The Solace of Trees
Page 34
Was your interest in writing The Solace of Trees sparked in part by the modern-day humanitarian refugee crisis in Syria? Do you find parallels between Amir’s story and those of Syrian child refugees?
The parallels between Syria and Bosnia are painful. Firstly, because of the suffering experienced by the people themselves. Secondly, because the world’s lack of response has been essentially the same in both cases. I began writing The Solace of Trees before the Syrian War began. But this story is the story of the Syrian conflict, and will be that of other armed conflicts to come, as long as we fail to confront the causes that bring them about. There are today over 65 million people worldwide displaced by conflict or persecution, a level higher than even in the aftermath of World War II. There isn’t a wall big enough that you can build that will keep this growing global crisis from landing on our doorstep in one form or another. In the not-so-distant future, these refugees will begin being joined by those forced from their homes by climate change, making the toll of human suffering even greater. It is in our self-interest to address these issues in an immediate and meaningful way.
In The Solace of Trees, there are some truly chilling episodes describing war atrocities committed against civilians. How did you become familiar with this subject area and, as a result, passionate about exposing it to a fiction-reading audience?
My research focused on first-hand accounts and documented proceedings from the war crimes trials held after the Bosnian War. The shock I felt at the instances of the inhumanity that research revealed quickly turned to anger and initially caused me to include a litany of atrocities in the book’s early draft. But the acts were just so horrific that I ended up editing most of them out. I was concerned they would overwhelm the reader, preventing concentration on the story and the underlying themes the book seeks to address. The recounting of the events I did include is not meant to shock but to build the foundation of the story and give the reader a true picture of the brutality that occurs when the targeting of civilian populations becomes a strategy of war.
What gave you the encouragement to push on and tell this story, rather than become discouraged by the knowledge that such horrific acts occurred in recent history and continue to this day?
It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by a world that no longer fits our image of what we feel it should be. We tend to judge the present based upon nostalgia for a past we’ve elevated to a place of more idyllic time and become discouraged by the weight of the problems that face us in the here and now—issues that have grown to take on a global, universal character no longer controllable within the environment of our immediate, contained place of habitation. Against such odds you feel as though there is little you can do about anything, so the tendency is to do nothing at all. And that’s when we all lose. As individuals we can’t do much to affect a war in progress, but we can act on smaller things that are more easily achievable for us, giving what we can in the way of financial, political, and moral support. Cumulatively that can add up to a lot. The more people who speak out against the targeting of civilian populations, the more those voices can become a deterrent to its use as a strategy of war in future conflicts.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) plays a key role in the life of the protagonist, Amir, and also more generally in the novel. How did you become familiar with this psychological phenomenon, especially with respect to PTSD in child refugees?
The literature on child refugees suffering from PTSD is just beginning to develop in terms of historical data. For the purposes of the book, I relied on what I could find of literature published by mental health professionals who worked with child victims of war from Bosnia as well as that written about child survivors of the genocides that occurred in Cambodia and Rwanda. The effects upon these children can be severe, with lifelong repercussions. Unfortunately, too many child victims of war suffering from PTSD receive little if any treatment. Their journey into adulthood becomes hindered by chronic symptoms that never allow them to fully integrate into society. The cost of war, then, continues long after the signing of any peace treaty that might end the conflict that brought about their suffering.
Although Amir is from a secular Muslim family, his experience is different from that of many Muslim Americans. How does Amir’s experience compare with that of Muslim Americans today?
One of the mandates for unaccompanied child refugees coming to the States is that, whenever possible, they be placed with people of their own cultural and religious background. In Amir’s case, his physical and emotional impairments took precedence over that directive, and it was determined that an individual care placement with someone experienced in dealing with his particular disabilities was the highest priority. His American foster mother did, however, make efforts to get Amir to take part in a Bosnian-American organization, and they did attend some of its events. But he wasn’t ready to further explore his heritage at that point. Immigrant children often feel torn between the culture they’ve been settled in and that of their birth country. I found this to be true in my own case, growing up outside of the US in a foreign culture. My children experienced similar struggles of identity when we moved overseas during their early childhood.
There is a tendency in our country to view Muslims as a kind of monolithic culture, all sharing the same values, lifestyle, and beliefs. The truth of the matter, however, is there is as much diversity among people of Muslim heritage as there is among Christians or individuals of any other religious or cultural identity.
Is there a connection between Amir’s PTSD and his eventual passion for filmmaking?
Yes, that’s definitely the case. Filmmaking is a way for Amir to see the world both more intimately and at the same time from a safe distance. Child victims of war have experienced an aspect of humanity, or rather, inhumanity, that the rest of us can choose to consider or not as our comfort with reading or hearing about it allows. For a child who has gone through what Amir has, this is not the case. What he has lived through is always there with him. It visits him and not the other way around. Filmmaking gives him the opportunity to reverse that dynamic.
As far as his foster placement and eventual adoption are concerned, Amir seems to have been quite fortunate. Is this out of the ordinary? Do child refugees, especially ones with disabilities or mental health issues, often get such acceptance into foster, medical, and therapeutic care in the United States?
The great majority of foster parents are caring, giving people. They come from all social and economic backgrounds. Amir was fortunate in both being placed with a foster parent who could help augment the limited budget designated for helping child refugees, and being sponsored, in the first place, by a religious charitable organization whose efforts over the years have brought thousands of children to the US and placed them in good homes.
Sadly, there are many more child refugees than there are programs and visas available for them to be relocated to the US or other countries of safe haven. For those suffering from disabilities or mental health issues, it is even more difficult to find placements. If Amir’s situation were to have occurred in the present day, it would be highly unlikely he would have a chance to find refuge in the United States. The opportunities for child refugees to be relocated outside of the war zones that have created them are, if anything, shrinking, not increasing.
Forests, and especially trees, play a key role in Amir’s life. Do you have a special relationship with nature that may have influenced this?
Like most people, I find great comfort in nature. As a child who moved as often as I did—it was something on the order of thirteen or fourteen times—nature was always a sustaining force for me, a relationship I didn’t need to worry about having to leave behind when we transitioned to a new home. It’s easy to forget that we are part of nature and not separate from it. Our anthropocentrism is such that we forget that nature is not dependent on us, but, rather, it is we who are dependent upon it for our survival. Nature can remind us of the relativity of our true place in th
e universe, through either stunning beauty or terrifying force. There is no ambiguity in nature.
The novel is in third person throughout, but there are subtle shifts of perspective. Toward the very end, the language shifts to reflect more the perspective of Amir’s captor than that of Amir. This leads to a chilling but profound ending. What is your motivation regarding the transitions in perspective in the novel? Why not tell Amir’s story from solely his point of view?
The Solace of Trees is about war as experienced by civilian populations who want nothing more than to escape it. Our understanding of armed conflict, for the most part, comes to us filtered through the lens of political and military perspectives. That is the most common point of view we take in when we watch the nightly news, read the paper, or go to the movies. Even when there is coverage of civilian populations caught up in war, it comes to us distilled through those perspectives. It seems distant to us, beyond our control, and makes us feel as though there is nothing we can really do about the sad happenings we glimpse from afar.
The Solace of Trees is written from the opposite view, one that comes from the innards of war’s workings. The shifts of perspective that occur in the book are meant to juxtapose the emotional and mental processes of those on the outside looking in with those who are directly caught up in war’s brutal act. They link the two seemingly disparate worlds in an attempt to reveal that they are, in truth, one and the same—our place of comfort and safety not absolving us of responsibility for the suffering of those who live in misery and terror. With the world growing ever smaller, the evasion of that responsibility ultimately ends up shifting the problem onto the shoulders of our children and grandchildren. They will be the ones who pay the price of our complacency.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Madrygin spent his early years in postwar Japan, where his father, a US military lawyer, had been appointed defense counsel for Japanese POWs. He attended a local school, and learned to speak Japanese. His father’s career then brought him back to the US to live on both coasts, and subsequently to Morocco, Franco-ruled Spain, and Paris. The adjustment in cultural shifts and moving from home to home were made all the more difficult due to the illness his mother suffered throughout her life, causing long periods of hospitalization and necessitating that he be placed in a succession of temporary homes during his early childhood. While Madrygin was in his teens, his father suffered a series of massive debilitating strokes and his mother died. On his own at a young age, he continued a life of travel. He worked in Spain as a laborer, in Italy as a deckhand on a ship, and in Alaska on a railroad and as a crew member on a fishing boat. Madrygin first started writing in his early twenties but put it aside when he met his future wife, married, and started a family. During this period Madrygin, his wife, and three children lived in the US, Ecuador, and Spain and traveled widely. It wasn’t until years later, while living in Spain, with his children now grown, that the call to writing returned, and Madrygin, informed by a lifetime of experience, took up where he had left off decades earlier. He and his wife live currently in Vermont.