

What emerges over the course of hundreds of page-turning action and reflection is the scope of wretchedness that was Betancourt's season in hell.  That it was relieved by snatches of friendship, glimmers of decency against all odds and calculation, displays of humanity as humbling as the all-pervasive filth and deprivation are testament to Betancourt's ability to sound the beat of this particular heart of darkness.  Not surprisingly her life post-captivity — the book ends with the triumphant release of a select group of hostages in a dramatic rescue operation — has been fraught with controversy.  Lionized on the Oprah show following the book's launch, Betancourt latest struggle has been a suit from her former husband claiming proceeds from the book's sales.

By contrast, Clara Rojas’ Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle—was written less than a year after freedom.  At a third the length of Betancourt's memoir and Out of Captivity by the trio of American hostages, Rojas' account often reads as opaque, less a thoughtful record of experience than a justification — to herself as much as her son — of lost years of wretched captivity.  

In many moments of Captive, she addresses Emmanuel directly seeking to explain and justify the brutality she experienced.  However, one key part of the puzzle is purposely left out.  Comfortable enough recounting the woefully inadequate FARC responses to the practical demands of pregnancy and birth on the move in the jungle, Rojas sidesteps curiosity about the baby's father with a vow of privacy, undertaken for her son's protection.   It's understandable she would resist disclosure as a violation of privacy, needing to exercise this most fundamental right to protect herself and Emmanuel.  The bitter truth of captivity shared by the three linked hostage narratives from Columbia — Even Silence Has an End, Captive, and Out of Captivity is the destruction of any sense of personal destiny.  Trapped in mind-numbing routines of haphazard marches and encampment dictated by the FARC, the hostages wage an uphill battle to maintain a sense of self against grinding, relentless odds.  Tormented by doubts surrounding her decision to accompany Betancourt, Rojas’ refusal to disclose the identity of Emmanuel's father on the grounds of personal privacy is hardly surprising.  Unfortunately, the resort to secrecy leaves a gaping hole in her narrative.  While it’s still absorbing to discover the details of the FARC’s fumbling attempts to cope with an unscripted event like pregnancy and childbirth, Rojas provides little insight into her state of mind then and after, regardless of naming names.  How much more moving and inspiring her story might have been if she had been able to find a way other than omission to probe her own feelings of motherhood in extremis.

Where Betancourt’s and Rojas’ are distinctly female voices, Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle offers the overlapping accounts of three male hostages: Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell, Americans hired by a privately contracted company as part of the official US war on drugs.  A year after Betancourt and Rojas are captured, Gonsalves, Stansell and Howes literally crash into FARC-occupied jungle on February 23, 2003.  On a regular surveillance mission to monitor drug-related operations in the Colombian jungle, their plane’s engine fails and they are forced to crash land.  Emerging from the wreckage, they and two other survivors are quickly surrounded by FARC guerrillas whose leader, Sonia, separates them into two groups.  Wounded, wearing street clothes only, the authors embark on what turns out to be a grueling 22-day trek through mountainous jungle made extra challenging by Colombia’s high altitude.   The punishing marches undertaken by the FARC — necessary to avoid detection by the Colombian army — are encountered in all three books.   Pain, exhaustion, mud, and the relentless pace set by the guerillas over endless days (and often nights) of marching are constants.  What’s reported in the Americans’ account — missing from the two native Columbians’ — is the factor of altitude.  This explains the cold nights related in passing by Betancourt in a supposedly tropical country around the equator.

Out of Captivity benefits from its three narrators each taking turns providing individual eyewitness-type accounts.  They corroborate each others’ testimony, often arriving at shadings of meaning by an accrual of details.   Their responses to Betancourt and the contingent of political hostages around her are revealing.  Stansell dismisses Betancourt as high-handed, essentially a snob, and untrustworthy.   His overall appraisal, though not entirely unsympathetic at specific incidents, remains remarkably consistent.  Gonsalves’ relationship to Betancourt undergoes a more dramatic arc: from wary indifference to intense friendship and guarded intimacy, even jealousy.  In Betancourt’s account, desire is endorsed in the FARC’s jungle operations, with couplings and rivalries amongst the captors regularly noted.  Its more renegade counterpart, love, however, is pretty near impossible.  The would-be lovers’ efforts are doomed by the circumstances of captivity, large and small.  Ingenious contrivances adopted against their captors’ vigilance unravel under prolonged separation, as suspicion and resentment replace romantic longing.

If Even Silence Has an End succeeds as a kind of gritty, real-life romantic thriller—Captive and Out of Captivity serve largely as apologias, largely aimed at “setting the record straight.” James Loney’s angle on Captivity is an extended argument for pacifism against his experience as a hostage in Iraq.   Faith is what propels Loney to Iraq in 2005.  An activist Catholic raised in Sault Ste. Marie, later based in Toronto, Loney joins Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization dedicated to non-violent witness as peaceful intervention in violent conflicts.  Taking their cue from the Apostles, CPT members consciously choose to mingle with groups and individuals working for peace against the overwhelming presence of armed conflict.  In November 2005, the CPT Iraqi group comprising Loney, Harmeet Sooden, Tom Fox, and Norman Kember are abducted en route to a meeting with an Islamic group, the Muslim Scholars.   They are held in two houses for 118 days.  During that time, the carrot of freedom is repeatedly dangled before them; its opposite outcome is visited upon Tom Fox, whose military background — despite having served strictly as a musician without combat experience — likely contributes to his murder. 

Whereas Betancourt suffered distinct periods of being chained in solitary punishment for her escape attempts, Loney and the others are regularly chained together as a condition of confinement.  As with the Colombian hostages, survival issues of food and hygiene become paramount, with personal humiliation recounted as testament to the debasing conditions of captivity.    Living intensely with a succession of individuals they nickname “Junior,” “Uncle,” “Medicine Man,” each of the four hostages adopts strategies to cope with the endless boredom.  Marveling at Sooden’s general composure, irritated by Fox’s insistence on “being in the now”—an odd echo of the American hostages’ mantra of choosing the “hard right thing”  in the face of the FARC’s revolutionary caprices—Loney exposes his own turmoil and impatience with his fellow hostages as much as his captors.    More so than their US counterparts in Colombia, the Iraqi hostages are united by a common mission as peacemakers; that unity, however, is challenged at one point as the avowedly Christian aspect of Christian Peacemaker Teams is called into question by Sooden, a Sikh.  

Harmeet Sooden, CPT member
Unlike Betancourt, Loney does not attempt escape.  Not that he doesn’t consider or fantasize about it.  In both instances, however, the tight circumstances of the group—their weakened physical condition to say nothing of their lack of Arabic in immediately hostile surroundings—check impulses toward freedom.  As troubling as Loney finds this acceptance of their fate, he becomes aware of his captors’ parallel experience.  As they wait for Medicine Man to once again deliver the latest news of Godot-like negotiations for their release, the hostages observe their captors’ liberty as constrained by much the same factors as theirs.  That jailers necessarily partake of imprisonment is not revelatory.  As a peace activist, however, Loney fingers the cult of violence and conflict that leads to situations that enslave captor and captive alike.  Later, following liberation by a British-led international rescue team, Loney is cautioned against Stockholm syndrome coloring his concern for the fate of his captors. 

In his introduction and post-liberation, Loney ponders the paradox of his release effected not through negotiation but by force, the very action he had gone to Iraq to oppose.  He notes how every army or violent force throughout history has operated under the conviction that they were right, that they were “the good guys.”  He observes how this same principle animates the “bad guys” who abducted the CPT team, even as they cheer and identify with the “good guys” in the Hollywood action movies they watch to kill time.   For them as for the soldiers who liberate the hostages, there is no irony.   For Loney, every side in the struggle sees themselves as the good guys, even in situations of occupation like Iraq.

For all these hostages, the hell of slow erasure—acclimation to everyday privations, piecemeal bargains with self and others over petty advantages, accommodation to filth and constant fear, chronic lack of privacy—is over.  What’s invaluable in the best of these narratives is the quality of witness: the courage to relive wretchedness all over again, not for cringe-inducing reality-TV notoriety, but as a necessary journey toward true catharsis.  In our media-saturated, irony-laden culture of overdrive, It’s rare to find—never mind seek out—gritty, old-fashioned forms of release based not on (self) indulgence but its opposite.  Without so much as a whiff of the other much more taboo “s” word, Silence and Captivity resonate as chronicles of enforced self-reflection, the void of captivity—its grinding sense of time irretrievably lost—offered up as hapless sacrifice at the altar of freedom inseparable from existence.