Comprenne qui voudra
Moi mon remords ce fut
La malheureuse qui resta
Sur le pavé
La victime raisonable
A la robe déchirée
Au regard d’enfant perdue
Découronnée, défigurée
Celle qui ressemble aux morts
Qui sont morts pour être aimés
Une fille faite pour un bouquet
Et couverte du noir crachat des ténèbres
Une fille galante
Comme une aurore de premier mai
La plus aimable bête
Souillée et qui n’a pas compris
Qu’elle est souillée
Une bête prise au piège
Des amateurs de beauté
Et ma mère la femme
voudrait bien dorloter
Cette image idéale
De son malheur sur terre1
The power of Eluard’s poem lies not only in his contrasting of ugliness and beauty and his counterposing of innocence and freshness to shame and obscenity. It is in his portrayal of this morbid, farcical concentration on the plight of womanhood. The fate of this tondue is the fate of his mother – his very own mother – who herself suffers for being a woman.
The problem with Eluard is that he leaves us with questions: what if the woman was not that innocent? What if she was not a symbol of the eternal feminine, the sweet beauty of desired passive femininity? What if she did not just love a German soldier, but also served the German occupiers in exchange for favours? After all, many novels, films and works of art in the period after the Second World War did sing the praises of love over and against national or group allegiance. Edith Piaf, for instance, gave us goose pimples each time she sang passionately: ‘J’irais jusqu’au bout du monde, je me ferais teindre en blonde, je renierais ma patrie, je renierais mes amis, si tu me le demandais.’ What then? Would our compassion for this woman fade away? Would we find ourselves again facing the dilemmas of judgement, understanding, forgetting, and seeking a preventive justice?
There is no easily available road to simple justice, as Camus regretted in 1945. He deplored the term épuration that was current in France during that period. He referred to it as ‘The thing that became horrid. It had a small chance of not becoming so, which meant that it had to be conceived in a spirit free of revenge or lightness. One has to believe that the road to a simple justice is not easy to find between the shouting for hatred on one hand and the claims of bad consciences on the other. Justice is not always the opposite of terror.’
I have continued the story that you began, Mme Nomy, but the stories of victims and victimizers interweave in curious ways. Their memory is woven like Penelope’s tapestry.
1. Paul Eluard, ‘Au rendez-vous allemand’, 1944.
Homelands
Many years have passed since the day when she hung up on Abu Firas. She now lives on her own. Allen and she are separated. He could no longer stand the hurried pace of the city. She feels at home in London, more than he ever did. Now she is a British national, but sees herself more as a citizen of Kensington. This is her real and true nation. When people come to visit from Lebanon or France she is proud to walk them through the park, along the path by the Serpentine, and she always pauses at the same spot on the bridge so that they can admire the reflections of the trees in the placid surface of the water. Then she walks them up Kensington Church Street and tells them about the obsessive passion of the English for the past and its antiquities, their weakness for mahogany chests and the imposing bronze frames that glitter through the classy shop windows along the ascending road. She always ends her tour in a part of London that has no concern for periods, be they past or future: Portobello Road. There, amid a feast of juxtaposed sounds and cultures, she asks her visitors if they have ever witnessed such an exciting mixture of styles and customs in their own countries. She now feels alien in cities that are not confused in their identities, cities with linear and local memories. She needs hybridity and clashes of colours in order to fit.
Why did she suddenly decide to go back to Beirut? She was happy as a Londoner and felt no need for big changes in her life. Smooth was the word that best described the routine of her existence here. She even resented those rare occasions when she had to visit the northern or eastern parts of the city. So why did she suddenly feel like being back in Lebanon? Was it perhaps because of the insistent presence of a pile of letters that she had written to Mme Nomy without ever having tried to find a forwarding address for her? They had actually turned into a book, a book that would probably never be sent to a publisher either. Whatever the reason, she decided that looking back was necessary and somehow the only thing to do now.
Her first step was to trace the whereabouts of Abu Firas. He had never tried to contact her again after that phone call that had triggered her suppressed recollections and so troubled her mind. His people had been moved to new countries, new refuges, and then on once again to other places. Now that she had a safe home, now that she was firmly settled among other exiles in a cosy homeland of blissful and stable marginality, she felt that she owed it to him, the wanderer who had never been given a chance to settle and choose.
‘You didn’t know?’ the old woman said, in an unresolved voice that hesitated between outrage and weariness. ‘He died when that wretched bomb blew half of this neighbourhood away. Many people died that day. They showed it on TV all over the world. Where were you then, on Mars?’
It obviously meant a lot to her that the explosion of the bombs and their ravages didn’t go unnoticed in the outside world. Living and suffering in a ghetto is bad enough, but the thought of it having been forgotten is unbearable.
She didn’t answer. What good would a truthful answer do for this poor old woman? No, the TV channels were bored with the endless bombings. They weren’t news any longer, and they weren’t good for viewer ratings either. Even the most nostalgic of Lebanese exiles stopped zapping like mad addicts for the latest news update from Lebanon after a few years in exile. The wrinkled features of the old woman begged for reassurance. She needed to hear that there were still people out there who remembered them and cared about their misery; that her family was not going to rot, silently forgotten, in these muddy slums; that there were people outside who still cared. The old woman smiled, and in an obvious effort to be cheerful said: ‘It is all written. It is destiny. Did you hear about the man who escaped unharmed from an explosion that killed all the other people who were in the building with him? He decided to emigrate to Canada. Only one week after he landed there, he fell on the stairs of a restaurant, and died instantly from a brain hemorrhage. When your time has come, there is nothing you can do, no precautions you can take.’ Such stories abounded in Lebanon. They carried a therapeutic power that no person living in safety and security could ever understand. Rationality is the privilege of the safe and the happy.
She did not dare ask if this bomb was actually intended to kill him. These bombs never made any sense. They were aimed at streets and buildings and anyone who happened to be in them. Nor did it make sense trying to find out who had been behind it. There was a time when these mass killings were such an everyday reality that you could as well have accused a jealous husband. So he died. He faded away. Like Umm Ali. Like Hashem. Like so many people who never had the chance to end up in Kensington, or the XVIème arrondissement, or even, for that matter, the slums of Detroit.
She walked out of the camp, shattered. She found she was missing the busy, cluttered streets of Sabra. She was missing their narrowness, and the kids playing in them, and the voices of the mothers calling their children back in. Now the camp is like an abandoned island in the middle of Beirut. There are only old people on the doorsteps, and a few idle adolescents. The camp is dry and screams from the lack of running water. The Lebanese want to forget their wars. They decided to forget the refugees who had been left behind, who had not been driven away to new refuges. These are the victims of amnesia, exc
ept that they are to be forgotten but not forgiven. The camp looks like one of those Dali paintings in which time hangs from a floppy watch, stagnating and lost among vestiges of lives and monstrous nightmares. Beirut is growing and putting up new and optimistic buildings. In an incitement to bitterness, those buildings are clearly visible from the old woman’s shack.
The old woman was smoking a locally-made cigarette and staring into nowhere. She thanked the old woman for her invitation to come inside and drink tea with her. She knew that the old woman needed her solitude as much as she did at that moment. She walked out of the camp as if she was moving across time. Time was terribly still and stagnant in there. But just a few metres away, the insistent noise of pneumatic drills was speaking of a fast, impatient leap into the future. Here buildings were mushrooming as if emulating the animated images of some cartoon film. Reality was becoming a parody of art, and her old city was like a difficult puzzle, with contrasting and conflicting pieces waiting for some magical hand to fit them back together. She stood at the opposite corner of the roundabout, at the outer edge of the camp. There was no physical wall, no actual barbed wire separating the camp from the rest of the city. But they were there nonetheless. She saw them in the eyes of the old woman, and in the rapid, hurried glances of the passers-by at the roundabout.
She stood there waiting for a taxi. She was agitated and angry at herself for not having inquired about Abu Firas earlier. Could it be that the relentless pounding of the drills had got to her brain and thrown her off balance? Somebody should tell them to turn off the power for a moment, just to allow the rest of us to listen to the silence of the camp. She screamed aloud as if needing to test the power of her own voice against the din of the machines. Maybe, after all, there should have been some trials, some assessment of responsibility in this terrible war. You can’t wipe out ugly memories without also erasing some of your humanity.
She could no longer wait for the taxi. She started walking, ignoring the dusty, raucous promise of the future, with its drills. She was thinking of Mme Nomy. She was ready to write a new essay for her. She needed to write. She needed to forget the bitter taste of the air on that roundabout. She longed to get some of the past off her chest and settle into words.
Responsibility, Truth and Punishment
An Essay for Madame Nomy
I am responsible for killing thirty people with my own hands … But I would be a hypocrite if I said that I am repentant for what I did. I don’t repent, because I am convinced that I was acting under orders, and that we were fighting a war … We were killing human beings, but still we continued … I have spent many nights sleeping in the plazas of Buenos Aires with a bottle of wine, trying to forget.
These are the words of Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, a forty-eight-year-old retired Argentinian naval commander. If I had heard his name in another context, I might have imagined a charming man with a tan, an exquisite smile, and the relaxed elegance of a tango dancer. But then who ever said that being a tango dancer was in contradiction to being an executioner? Scilingo was one of the protagonists in the ‘Dirty War’ of the 1970s which left Argentina traumatized and has created an organization of mothers searching for clues about their disappeared sons and daughters.
Mr Scilingo was one of those who had something to do with the disappearances, and Mr Scilingo decided to speak.
To speak, but not to repent. He chose to speak out because of what he called the Navy’s indifference to the plight of the rank and file who had carried out the orders for the torturing and killing of prisoners.
Adolfo Scilingo was a naval commander. He has his reasons for speaking. He feels he has been treated unjustly by the post-dictatorship press. He says that he does not feel guilty, but that he still needs the bottle to help him forget. His words are sometimes arrogant, often pitiful, and at best contradictory.
He told his terrible story in 1995. More than sixteen years after the killings had ended. He told us how the Argentinian military dictatorship had disposed of up to two thousand prisoners – having first kidnapped and tortured them – by dumping them into the Atlantic Ocean.
Many of the victims were so weak from torture and detention that they had to be helped aboard the plane. Once in flight, they were injected with a sedative by an Argentine Navy doctor before two officers stripped them and shoved them to their deaths.1
Fifty years earlier, Colonel (now General) Paul Tibbetts Jr had chosen the name that baptized an airplane that was about to set out on a historical mission. The Enola Gay. A tender gesture. Enola Gay was the name of the colonel’s mother. The airplane, a B-29 Super Fortress, was under his command when it dropped the H-bomb on Hiroshima. When asked recently on Canadian TV whether he didn’t sometimes feel remorse and whether he regretted having killed so many people, he answered without a hint of hesitation that it never stopped him from sleeping, and that he saw no reason why he should be ashamed. ‘It was like that.’
I cannot help feeling anger with these two gentlemen. Somewhere inside me lurks a stupid desire to hear them voice regret. As if their regret could make me feel more secure. As if history were a simple matter that can be read in simple ways and diverted to new beginnings and bright new futures for all.
But let’s think about General Tibbetts for a minute. It must have been nerve-wracking for him to find himself a hero at one moment, only to be turned into a monster mass killer the next, when the political mood in the United States changed. He is now, and has been for the last fifty years, a central character in a debate that has divided America. One view is that he is a hero, the other a villain with no compassion. Heroes and villains need each other and feed on each other, so it is not surprising to find them role-swapping in the drama that real life stages for them. It is no concern of generals and officers to be assessing whether history is an exact science or not, still less to be asking moral questions. And what Hannah Arendt wanted to know was ‘what made this man stop thinking?’ She was not speaking of a hero but a bureaucrat, a member of a party: Eichmann was not a soldier.
General Tibbetts has to live with his past, and at a certain level his reaction is understandable. What is not so understandable is when, fifty years later, a journalist in the Washington Post proclaims, in line with the known views of Bill Clinton, that America owes Japan no apology for the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Clinton had made a speech to the effect that President Harry Truman had made a correct choice, ‘based on the facts he had before him’. The journalist feels that this justificatory sub-clause is not required. Why? Because, among other things, ‘to put it mildly, Japan’s imperial army was never distinguished by any great concern for the civilian populations unfortunate enough to come within its reach.’
I don’t know why the columnist did not finish this last sentence with ‘So why should we have been?’ Or ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ Perhaps he feared that in expressing himself so frankly he might have been accused of barbarism!2
I am interested in General Tibbetts and Mr Scilingo, because in the unpleasant business of calling for the truth to be known we have to call in all the principal actors. When these actors speak some unpleasant truth we have to accept it as a reality that exists, a reality that may be the fruit of circumstances but is also the fruit of our human condition. The question keeps coming back to me: was Said inherently evil, or was he evil because of the war? Might I have become like Said if I had lived in the same flat, had the same mother, and had the same frustrations when the war engulfed my street?
We went to the airport, we entered through the back gate, we loaded the subversives in, like zombies, and we embarked them on the aeroplane.3
These are the words of Scilingo describing the processes in which he was twice a participant.
When asked whether today he would still call the people who were thrown into the sea subversives, Scilingo says:
No … when I did what I did it was understood that they were subversive. Now I can’t say that they we
re. They were human beings. We were so sure then that nobody asked questions … It was not a small group [of military people who took part in these flights]. The entire marines were involved.
When asked by his interviewer if this was not particularly cowardly behaviour, to throw people to their deaths in the ocean when they had been led to believe that they were being transferred to another jail, Scilingo answers: ‘If you look at it that way, it is possible. It is not normal, now I know that.’
Scilingo insists that he was following orders. A handful of marines had refused to obey these orders. To Scilingo and his ilk, they were cowards. To us, and to the victims and their families and comrades, they come across as the real heroes. The times when one has no choice but to be either a hero or a traitor are not the most human of times. ‘Woe betide nations that must have heroes,’ says Brecht. Unfortunately, we cannot add ‘Happy are the nations that must have cowards,’ for there is no way that you can have the one without the other.
The temptation to forget, to turn the page and pass on is extremely strong. To finish once and for all with phrases like the ‘Lessons of History’. In Europe I tried to change my skin, as we say in my native tongue. I went on for years rejecting politics. I thought I could keep my hands clean by keeping away from it. I proudly paid all the parking tickets that appeared on my windscreen and took this as a token that now I belonged to a stable, civilized society in which people should respect their duties and keep within the law. This proved rather heavy on my pocket, since I never lost my Beirut instinct to park wherever I found an empty space. I trawled the art galleries of Paris and London looking for an art that was not concerned with social issues. I praised fun, kitsch and lightness. The intention of my sculptures was that they should be colourful, superficial and useless. They were made to enjoy themselves, arrogantly, to indulge eternally in a trance of fun that no conflict could ever interrupt. I painted them in silver and gold, and I painted my own lips with a striking red. (Are you still wearing those austere brown suits, Mme Nomy? Or have you too opted for extravagant colours, to defy the grey memories of our lands?) ‘Long live escapism’ was the slogan by which I lived. But long it could not live. I find myself unable to switch off the TV when I see boys with faces like that of Said, but now speaking in Serbo-Croat. I search for clues in the confessions of Scilingo. I compare the twisted face of Leila’s grandmother to the sweet wrinkles on the face of Nelson Mandela.
Leaving Beirut Page 13