While Telling Secret Lives explored the outsider’s greater need to speak, Hell on Earth dealt with the fact that victims of abuse often lose the power of speech.
Just as at Beyond Faith and Reason Tariq Ali spoke of how even those opposed to a regime will fall under the sway of its dominant language, so Carolin Emcke’s experiences as a war reporter in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Iraq have clarified for her that the process of abuse is to appropriate language. Victims of violence always remember what has happened but they cannot speak of it in a lucid way; they’ve lost the trust that makes us want to speak to and share with others.
Both Emcke and fellow journalist Lydia Cacho agreed that it’s the reporter’s task to reconstruct the victim’s experience in a way that does not repeat the abuse they’ve suffered. In order for that account to have an effect, and find an audience, and achieve a result, the writer makes a choice. Carolin Emcke describes it as ‘double translation’. First she must come to know the place, the culture, the situation, then she must write about it, translate it, for people back home, and that may mean making omissions. As Lydia Cacho, who has taken huge personal risks in her exposure of a high-powered paedophile ring in Mexico, explains, there’s nothing objective about being a journalist: “We’re not objects, we’re subjects.”
With so many terrible events on TV and in the papers every day, there was agreement both on stage and in the room, that fiction had a part to play in enabling a news-weary reader to find out about the personal stories behind the headlines. And this was where Christian Jungersen’s brilliant novel The Exception came in. In contrast to his fellow speakers’ non-fiction concerns with giving a voice to the victim, he has used fiction to explore how it is possible for all of us to be evil. A troubling thought to end on.
Recent Comments