by John Gibler
That was what they told the media, but at the same time, behind closed doors, they don’t believe you. They think no, it’s not true.
WRITING AND VIOLENCE
ALPHABETIC WRITING THRIVED FOR CENTURIES through the exercise of violence against the spoken word, against song, against other forms of writing, and above all, against those who so spoke, sang, or wrote. This was not the doing of the written word. This was not an inevitable outcome of alphabets, printing technology, ink, or paper. Alphabetic writing and printed books were forced by their early entrepreneurs to become killers.
Notice the difference between an agreement and a contract, between a custom and a law, between generational experience and a property title, between the tales of elders and the National Archive. Power rides with the written word. States structure themselves through texts: constitutions, legislation, codes and laws, newspapers and books, archives and libraries. And the governing classes of those states publicly worship these texts as if they were immortal, until they become inconvenient, in which case the governing classes ignore or rewrite them: Texts do not pull triggers or lock jail cells by themselves. Those who so celebrate such texts generate more texts; they debate, build careers, charge by the hour or by the word, and write an ongoing series of new texts, and then later more texts about the newer generations of texts. Power resides in the domain of the written word and the control over its production.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in her book Decolonizing Methodologies:
Writing or literacy, in a very traditional sense of the word, has been used to determine the breaks between the past and the present, the beginning of history and the development of theory. Writing has been viewed as the mark of a superior civilization and other societies have been judged, by this view, to be incapable of thinking critically and objectively, or having distance from ideas and emotions.1
With the creation of the mechanically printed book those who wrote, printed, and read such books called themselves “people of reason” and those who did not “people without reason.” This was not merely a matter of arrogance, but a distinction essential to the consolidation of the cruelest institutions of human history: colonialism, genocide, the transatlantic slave trade, patriarchy, and racism. For centuries, European men, with all their reason and printed books, debated in all purported seriousness whether or not non-Europeans were people, whether or not women should be “allowed” to learn to read and write. Those debates, of course, were never about understanding, but about torturing out of reason some way of justifying the unjustifiable, vile treatments of the non-Europeans and the women that those European men developed, institutionalized, industrialized, and got rich off of.
While the printed book became a symbol of power and Europe’s proclamation of cultural superiority, both the printing press and paper were first made in China centuries before Johannes Gutenberg printed the Bible in Mainz, Germany, in 1450. As Benedict Anderson points out in his book Imagined Communities, printing technology did not have a bigger impact in China because capitalism did not exist there, yet.2
“In a rather special sense, the book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity,”3 and quite different from the other essential commodities of the young European imperial states and early capitalism, such as sugar, tobacco, and textiles. By 1500, forty-some years after the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, somewhere around 20 million4 books were printed in Europe. Between 1500 and 1600 the number rose to somewhere between 150 million and 200 million. In his book about the origins of nationalism, Anderson argues that printing technology in combination with the early development of the relations of production known as capitalism, had revolutionary impacts in Europe. Print and capitalism contributed to the fall of Latin as the written language of the elites. They also became an essential part of the Reformation and the success of Martin Luther—“In effect, Luther became the first best-selling author”5—and contributed to the consolidation of regional vernaculars such as Spanish and English. (Shortly after the mass printing of books in such languages, the languages stopped the processes of transformation they had undergone before printing: One can read with little difficulty books written in the 16th century, but not those written in the 11th century). And through all this, print and capitalism contributed to the capacity to imagine secular communities defined by those languages and territorial boundaries, the process that would lead to the development of the concepts of nation and nationalism.6
In “the Americas,” European languages, alphabetic writing, printing, and books all have a bloody history: “Access to written texts in Spanish or Latin was in itself a mark of distinction that separated colonizer from colonized, rulers from ruled, European from native.”7 The prohibition was quite intentional. The Spaniards systematically destroyed Mayan and Náhuatl texts. Walter Mignolo, in his study of literacy, territoriality, and colonization, writes: “The celebration of the letter and its complicity with the book were not only a warranty of truth but also offered the foundations for Western assumptions about the necessary relations between alphabetic writing and history. People without letters were thought of as people without history, and oral narratives were looked at as incoherent and inconsistent.”8
In a different colonial context, Ranajit Guha, in his study of rural insurgency in colonial India, draws attention to “the peasant’s hatred for the written word.” Guha writes: “He had learnt, at his own cost, that the rent roll could deceive; that the bond could keep him and his family in almost perpetual servitude; that official papers could be used by clerks, judges, lawyers, and landlords to rob him of his land and livelihood. Writing was thus, to him, the sign of his enemy.”9 During slavery in the United States, it was illegal in various states for Black people to learn to read and write. “The most common known punishment for pursuing such learning was amputation.”10
Colonial administrators, generals, slave traders, police, landowners, philosophers, novelists, and poets all used alphabetic writing as an essential tool of domination while simultaneously denying the depravity of their violence by denying the humanity of their victims.11 This is one of the fundamental wounds of colonial history, but it was not opened nor maintained by the mere existence of letters, printing presses, or bookbinding. As José Rabasa writes in his study of historiography and conquest: “The colonizing force of alphabetical writing resides in the ideologies that inform its dissemination and the rules that implement scriptural projects, rather than in the technology itself.”12 Such ideologies and scriptural projects promoted physical invasion, enslavement, murder, torture, rape, racial hierarchies, and other forms of terror. In the grip of these ideologies that so loudly proclaimed values of liberty and democracy, writers and soldiers were not entirely distinguishable from one another.
As Ranajit Guha writes in his essay “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency”: “The historian’s attitude to rebels is in this instance indistinguishable from that of the State—the attitude of the hunter to his quarry.”13
Regarded thus an insurgent is not a subject of understanding or interpretation but of extermination, and the discourse of history, far from being neutral, serves directly to instigate official violence. [ . . . ] In this affinity with policy historiography reveals its character as a form of colonialist knowledge.14
Guha’s reflections come in the context of a detailed analysis of a British historian’s 1953 book on the 1799 Chuar Rebellion against British colonial power in India. His observations are also useful here and now for the person writing about the insurgents of the contemporary world. Reproducing the State’s attitude to insurgents supports State violence against them—torture, forced disappearance, murder, massacre—as well as the epistemic violence necessary for ongoing colonial policies. When a writer or journalist identifies and rejects the hunter’s, or the land speculator’s, gaze and colonialist knowledge, what does he or she become?
“What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality,” writes Janet Malcolm in her book The Journalist and th
e Murderer, “is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”15 The combination of “blind self-absorption” and “publicist” makes it seem as if Malcolm assumes that any individual speaking to a journalist is doing so willingly in a capitalist marketplace of ideas and stories. That is, that any such person is just trying to sell something. A journalist’s skepticism is thus necessary for Malcolm to extract something interesting out of “blind self-absorption.” Malcolm’s assumption here exhibits, I think, one of the prime characteristics of the worldview and system of plunder known as “whiteness.” Her assumption dissolves all possible differences of position into a universal standard of the “human” based on Malcolm and her white interviewees’ particular experiences. (With one exception—Jeffrey Elliot, a white scholar of Black studies—Malcolm only racially identifies Black people in her book—e.g., “a young black woman named Sheila Campbell,” on page 44. Most of Malcolm’s interviewees are white, though only one, Elliot, is explicitly identified as such. Providing racial identifiers for people of color while not providing them for white people is a standard practice of whiteness, one of many insidious and violent strategies of claiming “white” experience as universal.) In Malcolm’s formulation, the “subject” and the “journalist” face each other in what would be theoretically a willing and equal relationship of power in the marketplace of ideas and stories. This assumption ignores, denies even, how race, gender, class, sexual orientation, language, age, and pain—so many “enmeshments of the body in time”16—structure the relationships of power between people in even the most seemingly mundane encounters, such as the relationships between people consenting to be interviewed for publication and people requesting to carry out such interviews.
I do not believe that everyone who participates in an interview with a journalist is essentially motivated by “blind self-absorption.” Parents, for example, looking for their disappeared children or seeking justice for their murdered children will often consent to—and seek out—interviews as integral parts of their struggles, despite the pain brought up by the interviews. They want to find their disappeared children, or see their children’s murderers punished, not promote themselves. I do not believe, for example, that a person who has survived torture and who is an active member of a clandestine guerrilla group, such as Andrés Tzompaxtle, could be said to heed “blind self-absorption” in consenting to be interviewed. For one, clandestine insurgents such as Tzompaxtle seek to conceal almost all details about their individual histories and lives to protect themselves from State repression. Tzompaxtle has granted three interviews in twenty-five years, and each time his desire to speak corresponded to making public his knowledge about State practices of torture and forced disappearance. He does not want to make his knowledge public to get tenure at a university; as he says quite clearly, he wants to help others who are fighting against those practices of State violence. To ask whether or not he also holds some degree of self-interest in presenting himself as a rebel seems to me offensive given the cause for the interview: What he has survived and the ongoing practices of State torture and forced disappearance. It seems to me that the “journalist’s skepticism” in this context would be the equivalent of what Guha calls the attitude of the State, “the attitude of the hunter to his quarry.” Avoiding such skepticism does not necessarily mean, however, being a publicist. Rather, I believe it means being an insurgent.
Some will say that a writer should not take sides, but should strive to remain objective. Such a response is insidious. Objectivity becomes, in practice, a mechanism for disguising official discourse, the discourse of power; in the hands of white writers, it becomes a mechanism for concealing and denying whiteness, for arrogantly and falsely claiming that a subjective text corresponds exclusively to objective facts and thus acquires the standing of some universal truth. From the moment a journalist or writer chooses to speak to one person and not another, to travel to one area and not another, to ask this question and not that question, to select this quote and not that quote, to use this adjective and not that one, the journalist is exercising subjectivity—decisions and values and desires—that structure and permeate the text. Objectivity is a ruse, and a dangerous and offensive one at that.
Honesty, in contrast, seems a value to which one can at least aspire. To be honest with the people about whom one plans to write and to be honest with one’s readers about what one has written. And to be honest with oneself about one’s own decisions, values, and desires and one’s own particular standing in the power dynamics established through the very forms of violence one opposes, such as torture, racism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Janet Malcolm, in her reflections on the journalist’s craft, argues against absolute honesty with the person the journalist plans to write about. She writes that there is an essential act of deception at the heart of journalism:
The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. . . . [There is a] falseness built into the writer-subject relationship, about which nothing can be done. . . . Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody puts his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.17
I do not want to settle into some “deliberately induced state of moral anarchy,” assuming that Malcolm uses “anarchy” here to mean something like an unresolved contradiction. Nor am I convinced by the “tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism.” Perhaps she is correct, however, when she writes that if “everybody puts their cards on the table, the game would be over.” Which leads me to ask: Might it not be better to stop that game and start something else?
Rather than the skepticism proposed by Malcolm, for me the vitality of journalism stems from leaving texts behind, for a time, and taking to the streets and the countryside to listen and to converse. Whoever assumes the attitude of the hunter does not listen so much as stalk to kill.
In his book Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier, José Rabasa asks: “To what extent can one write about violence without perpetuating it?”18 In addressing this question, Rabasa develops the idea of “writing violence” to encompass both the act of writing about violence and the violence wielded by that writing. Rabasa explains this as follows:
The concept of writing violence comprises both the representations of massacres, tortures, rapes, and other forms of material terror, as well as categories and concepts informing the representation of territories for conquest, the definition of Indian cultures as inferior, and the constitution of colonized subjectivities. Whereas the first meaning of writing violence is self-evident, the second might provoke readers to resist seeing the force of writing itself as violence.19
Rabasa analyzes the writing of the Spaniards carrying out the violent invasion and conquest of territories that would be named “the Americas,” including the writing of Spaniards critical of some aspects of Spanish colonial violence such as Bartolomé de las Casas in his 1552 book, Brevíssima relación de la destruyción de las Indias. Rabasa continues his investigation into the concept of writing violence as follows:
Descriptions of torture and terror lend themselves to a clari
fication of the materiality of writing violence. I can anticipate someone observing that there is an ontological difference between terrorizing someone and describing the torture in writing. But description can fulfill at least two functions: to instruct in techniques and to set an example. These modes of writing pertain to a culture of violence, but they also exercise material violence inasmuch as they have psychological impacts; the first forms the subjectivity of torturers (I assume a numbing of sensibilities), and the second aims to terrorize a population. . . . Description ensures a continuity of violence by shaping the sensibilities of those who will either endorse or commit future acts of terror.20