Yet instead of feeling humiliated by the nationally broadcast attack on his character and the ensuing controversy at the college, circumstances that saw him first suspended from his job, then reinstated, Zack seemed to wear the entire event as a badge of honor. Indeed, he appeared to be basking in the glory of controversy, as though he’d received a prestigious award instead of the steady flow of hate mail that condemned him as a traitor and terrorist. In fact, he delighted in showing the hate mail to whomever might be interested, readily reaching into his valise to pull out letters and emails proffering vitriolic and damnatory communications, especially those that spewed confused and fantastic allegation that had little, if anything, to do with his particular case.
“Look,” Zack would say, both delight and incredulity marking his face, “this one thinks Palestinians are an Afghan tribe. And here, read this one. It says I’m an agent for Saddam Hussein, who they call the dictator of Iran. They can’t even match the names with the proper country. For these people it is all the same, all one big jumble of hate. It doesn’t matter whether you are Somali or Pakistani. Every Muslim is the same in their minds. It just points out how the media and the government have manipulated the populace.”
Nor was Zack cowed by the government’s investigation of him. He had done nothing illegal nor anything to be ashamed of, he declared. His only desire had been to help relieve the suffering of the Palestinian people. The professor of Islamic studies found a number of supporters eager to condemn the government’s action. Zack’s advocates, who tended to have their geographic and political facts more or less in proper order, chuckled smartly at the more outrageous errors that Dr. Ashrawi plucked from the piles of hate mail he received. Yet their knowledge went little deeper than that, and they, like their right-leaning counterparts, were happiest simply repeating the snippets and sound bites they gleaned from their favorite news source.
If Amir wasn’t on the side of those who condemned Zack Ashrawi, for attitude if not for traitorous act, he also couldn’t be said to be counted among the professor’s ardent supporters. He agreed to help Zack once again because he felt he could hardly do otherwise. If he was going to express his own experience as a victim of war, how could he in conscience not help others who were at that very moment suffering the same? But the more he worked on editing the video footage Zack had asked him to distill into short digital clips, the quicker he wanted to be done with it. Amir’s own project was calling out to him urgently and insistently, its germination within his imagination having unleashed a fierce creative urge.
Amir envisioned his new film as one that would have little dialogue but nonetheless would be complex to script for the very simplicity that he wished to bring to it. In his initial research that summer, Amir had counted just over 150 wars or brutal repressions having occurred worldwide in the twentieth century, causing, by very conservative estimate, the deaths of more than 175 million individuals.
Contrary to common understanding, fewer than a tenth of those who died were actual combatants involved in the conflicts. The greater majority, by far, were victims from civilian populations, killed either by direct cause of warfare or by residual effects of injury or starvation. Statistical data made it clear that for each soldier killed in conflict, at least ten innocent civilians would forfeit their lives. When you considered the great number of combatants who themselves were civilians drafted or forced into the service, the data became even more daunting to contemplate.
As he read the statistics, Amir was struck not only by the shocking numbers but even more so by his own ignorance of them. How could war be understood as one thing and yet be so much another? Even for someone like him, who had experienced it firsthand? A search of his own memory easily corroborated the statistical ratio of civilian-to-combatant death. Amir had previously assumed that all of the civilian deaths he had witnessed had somehow been an anomaly isolated to his particular experience. The assumption that the rest of the war had involved soldiers fighting soldiers sat in his mind like the common wisdom of an old aphorism whose truth everyone took for granted.
The idea that his experience of war hadn’t been an isolated exception to the norm but was instead a universal result was shocking to both his heart and his mind. In the movies as well as the media, war was always portrayed as the brave soldier coming up against the evil foe, combatant to combatant—war glamorized through the glorification of the heroic warrior. Yet his own experience had shown him a truth far from the entertainment industry’s simplistic treatment so readily accepted by the public. The real experience of war was as complex as any of human interaction, the intensity and range of emotions it drew forth marking for life those who were involved. Valor, fear, love, hate, selflessness, and selfishness, mixing, often overlapping in moments of extreme trauma or days of tedious drudgery, of waiting in trepidation for what might come. Amir knew there was no glamor to any of it. He was not surprised that many of those who fought in wars should allow their service to be represented by politicians and film producers as glorious, even when they understood a far more horrific truth. Traumatized emotionally, if not physically, soldiers were easy prey for warmakers who would hail their valor and then quickly forget them, leaving the veterans to endure their nightmares in solitary obscurity.
Amir began to more fully understand that war meant not only soldiers battling each other but also the targeting of those who wanted no more than to escape it. As the young filmmaker read further into the details of twentieth-century wars, he was shocked to learn that it wasn’t always the aggressor who consciously took innocent lives. Often it was also those who claimed the side of right, who decried an enemy that would target civilians or use them as shield, who then found justification for their own policies that permitted the calculated killing of innocent nonparticipants.
Collateral damage, that most shameful and cynical phrase of modern invention, had entered the popular lexicon as a rationalization of what amounted to legalized murder. Solemnly spoken by politicians and generals, the two words would float from their mouths to hang in the air for all the world to hear the sincerity of the speaker’s regret, as though the calculated killing of innocent noncombatants was a result of some disastrous act of nature and not a decision of their own choice and responsibility. It was a nightmare catch-22…the barbarity of the evil justifying the dark acts of the “good.”
The more he read, the more Amir was drawn into that aspect of human behavior, which he had long sought to void from his conscious mind. Not given to political or social passion, Amir nevertheless forced himself to discuss the results of his research with his friends and classmates. When the subject of civilian deaths came up, he was met with comments of universal compassion. However, when speaking of it as resulting from governmental policy there was, on the whole, a reaction of a different order. Sympathy turned to equivocation. When confronted with US involvement in a broader, cumulative picture of collateral damage, people seemed to quickly scurry to the shelter of generalities, weak justification, or patriotic cliché.
Amir was reminded of a news story from a few years past: A young girl had been found murdered in her Colorado home. Her body had been discovered in the basement, the cause of death determined to be strangulation. Amir remembered being shocked both by it and by the media frenzy that kept it front-page news for months. What he couldn’t understand then, and even less now, was how such sympathy and outrage could be generated by that one, tragic murder while the deaths of hundreds of children war victims would, if anything, receive little more than a day’s passing coverage compressed into a small paragraph crowded among a dozen other minor stories in the back pages of the newspaper.
While Amir was visiting his mother’s rented beach cottage that summer, the conversation one evening turned to a recent news report about a bombing in Afghanistan. American warplanes had been on routine patrol when the celebrants of an Afghan wedding party had the unfortunate bad luck to be shooting off their rifles in a traditional festive display as the squadron fl
ew nearby. The rifle fire posed no threat to the aircraft, but at the pilot’s report, the central command, assuming enemy hostility, ordered the squadron to bomb. Nearly everyone, including the bride and groom, had been killed. A celebration that should have culminated in joyous union had ended in tragedy.
Margaret was surprised to see her son step forward to take the lead in the discussion, his strong and animated reaction to the story taking her aback. It was as if a switch had flipped inside of him, his normal quiet demeanor suddenly converted from the personality of the meek to that of the impassioned. Even Jadranka, who had been witness to the gradual transformation Amir’s research into armed conflict was bringing about in him, was caught off guard by the heat of his words and the anger in his voice.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Alice’s husband, Paul, sighed in response to Amir’s condemnation of the act. “Sadly, in war these things are sometimes unavoidable.”
“Unavoidable?” Amir asked, his anger rising.
“Look, I don’t want to justify the loss of innocent life,” Paul said, well aware of his young brother-in-law’s past. “It is a tragedy. It’s just that I think that collateral damage is a part of war and there’s no escaping it.”
“Exactly,” Amir stated, his eyes fixing on Paul’s.
“Are you agreeing, then?” Paul responded, looking confused. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying that as long as you see collateral damage as inevitable, then it always will be. Then the justification for its continuation will be built in to its very act, the good guys using the bad guys for excuse and the bad guys using the good, and in the end nobody doing anything about what amounts to legalized murder.”
When the conversation changed to other topics, Margaret felt relieved, the intensity of her son’s emotions worrying her. At the same time, however, she felt that Amir was doing exactly what he needed to do: become engaged in the world. Was he being naïve, or had she lost hope that things could change in a world that seemed to see only in black and white—the breadth and depth of its color spectrum dulled to “us” and “them”?
Amir spent his first few weeks back at school ensconced in the library doing research, reading histories and personal accounts of various wars, searching the Internet for statistics and stories, and writing them down until all the pages of his notebook were filled and he had to buy another. Compiling the data on his laptop, he shared it with his friends, ostensibly to share the results with those who had expressed interest in his project, though really more to observe their reactions.
To Amir, the statistics and stories he’d gathered were shocking. Somehow, though, those waves of shock hadn’t penetrated far beyond the part of his brain that dealt with facts. His mind had seized up when it came to translating those quantifiers into visions of reality. His friends’ reactions seemed to parallel his own. Listening to the statistics of death and destruction he shared with them, their responses followed in a kind of automatic expression of revulsion that, for all their declarations, sounded dulled and distant to his ear. It was as if they were a passenger in Amir’s car and he pointed out some dead animal lying on the roadway as they drove past, the viewer expressing his or her compassion and then quickly looking away, returning their attention to the road ahead of them before the gory scene had time to embed itself in memory.
It seemed that everyone with whom he shared the results of his research, rather than engaging their imagination in the visualization of what they read, wanted to do just the opposite, to block it out. To keep it in the realm where the mind added, subtracted, divided, and could make rational sense of things. It was an impulse Amir could understand.
What was the point in exploring the terrible violence and cruelty of war if its act was but an inevitable fact of human society? It was, Amir slowly came to believe, the feeling of hopelessness that there ever could be an end to war, or even a diminishing of its acts of inhumanity, that caused the statistics that he had compiled to become no more than a momentary, glancing shock to the mind. For any real change to happen, there needed to be real hope—hope that the universally accepted culture of war could end. Hopelessness could do nothing other than bring with it a self-fulfilling prophecy of war’s inevitably along with the barbarity that marked its act.
When he sat down to write the script for his movie, Amir had the sense that it was, in its way, already written. It was his story and the story of everyone like him who ever suffered what he had, and worse. It wasn’t about the detail of his particular trauma or the particular war that had inflicted it upon him. There was, he felt, a universal link tying him to the past through time, to the present and future of every human who ever suffered or would suffer barbarous injustice at the hands of others. He would have little trouble showing the brutality of war. The problem for the young filmmaker was how he could do that and at the same time still carry a message of hope to the viewer. Without it, his film could be nothing more than an angry cry in the dark. And both darkness and anger served to the advantage of those whose identity and economic well-being depended upon the excuse and ennoblement of war.
Searching through every film and video war archive he could find, Amir began to amass footage in hope that he might later work it into a cohesive whole. Viewing image after image, he came to the same conclusion he had reached in his earlier research begun in the library: there was no clear, visible pattern to war and atrocity, to the whom, the why, the when, and the where. War was a story of the human species, belonging not to a religion or to the color of a population’s skin, an ideology, a governmental structure, or a status of wealth or poverty.
Unable to find a thread with which to continue the writing of his script, Amir went out into the world to begin shooting the film. He began by filming children playing in yards, in the streets, and at schools. He didn’t know what he was after, only that he wanted to awaken the eyes of those who might shut them tight or turn away, those who would disappear the victims of war, nullify their existence with words such as “collateral damage,” steal their individuality, and transform them into statistics and indifferent generalities.
With his filming complete, Amir entered, as he and his fellow film students had termed it, the “time of the dungeon,” where he reclused himself in the editing studios in the basement of the film department in an attempt to create a story from all the bits and pieces he had gathered from film archives and the footage he’d shot. He felt like a sculptor caught in a nightmare…dreaming himself enclosed in the very material from which he was meant to make a work of art. Trapped inside, he needed to hack his way out in order to begin his work, but in so doing, he was destroying the very object he meant to create.
Having abandoned all of the structure he had previously developed, Amir—without a real script, outline, or storyboard—found himself swimming against the current. It was, he knew, a place no experienced filmmaker should ever be. Yet he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t know how to approach this particular film in any other way. He was possessed by it, and not the other way around. Eventually he found himself in a creative situation that felt like a place of shattered pieces without structure or order.
It seemed he’d spent a lifetime in the dungeon and had gotten nowhere. Film trims dangled about him, hanging from the wires that traversed the editing studio like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Amir felt as if his head were about to explode. The mass of short video and film clips he’d collected from war archives hung around his neck like the proverbial albatross. He somehow had to make them fit with the footage he’d shot on his own—but not just fit. He was after something much more.
Amir understood that he had arrived at a very dangerous point. The whole project was a mess, a pile of images making no sense, more worthy of the trash can than to be seen by any eye. The words of one of his professors came to mind in frightening portent of his film’s possibility: “Every time you make a cut on film, you’re destroying it. You can never put it back whole again. Theref
ore, you must be discriminating about what it is the story wants and not interfere with it by trying to be clever or interjecting extraneous ideas.”
Sitting in the dungeon, Amir looked about him, feeling that he had chopped his film to death. Succumbing to frustration, he ripped a handful of film trims from their pegs and threw them to the floor, kicking and cursing. After his outburst, he slumped down into his chair, dejected. A short time later, he bent over and picked up a single piece of trim from the floor. Looking around the room, he was barely able to manage a small shake of his head toward the contents in his hand. Not knowing what else to do, he held the short length of film up to the light, his eyes staring at the image in one of its frames. The face of a lifeless child looked back at him, holding his eyes, refusing to let him go. A thread of something there drew Amir in. Part vision, part idea, it refused to reveal itself, its invitation to follow demanding the freedom to go where it would. Amir gathered up the discarded pieces of trim laying on the floor and hung them back in place. Picking up pen and paper, he began to write the script and storyboard anew, this time trying to listen and let the story tell itself.
Chapter 28
Among the three members of the independent project review committee, Harold Irving, the film department chair, had unexpectedly been the most critical. The other two professors, while agreeing that it was questionable as to whether the film fit the genre under which the student had been granted the permission to pursue the project, felt that its execution had been of high standard and therefore fully deserving of credit. Professor Irving, however, maintained that Amir had been allowed to substitute an independent project for course work on the basis that his film would reflect the same area of focus as the class he dropped. But it didn’t. It diverged sharply from the more conventional, observational documentary style outlined in the course syllabus, into a decidedly poetic and abstract work aimed at a specific point of view.
The Solace of Trees Page 27