It is probable that such a homecoming envisaged by the policeman cannot occur in reality: before a black orphan would be brought into the house of the oppressor, many others in his own community would care for that boy. But as a metaphor, as epic drama, as a pluri-cultural ideal, what more could we ask for, what better challenge to present day South Africa, what better image of a multiracial omni-linguistic home can be offered? Is that policeman not speaking across continents and time to the woman who cried for Pinochet, is he not demanding that she take Carlos the carpenter home with her? Is he not affirming that it is his duty, as a policeman, to protect the carpenter’s portrait of Allende, his right to display that portrait on the wall, rather than persecuting him for his memories and his ideas? Are we not all being invited to bring into our homes what is concealed behind the walls of our identity, that which most disturbs us, those memories from the thickets of others that we have considered to be alien, to be hazardous to our integrity? Is it not in that back and forth process of offering a refuge to those who are different that we can find intimations of what it means to reconcile or at least move down a pale path towards tolerance? Is this not what literature and art do incessantly, invite us into the homes of strangers so we may know ourselves better, create a startling birthplace of common language from which we can explore an enigmatic world?
Above all, however, I would like to concentrate on the homeless orphan and what it might mean to him to be taken care of, to be truly cared for. Because all my words are meaningless unless they reach that child, unless they help fashion a world which that child deserves to inherit, unless the stories I have been telling speak to that boy who has lost his elders. I wonder, in fact, if that child, now grown, is not listening or watching this lecture, if he will not come forward in the days ahead to claim his public place, emerging from the hazy boundaries of storytelling into the history of his country, like the photo of Allende yearned to emerge into the history of my own land.
Think of children like him, boys like him, girls like him, all over the world. Think of them as potentially homeless because of our actions. We may not have murdered their parents, but we have built societies where girls and boys from every latitude and climate are in danger: famines, sicknesses, war, drought, poverty, beatings, pollution, civil strife, refugees and xenophobia, drugs and ignorance, women deprived of their rights, the compassion of the world’s religions hijacked by fundamentalists, leaders who seem to have no control over events, high officials of governments tolerating thuggery and corruption when they should know better, are not all of these crimes against humanity and the future? Worse still, there may be no future: we still have nuclear weapons that can render ourselves and our brother and sister animals extinct, we have blindly allowed our planet to be plundered and desecrated by our greed and our desires and our indifference. How can we take the child back home with us if there is no earth itself to greet him, no home for us all? What message of hope do my three intertwined stories deliver to those children and to a world crying out for concrete solutions to dire dilemmas?
Memory matters. One of the primary reasons behind the extraordinary crisis humanity finds itself in is due to the exclusion of billions of human beings and what they remember, men and women who are not even a faraway flicker on the nightly news, on the screen of reality. One of the ways out of our predicament is to multiply the areas of participation, to create veritable oceans of participation. To offer room and respect to those memories and stories is not a merely charitable, paternalistic initiative, but an act of supreme self-preservation. A nation that does not take into account the multitude of suppressed memories of the majority of its people will always be weak, basing its survival on the exclusion of dissent and otherness. Those whose lives are not valued, not given narrative dignity, cannot really be part of the solution to the abiding problems of our times. We cannot afford to wait twenty-five years, like that carpenter did, for each hidden dream to step into the light of day.
For that light to come, we must discover ways to diminish the fear that seeps into every aspect of our contemporary condition. The fear that we will be punished if we raise our voices. The fear that we will be mocked or derided if we reach out to those with whom we disagree. The fear that our attempt to redress the wrongs we may have committed will be met with rage and the desire for revenge.
Fear, yes, fear is our real enemy and its main victim is always trust.
That may be the central plea of this lecture: that if we do not trust one another, we shall all die.
It will not be easy. Unless we recognize the need for all the hidden photos and memories of the poorest and most neglected on this earth to find a safe haven, there will be no trust. There will be no trust unless we make efforts to disarm the most powerful, those who believe themselves the exclusive owners of the truth and can therefore, when they are challenged, commit all manner of crimes and misdemeanors in the name of their apprehension. And perhaps we need to start by disarming our own selves, admitting that none among us is so perfect or saintly that we are immune from the temptations of power and dominance, perhaps we should try to conquer the fear of our own nakedness. And then, maybe, who knows, others will trust us.
Can it be done in time? Can we take the children home with us? Before we destroy our planet?
Let us attend then to the message of hope that Nelson Mandela has been sending us.
One of the major pleasures of Madiba during his captivity was his garden. He tells us often of how uplifting it was to plant and harvest under the sun and rain, to be in control of that small patch of earth when he controlled nothing else in the world except his dignity and his memories and the certainty that his comrades would continue struggling. He tells us of the joy of sharing with his fellow prisoners but also with his jailers the bounty that his labors produced, what he and the land birthed into existence in spite of the injustice and the sorrow and the separations.
Mandela’s garden is not a fluke, an exception. Recently I have been reading a book called Defiant Gardens, by Kenneth Helphand, who recounts the story of gardens created improbably in the midst of the viciousness of war. The desperate gardens of the Warsaw Ghetto and the stone gardens cultivated by the Japanese Americans in their internment camps during the Second World War, the vegetable beds fashioned in the shadow of the trenches of the First World War, the gardens which flourished minimally, at first hesitantly, then insolently, and always with gentleness, as the bombs fell in Vietnam and as American soldiers prepared to fight in Korea and the Persian Gulf. What is fascinating about this array of landscapes is that these diverse and divergent gardeners do not align themselves on the same side in war; they might even be sworn enemies. And yet, they are all human, they all hunger for flowers and fruit, they all ache to keep alive a hint that something will grow in spite of the surrounding night of destruction.
There is no guarantee that we will ever reach the deep reconciliation we need as a species. Indeed, I tend to think—it may be the transgressive writer in me—that some damage done is irreparable. I notice that when justice comes infrequently the most long-lasting memories are in danger of fading. But when despair visits me, I hold on to the image of the garden. A garden that grows like memories should. A garden that grows as justice should. A garden that grows like true reconciliation should.
And do not forget that for crops and vegetables, for leaves and trees, to grow, we need to sing to them.
We need to sing to the earth so it will forgive us and continue to provide hope.
We need to always remember the multiple, infinite gardens of Nelson Mandela and his people.
14.
THE TRUTH THAT MADE HER FREE
Early on the morning of Dec. 3, 1980, a farmer on a remote road in El Salvador spotted four bodies lying in a ditch. It was a sight that had become inexcusably normal, even unexceptional, in that small “breathtakingly poor” Central American country in the throes of a civil war and a guerrilla insurrection. That year alone, over 8
,000 men, women and children had been slaughtered, most of them by the government’s armed forces and paramilitary death squads.
Once the corpses were identified, however, it turned out that there was indeed something exceptional about these particular victims. Not that all four were women, not that two had been raped, not that the perpetrators did not care to hide their crime. What made this into an international scandal was that the women happened to be United States citizens rather than “ordinary” Salvadorans, and that three of them, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Maura Clarke, were Catholic nuns (the fourth, Jean Donovan, was a lay volunteer doing missionary work).
Eileen Markey’s A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura, just published at the end of this terrible 2016, is not an investigation into the killing itself, like Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder, a masterly book that delved into the web of intrigue and deception surrounding the 1998 homicide of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala. But what Markey accomplishes is something equally valuable: to painstakingly map out the path that brought one of the nuns, Maura Clarke, who was nearly 50 years old, almost inevitably to that ditch in a foreign land.
Tracing Maura’s roots to a patriotic Bronx childhood suffused with religious imagery and brimming with stories about her immigrant father’s dedication to the cause of Irish independence, the author explains why the Maryknoll order was a natural home for someone who cared so lovingly for others and wanted to alleviate their pain. Markey also explores Maura’s own doubts about her worthiness for such a vocation. The story, a bit ponderous at the beginning, at least for this nonreligious reviewer, picks up once Maura arrives in Nicaragua in 1959 and gets involved with the needs and hopes of her parishioners. It then accelerates even more dramatically once the community she had come to worship as the living embodiment of Jesus joined the Sandinista insurgency destined to topple the corrupt and tyrannical Somoza regime. The final chapters chart Maura’s experience in El Salvador after she answered, not without some trepidation, the call by Archbishop Romero (himself assassinated during Mass a few months before her own death) for Maryknoll sisters to assist the church at a moment when its children, the peasants, and the squatters of his country, were being persecuted in ways reminiscent of early Christians under the Roman Empire.
Her final months of activism—ferrying refugees out of conflict zones, offering sanctuary to survivors of massacres, transporting food and medical supplies to faraway and wounded communities, documenting atrocities in case prosecution might someday be viable—resonated with me personally. At the time, in 1980, my wife and I lived in exile from our native Chile, where a similar resistance was growing against General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. And just as members of the clergy in Chile were targeted by the military authorities for their part in the struggle, so too were the churchwomen in El Salvador targeted for defending the human rights of people they saw as “blessed temples of the Lord.”
Maura and her colleagues chose to ignore the death threats they began to receive, insisting that the Good Shepherd does not abandon the flock to the wolves. And so it was that the wolves descended upon them, their broken and mutilated bodies meant to be a lesson in fear. If even American nuns could be killed with impunity, who then was safe?
Eileen Markey has meticulously researched the many fluctuations of her subject’s journey, visiting each place Maura inhabited, parsing government cables and memos, combing through thousands of private letters, interviewing scores of men and women whose lives were touched by the martyred nun, with no fact, factor, or marginal event left unreported. I sympathize with this passionate urge to help the dead speak, to rescue a voice of love that has been silenced forever by violence. And yet, that exhaustive zeal can also be somewhat, well, exhausting. Do we really need to learn about the trips of Maura’s innumerable relatives, or that “being home was delicious” and be immediately reminded in the same paragraph that “it was heaven to be home”? Surely it’s unnecessary to reiterate every few pages that Maura had a beautiful smile, conveying all over again how open, conciliatory, and friendly she was? I could go on with other instances where some judicious editing would have been welcome, but none of these minor limitations make the book any less important.
Because this is not only the story of one woman. It personifies a movement, a generation, an era in history. The old-fashioned church that Maura entered, that preached obedience and submission, changed after the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council and the Medellín bishops’ conference of 1968, opening the door to a fiery theology of liberation. The nuns now felt compelled to denounce “the hierarchies that condemned so many people…to poverty” and to demand that the church itself, conservative and male-dominated, examine its own role in the unequal distribution of wealth and power. For many who served in religious orders—and Maura is a shining example—this new understanding of the Gospel meant siding with revolution against dictatorship, even at the risk of sharing the fate of a God of the poor who had died on the cross. And, in the case of Maura and many of her religious co-workers, it also meant realizing that her country, the United States, was aiding and abetting the very tyrannies that kept el pueblo de Dios in bondage. Her critique of American foreign policy and Cold War complicity in war crimes is made all the more striking when one considers that the officer who led the death squad that executed her and another who gave the orders had been trained at the School of the Americas, an institution run by the United States that continues to this day to “educate” the military of Latin America despite persistent calls to shut it down.
At a time when many in Maura’s country are once more questioning its imperial role in the world and her church is yet again searching its soul for ways to save not only the forgotten of the earth but the earth itself, this nun’s life and sacrifice seems more relevant than ever.
Of the many scenes from that life, one of the last ones may be the most moving and memorable. The night before Maura was murdered, she wrote to her ailing parents in the United States: “The human family will always search and yearn for liberation.” And added the words: “I’ll call you soon.”
She never got to make that call. But “A Radical Faith” has resurrected her so that Sister Maura can, in fact, call out, and continue her mission in search of justice. There is no better time to listen to this brave, compassionate woman, a committed role model for all those who, secular or religious, want to be “truly free.”
15.
READING CERVANTES IN CAPTIVITY
Of the many times that, since adolescence, I have returned to Don Quixote de la Mancha, there is one which, archetypical and collective and unique, I choose to remember, that I cannot help but remember. That reading, more than forty years ago, along with a desperate group of captive men and women, matters singularly when the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes compels us to ask if that seminal author, besides the delight and pleasure he affords us, has an urgent message for our turbulent twenty-first century.
Cervantes in person could not have imagined a stranger, more diverse, more appropriate gathering of readers of his book if he had resurrected with that sole purpose than those who were jam-packed into one of the ample salons of the Argentine Embassy in Santiago, sometime in mid-October of 1973. Outside that building, death stalked the city. A month before, on September 11th, the military had overthrown our President, Salvador Allende, and a reign of terror had begun against the people of Chile.
I had spent the month since the coup living clandestinely, barely one step ahead of General Pinochet’s secret police, until the Resistance ordered me to seek asylum in the Argentine Embassy. Once I had managed to smuggle myself past the soldiers who surrounded the premises, I was greeted by almost a thousand men, women, and children raggedly camped out in rooms meant to receive a few honored guests for cocktail parties. It was a hellish scene: a once-opulent garden obliterated by trampling feet. Malodourous bodies lined up endlessly in front of bathrooms that were broken fro
m overuse. Everybody was perpetually hungry, as the kitchen was too small to prepare meals for so many ravenous mouths. And, above all, there was an overwhelming sense of suffocation, above all the stench of desolation and fear.
Reading Don Quixote was part of a plan to combat that depressing atmosphere during the long weeks ahead, as we awaited safe-conduct that the Military Junta was loath to grant. Having taught that novel at the University, I had volunteered to lead an expedition into its depths, anticipating that the boisterous escapades of the Ingenious Hidalgo and his squire Sancho Panza would serve as an antidote to anguish and grief. Might we not all extract hope, and more than some flickers of laughter, from a hero who persistently roams the roads of Spain in search of widows to defend and orphans to champion, undeterred by the blows that rain down upon him because he insanely tries to revive the ideals of chivalry that his society no longer values?
That dose of good cheer first required obtaining a copy of the book, and the fascistic Argentine functionary, the First Secretary of the Embassy in charge of the unwelcome boarders, a tall, jowly, unpleasant man whose name I definitely prefer not to remember, was dismissive of my request. He commented, derisively, that we should have read that novel before embarking on our doomed attempt to radically change society. “You tilted at the capitalist windmills,” he sneered, “and the windmills gave you a well-deserved beating, not that your kind will ever learn anything other than running like rats.”
In spite of such invective, that official, perhaps grateful that we had not demanded bomb-making manuals or the diaries of Che Guevara, ended up delivering into my hands a copy of Don Quixote that was soon warming the hearts of thirty some refugees who had up until then been in touch only sporadically, and always superficially, with that Cervantes novel. Besides a few Chileans, most of these improvised readers had come to our country from the failed revolutions of other Latin American lands—Uruguay, Bolivia, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil, and, of course, Argentina. They therefore brought to the book a wealth of maturity and experience, and a depth of vulnerability and mourning, that had been lacking among my young University students. Many of these militants had been locked away for prolonged periods of time, had suffered torture and oppression and exile, had tried to keep alive inside the caverns of defeat and sorrow and loss, a thirst for justice that Cervantes would, I am sure, have sympathized with, even if a writer of his era (despite admiration for More’s Utopia) could hardly have been expected to espouse the same socialist principles. Like them, Cervantes had been the victim of astonishing adversity, and also like them, was challenged, as he wrote the two parts of Don Quixote, to stay immensely resourceful in a cruel and disenchanted world.
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