Sisters of the Revolution

by Ann VanderMeer

  My producer finally took the initiative: “Allow me to introduce myself,” she began as, holding out her hand, she advanced towards Margaret A. Margaret A., however, shattered this moment of returned normalcy, for she ignored the proffered hand and commented that creating a facade of social conventions would cost more than she herself could afford—even if we felt ourselves able to afford it.7

  Margaret A.’s pointed refusal to shake hands opened another edge to an already tense situation and jolted me into a more sharply critical attitude towards everyone and everything around us. It was at that moment, for instance, that I understood to the marrow of my bones a bit of what this detention must mean to Margaret A. Previously I had felt an abstract outrage at her silencing and detention. But at that moment when Margaret A. mentioned the cost of social pretense, I felt the reality of her situation, I dimly sensed how apparently small things could exert enormous pressure on even a psyche strong enough to withstand the weight of official oppression such as that so constantly forced upon Margaret A.’s senses.

  Having learned from my producer’s embarrassment, I merely smiled and nodded at Margaret A. when my producer introduced me to her. Still Margaret A. rebuffed me, for the slight twitch of her lip (not amusement, for her ancient, frozen eyes remained just as wintry and distant) made me feel foolish enough to blush (thus making me feel even more foolish). The rebuff and my reaction to the rebuff in turn provoked first resentment in me—for a moment I felt indignant at her lack of manners—and then, seconds later, abashment as it occurred to me that Margaret A. must take me for a lackey of the system that had specially targeted her.8

  The crew did not bother with introductions, they simply set up shop and began taping with the equipment they despised. The producer reminded them to shoot without regard to our conversation, to scan everything in the two rooms of the hut and to be sure to get a shot of Margaret A.’s “garden.” And then she nodded at me, as though to remind me that I should be getting on with my part of the affair, too. I looked back at Margaret A. and frantically tried to recall the first question I had planned to ask her. But nothing came, my mind had gone blank. Panicking, I blurted out the first question that popped into my head: “Who cuts your hair for you?”

  Margaret A. flicked her eyebrows at me and snapped something to the effect that that was the sort of information the BOP would gladly provide me with. My entire body went hot with embarrassment; glancing around me I caught my producer frowning and the guards rolling their eyes. It was at that moment that it hit me: though Margaret A. is black, all the guards I had seen at Vandenberg were, to a person, white. (I suspect it was a combination of my noticing Margaret A.’s closely clipped woolly hair and my thinking that I could not imagine any of the guards whom I had seen—male or female—ever cutting it.) I wished then I could ask her if her guards had always been exclusively white and if so how she felt about it. But apart from worrying about such a question getting me into trouble with the BOP, I felt uneasy about what she might make of it. I had no idea whether the racial identity of one’s guards would be relevant to someone to whom the imposition of any guards at all was an outrage … Fortunately, I recalled one of the questions I had prepared, a question I thought could pass as personal (and thus “trivial”). “Has incarceration and the prospect of a lifetime of incarceration changed the way you feel about yourself as a human being?” I queried. Margaret A. looked straight into my face, as though to check out where that question was coming from. Uneasily I glanced around at the guards; though they paid no special attention to me (thus indicating the question to be acceptable, since if it weren’t, the BOP official monitoring the interview would have passed orders to the guards through the receivers I could see in their ears), I felt menaced by their presence as I hadn’t before. This room, I thought, is too small for so many bodies and machines.

  I wish I could remember Margaret A.’s exact words, but all I can give you is a paraphrase. She started with a humorous comment to the effect that one thing her incarceration had done for her was to indicate to her how seriously the official world took her, and consequently to make her take herself more seriously than she ever had before. Imagine, she said with a wry not quite sardonic smile, I was a nobody until people I had never met started listening to me. Just imagine if people took every word that came out of your mouth as seriously as they take every bullet fired out of a gun. I don’t think I ever took myself particularly seriously until after they threw me into solitary confinement and allowed me no human contact. They told me it was dangerous for anyone to hear anything that came out of my mouth. For several weeks I lived in the kind of quarantine you might dream up for the deadliest most mysteriously contagious of diseases. I was sure I was going to crack up. But can you imagine the ego trip? Can you imagine your own words being considered that potent? This official reaction made me a uniquely powerful person, accorded powers never attributed to any other mortal in history that I’ve ever heard of. At first I couldn’t take it that seriously myself. Later I got a little scared. But how could I go on being scared when there’s not a chance in a million I’ll ever be allowed to speak freely again?

  This reply took me entirely by surprise. I had expected her to talk about her bitterness at the unfairness of the system in denying her due process (which she could have done, I think, without necessarily mentioning the issue overtly), at the wreck her incarceration had made of her life, at the horror of her exile from friends and family. But because of the point of view she presented to me I comprehended afresh how extraordinary the apparatus of her silencing is—that so many resources are being devoted solely to that end, and how much credit, actually, they grant her by finding it necessary to protect themselves against the words of a woman who had been a simple mother and middle school teacher without party affiliation or organization (for the formation of an organization around her came only in the last three months of her freedom). The Margaret A. phenomenon had streaked into brief exhilarating visibility like the first unexpected flash of lightning crackling across a late evening summer sky.

  I asked her next about whether she missed her daughter (who it is well known moved to New Zealand subsequent to her mother’s incarceration) and other family members. Margaret A. took several minutes in replying to this question, and such was the complexity and unexpectedness of her answer that I’m afraid I cannot vouch for the accuracy of my paraphrase.9

  The press and other institutions in our world consider privacy to be a privilege, Margaret A. began, a luxury, not something that must be respected of every person. Human society would not be the same were privacy not considered a privilege. Consequently my daughter has paid a price for my frankness, a price exacted by the press and other institutions. I imagine most people would lay that exaction at my door, working on the assumption that my frankness invited disregard of my own—and therefore my daughter’s—privacy. But for me the issue with regard to my daughter becomes a matter of whether or not my self-censorship would have been worth the maintenance of the status quo of my daughter’s life before my words attracted widespread attention. Could I have afforded to pay the price silence would have exacted from me? It is always a question of determining what lies at stake in what one does or omits to do. Undoubtedly you yourself forfeited your privacy for the sake of taking part in this photo-opportunity. I wonder if you have weighed the price of your presence here today.

  It surprised me that the guards did not interrupt this speech. I myself heard some of the subversion in her reply even as she spoke, for I felt certain she was referring not only to the strip and body cavity search I had had to submit to, but to the years of keeping myself “clean” of suspect contact, years of playing the game as primly as Simon Bartkey himself could wish. I suppose her fingering of the press “and other institutions” and her references to “human society” and “our world” sounded vague enough to the monitors that they didn’t grasp exactly what she was talking about. But the expression on my producer’s face indicated that she had no troub
le understanding Margaret A.’s words, and that like me she considered them subversive, too.

  We then had only three minutes left of the allotted time. Though the camera crew had been in and out of the other room, Margaret A. and I had so far remained in the one room. I asked her if she would show me her other room while answering my last question or two. She flicked her eyebrows at me as though to deride my asking her permission while my colleagues had been aiming their cameras at whatever caught their fancy, but then gestured me to go before her through the doorless opening in the wall. I had wanted to ask her about her gardening, but when I saw the books piled on the linoleum floor beside the patchwork quilt-covered mattress I instead asked her if she read much and if so what. She said she read only poetry. I snatched a quick look at the book on the top of the pile and caught only the name Audre Lorde. Aware of time ticking away, I glanced at the bath fixtures taking up most of the room and wondered at the water standing in the tub. I asked her about it, and she said she was allowed one bath a day and that her bathwater was all that she had to water her garden with. Frantically, aware that only half a minute remained, I asked her how she spent her time. Instead of answering, she told me that there was no point in her attempting to reply to that question, that she knew the guard would stop her before she had finished since they had done so on the two other occasions she had attempted to answer it.

  A guard then told us our time was up. This was a moment I hadn’t prepared for, hadn’t begun to imagine. My entire adult life had been leading up to this time spent with Margaret A., and suddenly it was over, never to be repeated, and I would never again have a chance to listen to this woman whose words are forbidden.10 I stood frozen for a few seconds, staring at Margaret A. as though to memorize the moment. Looking at her impassive, aging face I realized that our meeting meant nothing to her, that we were only another media crew come to gape, that after a few months she probably would not even remember me, that surely she considered all the media people to be faceless robots playing the game that mattered not at all to her (except, perhaps, as insurance against excessively abusive treatment by her captors).

  During the next few hours I slipped into a dull numbness, mechanically answering questions and listening to the debriefers’ comments, hardly caring about what might follow. I had done the only thing I’d ever aspired to, and now it was over. The interview had been a disappointment and the future looked like an anticlimax—gray, dull, pointless.

  The Question of Professional Standards

  After the debriefing while en route to the L.A. affiliate that had lent us the van, we joked for ten or fifteen minutes about the transparency of the BOP’s “deprogramming” techniques. For me at least it had been an ordeal (and I suspect it had been for them, too, since we found it necessary to joke about it). Not only did I need to keep my wits about me in order to give the debriefers the answers they considered correct, but I just as importantly needed to preserve intact (as much as that was possible) the memory of Margaret A.’s words. All of us apparently passed muster without a glitch, for our producer assured us that the official in charge had let her know that he was pleased with our debriefings.

  When finally the joking had worked some of our unease out of our systems, the crew began complaining about the pointlessness of the whole Margaret A. situation. They said they couldn’t see what the big deal with Margaret A. was, they contended that the Margaret A. phenomenon must always have been super media hype since there certainly wasn’t anything special about Margaret A herself. They groused, too, about the BOP’s deleting their shots of the computer, the “garden,” and the partially filled tub and saucepan for bailing: touches that they had hoped would lift our photo-op above the mediocrity of those that had come before (when of course ours would show as almost identical to the others). Those particular cuts perplexed and perturbed them more than the BOP’s cutting every shot in which Margaret A’s lips were moving. They joked about the BOP’s fear of lip-readers, then segued into a discussion of the government’s paranoia in making such a big deal of a woman who was, they thought, simply boring.

  After several minutes of listening in silence to the discussion, our producer disagreed. “The woman’s a destroyer,” she declared. “She’s so damned sure of herself and her opinions that only the most confident people would be capable of resisting her subversive incursions.”

  The crew snickered. “What subversion?” they wanted to know. “You mean her refusing to shake your hand?”

  The producer ignored this below-the-belt crack. “Those idiots monitoring us were too slow to catch what she was talking about. When she used the word ‘institutions,’ only an idiot would have missed what she was referring to.” That counter-put-down shut them up—and ended the conversation about Margaret A.

  No one seemed to notice my silence. And in fact I managed to talk to Elissa Muntemba and even negotiated my own on-camera interview without raising suspicions of myself.11 The suspicions came later, in other contexts—after I had begun to ask of myself the very questions I believe Margaret A. in my place would insist upon asking. Not surprisingly the producer of the Margaret A. photo-op was the one to suss me out. She knew, even if no one else could trace it back to Margaret A.’s “influence.” “You’re a Margaret A. convert,” she accused me. “She really got to you, didn’t she?” I so detested the language she used that without considering the consequences I launched into a discussion of our complicity with the BOP. But she cut me off before I’d even finished my second sentence. “Professional journalists can’t afford to be susceptible to subversion,” she scathed at me. Does she understand at all what she’s saying when she uses the word “afford”? I wondered. Of course she didn’t, for she went on to berate me for being a gullible fool, for betraying professional standards—and then told me I was terminated. “I won’t mention this in your file,” she said—but later I wondered what such an assurance could mean since she obviously made a point of sabotaging every attempt I made at securing new employment within the mainstream media industry.12

  This question of professional standards is a troubling one for JATROF members. The position of journalists like my producer amounts to using the government’s contextualizations for determining the parameters of objectivity. Any consideration of facts outside of such contextualizations then become acts of subversion. If my contact with Margaret A. has taught me anything, it is that the self-censorship demanded of journalists is too high a price for me to pay. The question then becomes one of how the journalist reconciles the ideals of the profession with the practice my producer insists reflects “professional standards.”

  Summary

  First, for those concerned with Margaret A. herself, I can attest that her incarceration and silencing have not demoralized or disempowered her. On the contrary, the government’s efforts to obliterate her words seem to have strengthened rather than weakened the particular, distinctive articulation that characterizes Margaret A.’s speech. Should the day come when the government cannot resist public opposition to the Margaret A. Amendment (for as time passes, more and more people will consider the government’s fear of Margaret A. either hysterical paranoia or a cynical excuse for its tight control of the news media), Margaret A. will likely be prepared.

  Second, my experience doing a Margaret A. photo-op suggests that as journalists we need to question the conflation of the government’s contextualization with the parameters of objectivity and professional standards, especially when such contextualization demands the obliteration not only of words but even of facts. Journalists currently work in an environment in which their asking even so simple a question as “What would the harm be in showing a shot of a bathtub?” can lead to charges of a subversive lack of objectivity. The “limited censorship” of Margaret A.’s words has thus demonstrably altered journalists’ definition of objectivity and professional standards. JATROF members, I feel certain, will want to consider the cost to themselves and the profession of their continued submission to the princi
ple of self-censorship the Margaret A. Amendment has so clearly spawned.

  Following the Margaret A. photo-op, I learned at the cost of my career—thinking that since I had achieved my goal of interviewing Margaret A. I need no longer be “careful”—that this censorship process extends beyond the coverage of Margaret A. into other areas. It is perhaps ironic that the initial trajectory of my career was dictated by the determination to achieve one single goal, that of personally interviewing Margaret A., when in fact that very interview has called into question the price I paid to achieve it. That price included not only a loss of personal and professional integrity, but also a blinkering of my ability to see the world I live in. My meeting with Margaret A. woke me into a world I seem never to have really seen before, a world it is my mission as a journalist to expose and explore. It is my belief that Margaret A.’s words were forbidden because of their power to show us the world anew, without blinders. I may never fully share Margaret A.’s vision; I may never have a true record of Margaret A.’s words. But because of Margaret A., I now grope for the blinders that have been narrowing and dimming my vision, that I may tear them from my eyes and see a world far wider and brighter than I’d ever dreamed existed.

  1 The amendment is officially titled “The Limited Censorship for the Preservation of National Security Act,” but since the only object the amendment sets out to accomplish is the total obliteration of Margaret A.’s words, surely calling it “The Margaret A. Amendment” places the emphasis where it belongs. And though their name for it is better than the anti–free speech activists’ calling it the “Save America Amendment,” I don’t particularly hold with the free speech activists calling it the “Anti–Free Speech Amendment,” either. The amendment wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Margaret A. herself. And both the anti–free speech and free speech activists seem to forget that.