Wednesday, October 21, 2009
We Were Wrong to Try and Kill You
Journalist Vets in El Salvador crossed the Torola River on a bridge this time, a much different experience from crossing in the 1980s. Once, Jon Lee Anderson’s orange car filled with water in the middle of the shallow river, and with Jon and Nancy McGirr, I waded to the far ( ERP guerrilla-held) shore. Army mortars began to fall behind us, then eerily stopped. We tried to make our way back across, but came under a rain of bullets from them mid-river. Never made it that day.
"You were wrong to try to cross the river," said the Salvadoran commander in San Miguel. But he made an admission too. "And we were wrong to try and kill you."
So this would be Nancy and my first experience of Perquin. I’d call it Kafka-esque.The museum is not to be missed. Here is an ex-combatant in front of the remains of the plane in which Domingo Monterroso was cradling what he thought was the Radio Venceremos transmitter. Just as we pulled up a tour bus carrying about 40 middle-age Salvadorans was leaving after their visit. We skipped the guerrilla camp. Guides, wounded ex-combatants, said they get an average of 60-70 visitors a day.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
For the Women's National Book Association-One Way to Find an Agent
By Mary Jo McConahay
“Only connect,” counsels E.M. Forster. I had begun to think the British novelist invented the phrase for would-be authors, and their would-be agents. My book project had moved along considerably in 18 months, but where did one go from here?
As I wrote, researched, and rewrote, I made sure I also was “putting myself out there” at literary events, just as the manuals advise. I met one or two agents, amenable but failing to connect to me or to my work, and I, unable to connect with them. I even bid at a benefit auction, for lunch and pitch time with an agent whose name you would know; as other bidders peeled off, I got scared, but raised the prize $10.00 each time against those who remained. The poor agent would be my captive audience; I would order something that didn’t stick in my teeth; after a last glass of Napa Merlot, I would walk out past the kind of dustless palms that grow only in restaurants, a represented author. When the bidding reached $700.00, I quit.
No one had ever told me getting an agent might be the hard part.
Now a chance was coming to talk not just to one agent, but a dozen, each pledged to give me three full minutes of attention. The process, unfamiliar to me, had a name I kept referring to mistakenly as “Kiss and Tell.” By the time I reached the Women’s National Book Association venue, I knew to call it, “Speed Dating.”
Last March I joined a hundred other men and women from the WNBA San Francisco Chapter at Sinbad’s Restaurant for its annual Meet the Agents event. From the windows, views of the Bay were the blue of dreams, and expansive enough to calm the most nervous. I won’t say I wasn’t a little jittery as I looked around the room, at the agents waiting at their little tables, and before each, folks like me lined up in orderly queues.
From the WNBA website, I had taken down the agents’ names days before, and researched them as thoroughly as I might have fact-checked a sentence in my book. One specialized in novels – not my genre – but had once written about geography similar to that in my book, so she ranked on my list anyway. Another had represented a National Book Award nominee, that again, was fiction, but rooted in the country I described, so I considered that a bridge. With one agent I could see no point of contact at all, except that his last name was Polish, like my mother’s; I decided I was not above using any contact point, real, or a stretch, with anyone behind a table, and would talk to him, too.
There was one particular agent I hoped would love me, or at least be drawn to my project, because I really liked his life story (you can find anything on Google), and non-fiction specialty. Others I would have been perfectly happy with. Only one fell into my category of any port in a storm, but if she liked my project, I would admit to having misjudged. You’ll notice the hubris with which I walked into that room, and stood in the lines: as if any of the men or women there would take me as a client, I who had a good writing record, but new in the book publishing world. However, without possessing, or pretending to posses, the confidence that I would “only connect” with someone, I would never have had the nerve to subject myself to the strange, but unexpectedly enjoyable, process.
By the end of the morning, I had talked to every agent, some of the WNBA officers, and many other writers, and learned something from each one. As I find the opening lines of a chapter to be, the first was the hardest.
“Have you got something I can read?”
No hello. I handed over Chapter 1.
“What is this supposed to mean? ‘Surf line.’ What is that?”
Damn, I knew I should have cut it.
First lesson: Follow your gut.
His voice was loud. I felt like disappearing into to the Ladies’ Room. He continued to read silently.
“Good,” he said, and gave me his card, without ceremony.
When I stood to leave, he did too, and put an avuncular arm around me.
“Send it, please.”
Second lesson: Hang in there.
Others, much more talkative, invited me to send a chapter and outline, or the entire ms. when finished, or simply and graciously said I might be a better fit with someone else. I drank three cups of (free) coffee. Had many laughs with fellow authors. Discovered I could encapsulate my project in a 30-second sound bite; explain why Rysard Kapuscinski and Joan Didion are my models; compare my project to a bestseller, while making it different enough to pique interest; and of course, describe my platform, how I might help “sell” the book. In fact, the hours were so learning-intensive and fun, that something in me will miss the experience at the next Meet the Agent event, while I’ll continue to recommend it to anyone who asks.
Because, Dear Reader, I called an agent I met, to whom I felt connected, and within a few days we were literary representative, and client. This week, some six months later, I sign the publisher’s contract.
Mary Jo McConahay’s Maya Roads: Travels Through Time and Space in the American Rainforest, will be published by Chicago Review Press. Her agent is Andy Ross. www.maryjomcconahay.com
Sunday, September 13, 2009
CASA CREMA, HOUSE OF HORRORS. OR NOT.
GUATEMALA CITY
I used to feel chills when I drove by the Casa Crema, the massive “Cream-Colored House" once home to the Defense Minister and his powerful offices. The Casa Crema was a house of horrors during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a time when students, intellectuals, labor leaders and anyone else presumed sympathetic to the armed left, were murdered by government death squads. Or kidnapped and tortured first, before disappearing forever. Some suffered in the Casa Crema.
A few days ago, searching for the offices of the Academy of Maya Languages, I found myself walking in the direction of the Casa Crema. It is not cream-colored at all, but battleship gray, covering a city block, walls crenellated, with the tiny rectangular windows from which men with guns can shoot, if necessary.
How ironic, I thought, for the Maya Academy offices to be near a place that once served a military that killed tens of thousands of unarmed Maya Indians.
In fact, the Academy of Maya Languages, and a Maya television station, now occupy the Casa Crema itself.
“I bet you thought you were going to be kidnapped, joked a young Maya woman inside, commenting on the building her offices have occupied for 5 years.
The Academy of Maya Languages, established to preserve the country’s 22 indigenous tongues, is part of the Ministry of Culture and Education; a former president gave the Maya the Casa Crema to use. The Defense Ministry has long since moved elsewhere.
The young woman sold me some books. She looked in her late 20s, a child during the heat of the war, which ended in 1996 . She wore the heavy woven blouse, woven belt, and long blue skirt of the Kanjobal Maya. And the black, pointed-toe high heels of a fashionable woman in the capital.
“Can a Maya remain Maya, living in a big city, speaking Spanish, far from her mountain home?” I asked.”
“I can,” said the young woman . “Because I know who I am inside.”
In the office of the director, a Pokomam Maya, it was clear that part of the Casa Crema, at least, once had been something like a home. A fireplace framed in dark wood. Stained glass windows with images of medieval ladies and hunting hounds. On the director’s desk burned incense, its scent filling the room.
All the way back to Antigua, I wondered if there were enough incense in the world to purify the Casa Crema. I wondered why the Academy accepted being housed there. The government hardly backs Maya insistence on a “multilingual, multicultural” nation; I wondered whether it pulled a cynical trick by making the Academy -- dependent for funds on the state -- an offer it couldn’t refuse.
Or whether it didn’t matter at all, to anyone who knew who she was inside.
I used to feel chills when I drove by the Casa Crema, the massive “Cream-Colored House" once home to the Defense Minister and his powerful offices. The Casa Crema was a house of horrors during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a time when students, intellectuals, labor leaders and anyone else presumed sympathetic to the armed left, were murdered by government death squads. Or kidnapped and tortured first, before disappearing forever. Some suffered in the Casa Crema.
A few days ago, searching for the offices of the Academy of Maya Languages, I found myself walking in the direction of the Casa Crema. It is not cream-colored at all, but battleship gray, covering a city block, walls crenellated, with the tiny rectangular windows from which men with guns can shoot, if necessary.
How ironic, I thought, for the Maya Academy offices to be near a place that once served a military that killed tens of thousands of unarmed Maya Indians.
In fact, the Academy of Maya Languages, and a Maya television station, now occupy the Casa Crema itself.
“I bet you thought you were going to be kidnapped, joked a young Maya woman inside, commenting on the building her offices have occupied for 5 years.
The Academy of Maya Languages, established to preserve the country’s 22 indigenous tongues, is part of the Ministry of Culture and Education; a former president gave the Maya the Casa Crema to use. The Defense Ministry has long since moved elsewhere.
The young woman sold me some books. She looked in her late 20s, a child during the heat of the war, which ended in 1996 . She wore the heavy woven blouse, woven belt, and long blue skirt of the Kanjobal Maya. And the black, pointed-toe high heels of a fashionable woman in the capital.
“Can a Maya remain Maya, living in a big city, speaking Spanish, far from her mountain home?” I asked.”
“I can,” said the young woman . “Because I know who I am inside.”
In the office of the director, a Pokomam Maya, it was clear that part of the Casa Crema, at least, once had been something like a home. A fireplace framed in dark wood. Stained glass windows with images of medieval ladies and hunting hounds. On the director’s desk burned incense, its scent filling the room.
All the way back to Antigua, I wondered if there were enough incense in the world to purify the Casa Crema. I wondered why the Academy accepted being housed there. The government hardly backs Maya insistence on a “multilingual, multicultural” nation; I wondered whether it pulled a cynical trick by making the Academy -- dependent for funds on the state -- an offer it couldn’t refuse.
Or whether it didn’t matter at all, to anyone who knew who she was inside.
FEARSOME MAYHEM: A WEEK OF ORGANIZED CRIME IN GUATEMALA
In Guatemala again for the first time in 8 months, I sense the grip organized crime has on streets and minds. It seems the violence of the 30-year civil war didn’t disappear with the 1996 peace accords, but metamorphosed into a far more ambiguous, fearsome mayhem.
The sides in this war are unlikely to meet at a table.
The week began with what one daily headlined, “A Diabolical Tidal Wave:“ In coordinated attacks, in various public corners of the capital, hitmen murdered the director of one prison, sub-director of another, and on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare, two prison guards transferring a prisoner from one site to another. Passers-by were killed too, or wounded in the sprays of gunfire, some from AK47s.
A few days later, outside the home of the country’s Chief Prosecutor of Organized Crime Rony Lopez, a police agent protecting Lopez’ family challenged two men, who answered with 9mm bullets. The agent died on the spot, and the killers escaped.
U.S. Ambassador Stephen McFarland and Carlos Castresana, head of the U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity, appeared with a drawn-looking Lopez to show support. But the prosecutors and prison-keepers of Guatemala must know the crime lords have them in their sights.
The crime web catches ordinary Guatemalans too, notably through extortion. Bus company owners are expected to pay monthly to keep their drivers from being murdered; over 80 were killed last year, and the killing continues. Passengers are at risk. Drivers’ murders can take place by automatic weapons fire from a car running alongside the bus, or even a grenade.
Many extortion rings are run from prisons by cel phone. A good friend explained how it worked at their house: a call comes once and tells you where to leave money. If you don’t, another call comes, advising “we know” where children go to school. My friend’s large family now lives without a telephone at home out of terror of another call.
Reactions to the atmosphere of precarious living range from the poignant to draconian. At a conference given by photographer Jean-Marie Simon this week in the capital, the packed room intently watched troubling wartime slides from her classic book, Guatemala, Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny. Afterward, queries about the cycle of violence showed frustration, as if some questioners were asking themselves, “What can we do?”
Former President Alvaro Arzu, now the mayor of this city, the biggest in Central America, believes he has an answer. Democracy is not it.
“Behind a mask of tolerance and freedom of opinion,” Arzu said in a speech Sept. 10, are values in today’s society -- such as democracy -- considered unquestionable, just as ideas about religion were in the Middle Ages. He suggested a “civic military” model of education to regenerate the country’s institutions.
The sides in this war are unlikely to meet at a table.
The week began with what one daily headlined, “A Diabolical Tidal Wave:“ In coordinated attacks, in various public corners of the capital, hitmen murdered the director of one prison, sub-director of another, and on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare, two prison guards transferring a prisoner from one site to another. Passers-by were killed too, or wounded in the sprays of gunfire, some from AK47s.
A few days later, outside the home of the country’s Chief Prosecutor of Organized Crime Rony Lopez, a police agent protecting Lopez’ family challenged two men, who answered with 9mm bullets. The agent died on the spot, and the killers escaped.
U.S. Ambassador Stephen McFarland and Carlos Castresana, head of the U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity, appeared with a drawn-looking Lopez to show support. But the prosecutors and prison-keepers of Guatemala must know the crime lords have them in their sights.
The crime web catches ordinary Guatemalans too, notably through extortion. Bus company owners are expected to pay monthly to keep their drivers from being murdered; over 80 were killed last year, and the killing continues. Passengers are at risk. Drivers’ murders can take place by automatic weapons fire from a car running alongside the bus, or even a grenade.
Many extortion rings are run from prisons by cel phone. A good friend explained how it worked at their house: a call comes once and tells you where to leave money. If you don’t, another call comes, advising “we know” where children go to school. My friend’s large family now lives without a telephone at home out of terror of another call.
Reactions to the atmosphere of precarious living range from the poignant to draconian. At a conference given by photographer Jean-Marie Simon this week in the capital, the packed room intently watched troubling wartime slides from her classic book, Guatemala, Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny. Afterward, queries about the cycle of violence showed frustration, as if some questioners were asking themselves, “What can we do?”
Former President Alvaro Arzu, now the mayor of this city, the biggest in Central America, believes he has an answer. Democracy is not it.
“Behind a mask of tolerance and freedom of opinion,” Arzu said in a speech Sept. 10, are values in today’s society -- such as democracy -- considered unquestionable, just as ideas about religion were in the Middle Ages. He suggested a “civic military” model of education to regenerate the country’s institutions.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Coming...
Marketing Memory -- Latin American Studies Conference in Rio
Rio LASA Windup -- Don't Move All Meetings to the USA! And, The Obama Effect
Killing Kodachrome
Rio LASA Windup -- Don't Move All Meetings to the USA! And, The Obama Effect
Killing Kodachrome
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Expanding Genocide’s Definition at LASA
Only seeing Rio from the bus so far: Latin American Studies Association meetings, Rio de Janiero, Brazil......
+++++
+++++
Parsing Political Violence
There is more reason every day to study the paroxysms of violence that shook Chile, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Latin American countries in the late 20th century. Knowing in depth what happened can mean they may never happen again. But examination also determines whether they fall into the category of genocide, what journalist and academic Samantha Power calls, “The Problem from Hell.”
The problem defining genocide comes first. Panelists discussing Institutional Memory -- that of political parties, the military, etc -- ended up grappling with what genocide is, and which killing events might fall into it, for much of their lively session. In particular: should the definition of victims be expanded to include members of a political affiliation?
It’s well known that genocide includes targeted killing of individuals because they belong to a particular group -- religious, racial, ethnic, national. What is less well known, as Pablo Policzer of the University of Calgary, pointed out, is that the first several drafts of the 1946 U.N. Genocide Convention included the political category, making it a crime of genocide to kill someone for his affiliation with a particular political group. Only at the last moment, because the Soviet Union and Iran threatened not to sign the convention if that group were left in, was it removed.
Some panelists said only the most numerically massive and egregious killings ought to be included in genocide's definition, like the WWII Holocaust, Cambodia, or the slaughter of Armenians; others stood for the original, wider definition including political groups, which might bring in Chile, for instance.
Against the wider definition is the argument that political affiliation is a choice one makes, less basic to identity than one’s ethnicity or religion. The counterargument is that a person’s choice of political affiliation is far more fundamental to who one is than even the other protected categories: Ethnic identities may be constructed; religious affiliation may be changed. By political affiliation we are not talking here about U.S. citizens choosing between the parties of Democrats and Republicans, who have more in common than they do separating them; instead we are talking about political world views, dictated by a person's birth or experience to become as intrinsically part of his being as his blood type.
Any of the already recognized categories of victims of genocide include identities that are not necessarily objective, but can be created or defined by the perpetrators of the genocide themselves. That is true too of political grouping -- consider the Guatemalan military policy of eliminating entire indigenous villages because of its belief the Maya were natural “allies” of insurgents. It was the military’s own definition of who the enemy was, its assumption of alliance with a political group, without regard to the stand of individuals.
Beyond scholars, lawyers and judges are wrestling with definitions of crimes against humanity and genocide to an increasing degree each year. Defining genocide is not an exercise like determining the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin. It has real world consequences for justice: crime juridically defined as genocide becomes a crime against humanity, which makes perpetrators liable under international law.
At least one panelist was convinced by colleagues’ arguments at LASA, he said, so that by the session’s end he said he believed the political affiliation category ought to be included when considering the crime of genocide.
Some panelists said only the most numerically massive and egregious killings ought to be included in genocide's definition, like the WWII Holocaust, Cambodia, or the slaughter of Armenians; others stood for the original, wider definition including political groups, which might bring in Chile, for instance.
Against the wider definition is the argument that political affiliation is a choice one makes, less basic to identity than one’s ethnicity or religion. The counterargument is that a person’s choice of political affiliation is far more fundamental to who one is than even the other protected categories: Ethnic identities may be constructed; religious affiliation may be changed. By political affiliation we are not talking here about U.S. citizens choosing between the parties of Democrats and Republicans, who have more in common than they do separating them; instead we are talking about political world views, dictated by a person's birth or experience to become as intrinsically part of his being as his blood type.
Any of the already recognized categories of victims of genocide include identities that are not necessarily objective, but can be created or defined by the perpetrators of the genocide themselves. That is true too of political grouping -- consider the Guatemalan military policy of eliminating entire indigenous villages because of its belief the Maya were natural “allies” of insurgents. It was the military’s own definition of who the enemy was, its assumption of alliance with a political group, without regard to the stand of individuals.
Beyond scholars, lawyers and judges are wrestling with definitions of crimes against humanity and genocide to an increasing degree each year. Defining genocide is not an exercise like determining the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin. It has real world consequences for justice: crime juridically defined as genocide becomes a crime against humanity, which makes perpetrators liable under international law.
At least one panelist was convinced by colleagues’ arguments at LASA, he said, so that by the session’s end he said he believed the political affiliation category ought to be included when considering the crime of genocide.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
