KJ
Reviews
Stories
of Forgetting, Remembering and Ritual
Maps of Reconciliation – Literature and the Ethical Imagination
ed. Frank Stewart & Barry Lopez,
Mãnoa
20:1, University of Hawai’i Press 2008
Reconciliation is a work in progress, as attested to by the recent history
of international criminal tribunals or truth and reconciliation commissions
from the former Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone. Neither the tribunal in
the former Yugoslavia nor the commission in Sierra Leone has completed
its work: both have been running for a decade or more. Yet, despite
their flawed and protracted nature, activists, academics and citizens
across the world are now starting to demand that these strange, complex
processes be set up for both Sudan and the United States’ violations
in Iraq and the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
Cambodia is yet another country currently struggling to heal from and
come to terms with the genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated
there. As if this history were not difficult enough, its citizens are
being walked through a legal minefield. They now have to try to comprehend
notions of justice, fair trial processes and legal rights as defined
by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the court set
up in 2001 to try former high-ranking officials of the Khmer Rouge.
These are positivist processes in that their bold and ambitious promises
are delivered in the form of hefty paperwork cataloguing complex legal
rules: everything is written out. There are caveats of course, and the
promises come with fine print — rules to explain rules.
One wonders then, what happens to survivors — heroes and victims
alike — who have to get on with the everyday business of living
while these tragicomic machinations play themselves out. How do you
deal with trauma until this or that civil society organization and tribunal
comes to you with promises to heal your wounds?
Mãnoa’s Maps of Reconciliation is a compendium
of writings and images that grapple with this very difficult question.
Nine out of eighteen essays found in this anthology are reprints, some
of which were written in the mid-1990s. There is something revelatory
about this decision on the part of editors Frank Stewart (co-founder
and principal editor of the journal) and Barry Lopez.
This is an issue that looks ahead or forwards to imagine and create
realities that are an appropriate response to what guest editor Barry
Lopez calls the “vetted doctrines and the ruthlessness of reason,”
(p. ix, Editor’s Note) that we have thus far been subject to and
find ourselves complicit in propagating. Yet, in this issue we are very
much looking backwards, turning our heads and opening our ears to see
and hear the reiterations for reconciliation and peace found in the
essays, poems, plays and photographs of writers and artists who have
been uttering it for decades.
What are we not hearing? Why is there an absence of dialogue between
the people who craft legislation and set up tribunals or commissions
and the artists who speak for their communities? Why do these legislators
and administrators not look deeper at the collective acts of engaging
in indigenous, local and deeply personal forms of reconciliation —
a word that at any rate may be untranslatable into languages other than
English? The essays in this edition of Mãnoa do not
profess to answer this question or redress this gap, this lack of communication.
Instead, as a whole, they fill the void created by a one-size-fits-all
approach to justice, peace and reconciliation concocted by governments
and the United Nations.
All three photographic essays in this collection quite appropriately
detail rituals of reconnection, community and identity among indigenous
Hawaiians. Italian-American Franco Salmoiraghi’s black and white
portraits are quiet glimpses of Hawaii’s communities engaged in
various rituals of reclamation, reconciliation and the linking of generations
past and present. Taken from 1989 to 1993, they invite the reader into
a story, detailed frame-by-frame. And yet, we are looking from the outside
in and they conceal as much as they reveal: these private affairs are
not meant to be scrutinized by onlookers.
The essays themselves deal with desecration and restitution (Honokahua)
of burial grounds and spiritual forefathers; the struggle for sovereignty
and self-determination, symbolized by Queen Lili’uokalani’s
struggle for her people; and finally that theme which runs through every
page in Maps: remembering and passing down stories as an act of continuity
in the face of destructive changes (Ho’oku’ikhai:
To Unify as One). This final essay reminds us, “It was a shout
to assemble, for in retelling our past, we honour our forefathers. They
live through us — in our songs and our stories, and in who we
are” (p. 190).
However, Wayne Karlin’s essay “Wandering Souls” and
Galsan Tschinag’s powerful oral narrative “The Tamyrs: A
Tale of Two Peoples” are the powerful core of this issue. Both
tell stories of past atrocities which linger like cancerous growths,
slowly eating away at the possibility of a normal life for the perpetrators
and their progeny. Karlin’s essay on a Vietnam War veteran’s
efforts to come to terms with the fact that he killed a newly drafted,
innocent Vietcong soldier may not be uncommon or rare in the facts it
relates. But the tenderness with which he writes about veteran Homer’s
guilt and pain, as well as the way in which he re-creates Hoang Ngoc
Dam, the Vietnamese soldier whom Homer killed, makes this the strongest
piece in the collection. The final scene of ritual reconciliation is
the kind of future that editor Barry Lopez wants us to imagine in the
aftermath of so much conflict.
Tschinag’s essay on the other hand, speaks of ancient tribal hatred
between the Kazakhs and minority Tuvan peoples. Scene after scene details
how resistant to reconciliation two men from the two warring tribes
are until both are forced to work, fight and protect each other as soldiers
in the military. If the native Hawaiian essays urge us to remember our
pasts and honour our forefathers, Tschinag’s essay reminds us
to not carry the hatred of our forefathers forward into future generations,
but the tale is told without moralizing or prescribing a way of being.
Similarly, Prafulla Roy’s snapshot of Bombay after the Hindu-Muslim
riots and violence in his essay “India” asks us whether
we could in fact forgive a collective, unseen enemy in the immediate
aftermath of a tragedy. Did any Hindus protect Muslims from enraged
Hindu rioters and murderers when the violence broke out? Did the Muslims
do the same for the Hindus? Roy answers us in the affirmative, but not
without first addressing the immense leap it takes to move from hate
to compassion.
This impressive collection rarely slackens in its intensity, though
some additions like Luis H. Francia’s “Meditation #7: Prayer
for Peace” and Julia Martin’s “Wonderwerk” seem
to sum up the complexities of reconciliation with sweeping and benign
turns of phrase (Francia’s poem), or depend too much on repetition
and abstraction to instill a sense of wonder about the past’s
connectedness to the present (Martin’s essay). Playwright Catherine
Filloux’s 1996 play) “Eyes of the Heart” focuses on
the impact of the Khmer Rouge on Cambodians (one of four such plays
she has written). While it is interesting in that Filloux drew from
real cases of Cambodian trauma victims who were blind (chose not to
see?) for a while, it’s an awkward addition to a collection that
otherwise flows seamlessly. Filloux’s play is topically interesting,
but lacks the power of some of the other pieces in this edition.
Overall, this is a marvelous issue of Mãnoa that carries
us from the Pacific Islands to Asia, South Africa and Latin America
to provide readers with a brief, but entirely resonant glimpse into
rituals of reconciliation. One wonders whether copies should be sent
to tribunal and truth commission administrators.
—Vinita Ramani Mohan
Published
in KJ #72,
June 2009, P. 82. Copyright
held by author.
Link
to Maps of Reconciliation here
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