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 the 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.