To be told that a scene of mass death is the result of an accident or terrorism is to be given not only an explanation of the cause but also an idea of how to reckon with the consequence.
Tag: philipgourevitch
Philip Gourevitch: Memory is a disease – Salon.com
Great interview. I’ve been slowly working my way through The Histories lately, and this attitude reminded me of Herodotus:
If I were simply to present these people talking about the deep past at face value, an historian would almost immediately say, “Gourevitch was taken in by these guys and their spin on history.” But to me what’s interesting—and the way I’ll present it—is that this is how they are invoking and recounting their inheritance, which may or may not be historically accurate. […] It’s an identity story as much as an accurate history.
On memory and moving on:
There’s a kind of fetishization of memory in our culture. Some of it comes from the experience and the memorial culture of the Holocaust—the injunction to remember. And it also comes from the strange collision of Freud and human rights thinking—the belief that anything that is not exposed and addressed and dealt with is festering and going to come back to destroy you. This is obviously not true. Memory is not such a cure-all. On the contrary, many of the great political crimes of recent history were committed in large part in the name of memory. The difference between memory and grudge is not always clean. Memories can hold you back, they can be a terrible burden, even an illness. Yes, memory—hallowed memory—can be a kind of disease. That’s one of the reasons that in every culture we have memorial structures and memorial days, whether for personal grief or for collective historical traumas. Because you need to get on with life the rest of the time and not feel the past too badly. I’m not talking about letting memory go. The thing is to contain memory, and then, on those days, or in those places, you can turn on the tap and really touch and feel it. The idea is not oblivion or even denial of memory. It’s about not poisoning ourselves with memory.
And there’s this:
There’s no such thing as a story all by itself. Stories don’t exist in solitude—they exist in relation to other stories.
Standard Operating Procedure (review: 4/5)
If you fight terror with terror, how do you tell which is which?
By choice, I stayed ignorant of the scandals at Abu Ghraib when the news first broke. Too disgusted. Too disheartened. I didn’t want to see it or hear about it, though it seemed the photos were everywhere. I finally came around.
Philip Gourevitch wrote Standard Operating Procedure by drawing on the hundreds of hours of interviews that Errol Morris used to make his documentary film of the same name. There’s some commentary on the mind-bogglingly poor management and bureaucratic indifference (e.g. “In the course of a month five different versions of the interrogation rules had been put into circulation at Abu Ghraib,” or the topsy-turvy relationship of Military Intelligence and Military Police, or the secrecy of the International Committee of the Red Cross even after its investigation found conditions “tantamount to torture,” or the willingness of people up and down the chain of command to look the other way when they saw the photos, or even saw it in person. This stuff is insane.).
But the photographs are the centerpiece. Most of the book details the incidents around the photos with lots of recollection from the military personnel involved, and talks more broadly about the nature of the photograph. It’s the iconography, how they encourage us to interpret the scene even though we have only that slice of time to judge—I’m glad the photos don’t appear in the book.
Were there a scale for jaded political cynicism, I’d probably rank in the 90th percentile, and I still find these stories really upsetting. But I’m glad I read it.
This interview with Philip Gourevitch is mostly about interviewing, but I like this, too:
My guilty pleasure reads are things that are just fabulously written. I donÄôt know how to say it without it being pretentious—IÄôll read a chapter from Moby Dick or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at random, where the language is just rocketing around, where thereÄôs absolutely no urgency to read it. ItÄôs like putting on one of your great anthem songs. ItÄôs like cranking the stereo.
Mark Larson 