Cognitive Resonance

Partnoy, Alicia. The Little School. Trans. Alicia Partnoy with Lois Athey and Sandra Braunstein. San Francisco, CA: Midnight Editions, 1998.

The class I'm teaching for is also listed under Letters & Sciences, which allows us to go beyond strictly historical materials in the syllabus. The Little School is a fictionalization of the author's experiences after her arrest and "disappearance" by the Argentinian military junta in early 1977 in the torture installation known as "the little school" after its previous use as an actual educational facility. Many of the poems and stories here were smuggled out of prison after Partnoy was reappeared and transferred to a de rigeur prison. In 1979 she was granted a U.S. visa and released into exile, joining her husband (who was also arrested and tortured in her presence at the little school) and daughter in the United States, where she still resides. Partnoy has testified about her experiences in multiple fora.

This edition of The Little School is introduced by Julia Alvarez, whose novel about the Trujillo dictatorship, In the Time of the Butterflies, I read for a class on the literature of political power and oppression in high school. The Little School is perhaps less literary but a much better historical text than Alvarez', simply because Partnoy lived her experiences. In her introduction Alvarez argued that "the impact of Partnoy's message springs solely from the details of the story, in much the same way that the news of Imelda's eight hundred pairs of shoes brought home to many the corruption of the Marcos regime. This is how the best writing--and the best political writing--work" (9). I'm not sure I agree fully with that statement, but it's certainly true that the details in Partnoy's account are telling and poignant, and that my students, appropriately, fixated on them and their larger meanings in discussion.

The role of women in contemporary human rights and democratic expansion is surely both central and understudied: the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo were instrumental in placing pressure on the Argentinian junta, women were instrumental in ending the Liberian civil war (for which 2/3 of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize were awarded), and the other third of this year's Prize went to Tawakel Karman, the "Iron Woman" who has been called the "Mother of the Revolution" in Yemen. Partnoy's story is part of that story, and wrenching in its own right. The book finally speaks, as so many of these sorts of narratives do, to the commonalities of humanity, even in a place where humanity is what those in power are attempting to stamp out.

I embed the U2 song "Mothers of the Disappeared," inspired by the work of the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo (and which I now understand much better): 

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Blackwood, 1902.

I read this book (novella, technically) for the first time in nearly a decade as part of teaching for human rights, and it was a very interesting lens through which to view a text that is fascinatingly positioned, both in history and in literature. Unlike a lot of my students, I didn't read Heart of Darkness as an assignment in high school; I read it on my own, decided I loved Conrad, and made my way through a substantial chunk of his oeuvre independently. This time around, I was expecting to have a much more nuanced reaction to the text than I did a decade ago, and I did. I still like the book more than I thought I would after rereading it, though that doesn't preclude me from saying that from a contemporary perspective it is highly problematic.

Heart of Darkness is of course Conrad's fictionalization (via the literal mouthpiece of his stand-in Marlow) of his experiences as a steamboat captain in the Congo Free State in 1890-91, published in book form in 1902 as part of the international humanitarian effort to force King Leopold II to relinquish his personal dominion over the Congo, which had become the abattoir of Africa: historians estimate that at least ten million and as many as twenty million people may have died in the Congo Free State in the nearly three decades of Leopold's personal rule there, out of an entire continent's population of somewhere between 90 and 130 million people.

As a modern human rights novel, Heart of Darkness is frustratingly oblique. In a text that's all about hearing, and being unable to see, Conrad gives precisely one African character direct dialogue (and this the chief of the cannibals Marlow hires on to the steamer for recondite purposes), and very few African people are even described individually. We as readers see people dying en masse in port under a tree, and then hear them or their drums from the riverbanks and see them massed at Kurtz's hut at the end, but almost no one stands out, and neither does the crushing experience of living amidst mass death. The only African Marlow seems to care about directly is the helmsman of his steamer, whose death provides the single most concrete episode in the tale. Rather, the primary focus of the story is of course Kurtz the flower of Europe, his voice and Marlow's obsession with them both, culminating in Kurtz's famous last words ("The horror! The horror!") and Marlow's bitter certainty that Kurtz's story will never be forgotten--which of course it won't be, because Conrad wrote it in this book.

One of my students pointed out that Marlow in some senses is an excellent example of the sort of decent person who's just sort of swept along into atrocities, anticipating in some respects the experience of ordinary people in Nazi Germany, or any of the other killing fields of the 20th and 21st centuries. It's certainly true that Marlow (crucially, unlike Conrad) is in some senses the ideal imperial subject, a staunchly British middle-middle class man who clearly knows his history and his Shakespeare and has his sympathies in the right place (with the red splotches on the map), but who also isn't so indecent as to condone Kurtz's fevered solution to the problem of Africa: "Exterminate all the brutes!" Indeed, Marlow's primary problem with the way things fell out in the Congo seems to me to be that in some senses Leopold and his henchmen were letting the (white, European) side down. Doubtless Her Majesty's subjects would have done it better.

Someone asked whether we should talk about the "revisionist reading" of Heart of Darkness as a racist text. I can't even begin to understand how there's anything at all revisionist about that reading; the racism is right there on the page, in even more ways than I realized in high school. And it's not pleasant, by any means, but it is part and parcel of what makes Heart of Darkness prime historical material.