Supersurvivors

by David B Feldman

  Aaron is a smiley fellow with a short, square chin and neat dark hair. He wears frameless rectangular glasses that match his conservative and measured demeanor. He dresses in slacks and sweaters and carries himself with an air of properness. It’s hard to imagine how he maintained this demeanor when the Bhutanese government began enacting discriminatory citizenship laws against his people in the name of maintaining the country’s Tibetan Mahˉayˉana Buddhist character. While he was away at school in India, security forces arrived in Relukha to evict the population from their homes and seize their lands. Making these actions legal required the locals, including Devi, to sign a so-called voluntary migration form. But the soldiers didn’t count on Devi’s strength of spirit. He refused to sign. In response, officials launched an operation of harassment and arrests.

  Aaron returned for a holiday and learned of his father’s incarceration. “A war had begun in my absence,” Aaron explains. “It wasn’t a war you ran from, but a war you were forced into at gunpoint.” Aaron was determined to get his father back. The local agent of the central government had turned a small post office five hours from the village into a makeshift prison, where Devi was now being held. Aaron demanded that officials let his father go. Instead, they incarcerated Aaron, too. For five days and nights Aaron heard the jailers thrashing Devi and three of his friends in a neighboring cell. “He shouted and cried out,” Aaron says of his father. “They hung him upside down. They beat him. They wanted me to hear. They probably wanted him to know I could hear.”

  On the fifth day of Aaron’s arrest, two officers brought Aaron and Devi into an office. There, a menacing officer walked around his desk, glaring first at Aaron and then at Devi. “You’re a troublemaker,” the officer said to Devi. “Sign, and you can both leave tonight. Don’t sign, and I’ll kill you.” To show he meant it, the officer fondled the pistol he had strapped to himself.

  Devi shook his head. The officer crossed the room and punched Aaron’s father hard in his belly.

  “Dad, just sign,” Aaron said. “We’ll come back one day and get everything back.”

  The officer turned and leveled his gaze at Aaron. “What did you say?” He pushed the barrel of his pistol against Aaron’s temple.

  Another officer put a pen in Devi’s hand. Aaron watched his father sign the documents. The eviction papers gave Devi and his family twelve days to leave the country. Another twenty-three families faced the same edict. Aaron’s family had land, three houses, cattle, and crops they were now forced to leave behind.

  The ancestral families of Relukha would caravan for three days to a tiny camp near the border of India. From there, they would travel toward another series of camps set up in neighboring Nepal by the Nepali government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. These camps, Aaron knew, were dangerous and lawless places filled with disease, violence, and squalor. But there was no choice.

  It was a silent journey, on foot, back to Relukha from the jail. In Bhutan, Aaron explains, men do not cry, so Aaron hid his rage and despair. Devi had been beaten so savagely that he couldn’t walk straight. If Devi had permitted him, Aaron would have carried him home. But Devi was a proud man. He would walk on his own. These crimes, Aaron thought, were unforgiveable.

  Trauma happens to most people. We expect it to happen to people living in troubled parts of the world: war-torn nations and poverty-stricken regions. We expect it to happen to people in risky careers: cops, firefighters, rescue workers, and soldiers. Though it might not surprise you that people such as Aaron and his family were targeted, as we allude to in chapter 1, trauma also happens to somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of people in the developed world at some point in their lives. In 1990, Harvard Medical School professor of health care policy Ronald Kessler, along with the U.S. government and a large team of investigators, undertook the first large-scale field study of mental health in the nation’s history. As part of the study, called the National Comorbidity Survey, researchers interviewed a representative sample of almost six thousand Americans ranging in age from fifteen to fifty-four, asking them detailed questions about their exposure to traumatic events. According to the results, a whopping 61 percent of men and 51 percent of women had experienced a traumatic event sometime in their lives. And these numbers are lower than some estimates, because the researchers didn’t count as traumas such things as severe medical illness or the loss of loved ones.

  The really sad thing is that many of these traumas are man-made. As Aaron and the villagers of Relukha experienced, many traumas are the result of people’s cruelty and inhumanity to one another. Although it’s difficult, because of variance between regions, to estimate exactly what percentage of trauma worldwide is man-made, it’s clear that it’s large. In the National Comorbidity Survey, for instance, if you add up the percentages of traumas involving rape, molestation, physical attack, combat, threat with a weapon, neglect, or physical abuse, the total comes to 45 percent in men and 43 percent in women. The figure for natural disasters is only about a third of that.

  To make matters worse, the very people we love and are close to are often the ones who perpetrate crimes and injustices against us. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that about one in six women in the United States is raped during her lifetime. Contrary to popular belief, most people know their rapists. According to the National Violence Against Women Survey, a study of eight thousand women across the United States published by the National Institute of Justice in 2000, only about 17 percent of adult female victims were raped by strangers. The rest were victimized by people they at the very least were acquainted with. But a shocking 62 percent were raped by someone they knew pretty well—a spouse or ex-spouse, current or former live-in partner, date, or boyfriend.

  These forms of victimization, sometimes called interpersonal traumas, are the most traumatizing of all. In the late 1990s, the World Health Organization launched its World Mental Health Surveys Initiative, an ongoing program to review mental health across the globe. In 2010, Dan Stein, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a team of colleagues used data from the initiative to find out what sorts of traumatic events were most associated with suicidal ideation, plans, and attempts. They read more than a hundred thousand interviews related to trauma in twenty-one countries, and topping the list was sexual and interpersonal violence.

  Given these depressing statistics, it’s tempting to become angry and resentful, to view other people as threats and little more. That’s what some victims of interpersonal trauma do, of course. They may hold grudges, harbor lifelong resentment, and even seek retribution. Who could blame them? A long review of history reveals no shortage of violent examples—whether we’re talking about the generations of Jews and Muslims in the Middle East or classic conflicts among Serbs and Croats, Protestant and Catholic Irish, or northern and southern Sudanese.

  From a safe distance, it’s easy to see that grudges aren’t healthy on a societal scale. But what about on an individual level? Technically, psychologists refer to grudge-holding and revenge-seeking as unforgiveness. It seems obvious that unforgiveness is bad for mental health—it’s highly unpleasant to harbor anger, hostility, and hurt for prolonged periods of time. But science also is beginning to show that unforgiveness also may contribute to poor physical health. Psychologists Charlotte Witvliet, Thomas Ludwig, and Kelly Vander Laan asked seventy-one students at Michigan’s Hope College to call to mind a person in their lives who had mistreated or offended them. While fitted with instruments to monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and sympathetic nervous system activity, students imagined both what it would be like to forgive the transgressor and what it would be like to harbor a grudge. The results were simple and to the point. When imagining harboring unforgiveness, the participants felt stronger negative emotions and experienced higher heart rate, blood pressure, and sympathetic nervous system activity than when imagining offering forgiveness.

  These results dovetail
with the findings of a 2010 replication of the National Comorbidity Survey mentioned earlier. Among the many questions in this extensive survey, ten thousand U.S. residents were asked, “Would you say this is true or false? ‘I’ve held grudges against people for years.’ ” Writing in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, researchers Erick Messias, Anil Saini, Philip Sinato, and Stephen Welch from the Medical College of Georgia find that people who said they tended to hold grudges reported higher rates of heart disease and cardiac arrest, elevated blood pressure, stomach ulcers, arthritis, back problems, headaches, and chronic pain than those who didn’t share this tendency. Though most scientists note that much more research is needed on the subject, it’s possible that the physiological agitation experienced by the Hope College students may actually erode health over the long term.

  Unforgiveness certainly appears to be unhealthy. But aren’t some truly horrible things simply unforgiveable?

  Growing up in the city of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, Clemantine Wamariya was an inquisitive little girl. In fact, her unending wonder at the world around her caused even her endlessly loving parents to want to put tape over her mouth. “I remember driving through the city and the whole way asking my mother, ‘Who lives here? What about here?’ My mother made up stories from one house to another. I wanted to know everything.”

  With a short nose, high cheekbones, and a slender physique, Clemantine at twenty-four is striking. The first thing people often notice is her distinctive wide-eyed smile. She wears her hair in dozens of long Rwandan braids tied behind her head. Her skin is the color of a dust storm. She speaks with a yearning cadence that infuses wonder and horror as she talks about the events that began in 1994, only shortly after that drive through the city with her mother.

  She was six when the mass killings started in Kigali. “The first thing they do is rape the girls,” Clemantine says, drawn back to the memory of the genocide.

  Ethnic tensions were brimming in Rwanda when a government assassination sparked the start of Hutu-conducted mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace sympathizers. Trying to protect her and her sixteen-year-old sister, Claire, their parents placed them in hiding at their grandparents’ home. But Clemantine’s grandparents couldn’t protect the girls from the violence for long.

  She remembers the beginning of the massacre in snippets. The house was cold. The darkness was impenetrable. The night ushered in the sounds of annihilation, howling, and bawling, from the street. “There was lots of noise and banging outside. There was singing—actual singing—from the mob coming down the avenue as they broke into the houses. I heard crying in the dark. From inside or outside, I’m not sure. Then screaming. I was in a corner, shaking near my grandmother’s bedroom. Claire and I scrambled in the dark, trying to find places in the house to hide. We didn’t know where to go.”

  The sisters crept through an airless hallway to the far side of the house. Claire stopped short of the kitchen and opened a tiny window. From there, the sisters escaped to the yard and slipped into the darkness of a field of banana trees. Then Clemantine had a sudden horrible thought. She turned back to the house, but Claire yanked her deeper into the forest, seemingly incapable of stopping to consider the family they’d left behind. Claire lifted her sister up the trunk of a tall tree and ordered her to climb. Up in the yawning branches, time atrophied. Clemantine imagined transforming herself into a boulder, an inanimate piece of earth whose elements were frozen in time, anonymous and impermeable. All around them, far below, deafening shrieks and cries split the darkness as roaming death squads slaughtered neighbors with laser-like exactitude, much as they did all over the capital city that night and throughout the country. “Far away, I could see fire and smoke rising above the trees and rooftops,” Clemantine says. “I didn’t know if my house was on fire, too. We waited for my grandparents to get out.” She pauses to find her next words. “This will never make sense to me. Not ever. What we saw. So much death. What we ran from . . . If I think about it too much it will make me crazy. My grandparents never came out.”

  In the morning, Clemantine and Claire emerged from the trees. They walked roads clogged with people lying motionless in the gutters. Needing a place to store the dead, houses of worship were converted to storerooms, where bodies were piled floor to ceiling. Across the city, houses smoldered. Clemantine and Claire joined other displaced victims of the ongoing assaults and walked many days to a refugee camp in Burundi. “We’d found ourselves in a place neither of us had ever imagined, surrounded by thousands of others, all wounded, lost, screaming, crying, and hungry; all in shock; all in disbelief,” Clemantine says. Together, she and Claire stood in a long line for a tent, blankets, and sacks for their belongings. She and her sister stayed in the camp for roughly a year, during which time the Hutu massacred an additional eight hundred thousand Tutsi.

  “Most of us usually then want to get our own back, but an eye for an eye ends up with everyone blind, as Gandhi noted,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells us from his home in South Africa. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient rose to worldwide prominence as a vocal opponent of apartheid and a defender of human rights not long before the government of Bhutan began its campaign of ethnic discrimination. Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on political forgiveness, Archbishop Tutu had presided over the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which determined whether to grant amnesty to those who had committed abuses during the apartheid era.

  “No one has the right to tell someone who has suffered that he must forgive,” Tutu continues. “No, we have to enter into the anguish of the one who has been made to suffer, to ameliorate and understand and sympathize with their suffering.”

  Tutu is giving voice to what many survivors and experts agree is true. There should never be an obligation to forgive. Victims do not owe their victimizer forgiveness. To forgive is something highly personal that people do when and if they are ready. It’s not something that anyone can or should force anyone to do. To apply such force further wrongs the victim. However, science seems to show that for people who naturally come to the point where they are ready to move beyond unforgiveness, to forgive is generally a healthy decision for them. It helps them to move forward in their lives, and indeed may help them to become supersurvivors.

  But Aaron Acharya of Bhutan had a lot of reasons for harboring unforgiveness, had experienced a lot of wrongs that nobody could make him forgive. His scholarship to study engineering in India, awarded by the very government that was now persecuting him, had been revoked. Instead of returning to finish his degree, he had settled into temporary shelter in a refugee camp in Nepal with thousands of other refugees from Bhutan, many from his own village. Aaron’s family, unlike other refugees who were registered in the camps before him, was given no living supplies, no cooking oil, no firewood, no vegetables, and no kerosene. Despite the shame it brought upon them, they foraged for firewood in the deep jungle so they could cook the meager rations they collected from the UN. Their new home was an overpopulated mix of tiny dark shanties, dense expanses of bamboo huts without sanitation. Many there died of malnutrition. Over time, conditions deteriorated, ushering in scurvy, malaria, cholera, and measles.

  Aaron’s father, Devi, tried to remain a strong leader among his people in the camp. It was clear to Aaron, though, that Devi was a shell of the man he’d been before the torture. “I don’t know if my father blames himself,” Aaron says. “He always thought he was the provider, not only to our family but to our neighbors, too. In the village, people looked to him. His understanding of his family, his village, was lost, along with that intangible sense of responsibility you can measure only in kind acts. He lost his home and his self-worth. He was dehumanized.”

  “I spent a lot of time wondering what I would do if I saw these people who did this to him on the street, in another life or situation,” Aaron recalls.

  One night, he was offered that chance.

  A group of men came to see Aaron in his hut claiming
they had found one of the people responsible for the family’s eviction from the village. “We have no doubt it’s him,” they said. “Let’s teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget!” Aaron and a few others who had been victims of this man’s brutality arrived at his hut in the new camp. The man who lived in this hut was once a member of the District Planning Committee and had worked alongside Aaron’s father. During the purge, Bhutanese security forces had recruited Lhotshampa foot soldiers. This so-called colleague of Devi’s became a low-level official who played a role in evicting his fellow villagers. “I was so angry at him and his collaborators,” Aaron says. “I couldn’t get over it. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I saw him. I wanted to understand what drives human beings to do what they do. The beating, jailing, and starving. Was it anger? Was it hatred? Because of the actions of this man, we’d lost everything. Is this what you do when evil gets into you?”

  The man was not home, just his wife and children. Aaron pushed the door open and he and the other men let themselves inside. The children were sitting at a table in the middle of the hut. Not just any table, Aaron realized, but a table that the children’s father had appropriated, by force, when Aaron’s family had just a day to live in the village.

  “Could I forgive this man? Could I move on without confronting him in some way? I did not know.”

  Though Archbishop Tutu is resolute that no one should or even can be forced to forgive, he is quick to add: “We can only hope that the sufferer will realize that not forgiving affects them as a human being, and hope that they will see that nursing a grudge is bad for their health—it can give one stomach ulcers.”

  We know from the research that what Tutu has realized through hard-lived experience is right. “Forgiving,” the archbishop says, “is good for our health.”