Author Archives: Kate Polak

Under the Gun

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After a year in New York City, where the claustrophobia was so oppressive that I sometimes snuck out into the hallway to beat on the plywood screwed onto the roof hatch, my husband and I moved to a small village in Ohio. Yellow Springs is a town you may have heard of, in spite of its population of only a few thousand; the hometown of Dave Chappelle, a liberal enclave filled with older radicals and young free-spirit entrepreneurs, it is bounded by farms and parks. The Tecumseh Land Trust, a sort of demilitarized zone whose maintenance keeps strip malls and chain stores at bay, insures a level of charm annihilated by an influx of big box stores in neighboring towns. It is bounded on another side by Glen Helen, a small nature preserve with winding trails leading over a waterfall and a modest center for the rehabilitation of injured birds of prey. Our downtown consists of a few restaurants, a few coffee joints, a number of shops devoted to the functional and ornamental artwork of locals, a movie theater, and a local grocery. On Saturdays, much of the town turns out for the farmer’s market, populated by piles of organic peppers and tomatoes, small-batch fermented vegetables, and cheese from the cows I walk past on foggy mornings.

A year after our move, the pavement was still hot against the soles of our feet as my husband and I stood, arms around one another’s shoulders, looking far down the street. This was an awkward posture for us—neither a cold nor an overly affectionate couple—and after a while, we ended up standing apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.

I came from a neighborhood where SWAT raids, random gunfire, and despair were not uncommon. I was in eighth grade when a girl in my class was gunned down in a nearby parking lot—I didn’t know it was her, but I had seen a body lying in a parking lot on a walk. One morning, I woke to the train whistle, more insistent than usual. A block away, a man had simply sat down on the tracks and waited. The rails were awash in blood by the time I was going to school, a fine spray over the rocks in the cess. A stray bullet fired by a neighbor in a fury of celebration one July 4th afternoon lodged itself in the wall above my parents’ bed. If it had been the evening, it would have penetrated my father’s abdomen. He dug it out of the wall and displayed it next to the pennies he and my mother crush on the train tracks.

On this night, however, violence was out of place.

The gun battle was raging at 11pm on a Tuesday. After picking Ian up from work when the sirens began wheeling around our neighborhood, we padded back and forth between the porch and the intersection between our street and a major road. For two blocks beyond the intersection, police cars lined either side of the street, and the main road was rapidly filling with news cameras, giant lights casting a surreal glow on the corner I normally turned to walk past a friend’s wild flower-strewn front garden. She sometimes punctuates the arboreal splendor with artfully curated holiday decorations. The pavement was still hot against the soles of our feet as Ian and I stood, arms around one another’s shoulders, looking far down the street. This was an awkward posture for us—neither a cold nor an overly affectionate couple—and after a while, we stood apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.

Facebook had exploded with rumors two hours before, but by 11pm, we know that the shooter was Ian’s friend Paul, that he was barricaded in his house a few blocks north on our street, and that he would not be coming over for dinner on Wednesday.

We had been trying to find time for a cookout for a year, in part because I had never met him in person. Online, Paul’s regular posts on Ian’s Facebook wall, while littered with extraneous ellipses, were well-reasoned, and emotionally raw—a mockery of form that nonetheless commanded respect for their naked subjective engagement. In spite of this, however, he was not known for his delicacy of approach. Debates about guns were particularly vituperative. Paul had, several years before, been the subject of a raid, which turned up hundreds of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. All of it was legally purchased, and all of it was returned. Several other friends had already blocked him, and his rambling responses were occasionally aggressive. Unlike those on most internet commenting threads, however, the longer Paul interacted, the sweeter he became—after what began as a particularly vicious battle, the thread would eventually devolve into Paul’s declarations of love and appreciation, grateful for the debate.

Ian had seen him the day before, Monday, at Kroger, and was a bit sad and distant after watching Paul limp to the plastic pharmacy counter to collect his blood pressure medication. He had picked me up from mucking out stalls, I was flush with the new strength in my arms, and reeked of dirt and manure, my spine singing from the muscles knitting and thickening across my shoulders and back, and easily gamboled over Ian’s ache for Paul’s reduction.

Tuesday morning was spent pulling meat out of the freezer to defrost and marinate.

My fingers closed on Ian’s arm as we counted seventeen shots in rapid succession. We walked back to the corner, looked down at the army surrounding Paul’s small house, briefly embraced, walked back.

On Wednesday morning, I started to weep.

A week before, the day after I defended my dissertation, my friend Jeremy was gunned down in a local bar after what can only be described as a psychotic break. During high school, Jeremy’s parents’ porch was a safe space; conveniently placed alongside of a main drag, but tucked just away off on a side street, the wide, concrete steps could accommodate more than a dozen milling youth, while the solid stone paling shielded us from passersby. Teenaged girlfriends and I loitered while he and his friends joked around, but the unusual element in this scene was that Jeremy and his friend Phil policed the discourse; it was a misogyny-free zone, the only anodyne social space in my adolescence.

Jeremy and I had been in irregular but enthusiastic contact since we were in high school, using the innovations of digital correspondence to manufacture political debates every few months. Looking back on a long conversation on hate crimes, I’m struck more by the pleasantness of the exchange than by our stark disagreement. Jeremy thought that the existence of the legal designation of hate crimes amounted to criminalizing thought, while I see them as a classification of a crime committed against an individual but intended to terrorize a larger group. Jeremy thought profiling could be useful, while I think that profiling is an act of racism. These are wide gulfs in thought and approach, but his respect for my views was apparent in his phrasing. He wasn’t seeking to convert me—merely to show me that his point-of-view was reasonable. I often explain to my students that this is the only truly honorable approach in a debate.

On the day of his death, according to reports, he argued with his mother before departing her home. When confronted by police he removed his gun from its holster and waved it around in a threatening manner, at which point he was repeatedly tased and then shot to death in a bar around the corner from his parents’ house, the only bar in crawling distance from my apartment of half a decade. He had apparently tried to raise his gun as officers struggled him to the ground.

It has been nearly two years since their deaths, and I have fought with myself over how to say something meaningful about them. Mass shootings are in the news more often than not, and each time another young man murders, I think back to Paul and Jeremy. Their stories are not unfamiliar: both had issues with mental illness, both had easy access to firearms, and both had a deep and abiding suspicion that gun regulation was the first step down the road towards fascism. But both were also deeply compassionate, vulnerable, had families they loved and large social circles. They were friendly and warm, and when they talked about the issues they cared about, they spoke clearly and calmly, and they listened respectfully to other views. It won’t do to memorialize them with another call to fund mental health services, to regulate the sale of firearms, or to expand government oversight. They had good access to mental healthcare, they purchased firearms within the bounds of the law, and they would have been appalled if I leveraged their memories for more regulation. It won’t do to call on neighbors and friends, or to point towards a particular viewpoint or conspiracy theory. They had friends and family who cared deeply, and they weren’t rigid ideologues. They were nuanced.

In both cases, the authorities tasked with handling Jeremy and Paul’s respective outbursts were in danger, but also were both heavy-handed, which led to discussions in Cincinnati and Yellow Springs about the increasing militarization of the police force. It’s a discussion that should continue, but it is not the only discussion worth having in relation to outbreaks of gun violence (if their perpetuity can even be captured by the term “outbreak” anymore).

These deaths recall for me a darker aspect of our culture. As I mentioned at the opening of this essay, I’m not a stranger to violence. The neighborhood I grew up in goes through regular cycles, the ebb and flow of blood that is a fact of life in poverty. As a teenager, I had guns trained on me by both criminals and officers, and never in the context of a “drug deal gone wrong” or during an arrest. Instead, it was during activities remarkable in this context only for their dailiness; walking home from getting a cone of shaved ice, walking into my parents’ back yard. When the ATF raided the house two doors down and pulled 147 illegal guns out of one side of the duplex, kids had been playing in the front yard an hour before. The girl in my 8th grade class who was shot to death in a parking lot two blocks away. Shots fired were nothing irregular. These were not the experiences of the vast majority of my white classmates, whose houses were nestled in quiet cul-de-sacs in different neighborhoods that seemed very, very far away.

But now, the boundaries are failing. It isn’t that mass shootings are becoming more frequent. It’s that they’re becoming more frequent in ways middle-class white people can see. At 33, now a middle-class white person myself, it is eerie to watch the type of violence I grew up understanding to be common follow me into areas where the police brutality, the S.W.A.T. raids, the tanks, the guns, and all of the other attendant material hallmarks are clearly perceived as something new.

One of the things that always bothered me in discussions about gun violence and violence in general is that those who have not grown up in the shadow of its threat often assume that we acclimate ourselves to it. Environments of violence don’t breed an adjustment period that is capped with a reconciliation with one’s surroundings. It doesn’t get less traumatic just because it happens every day.

I’m a professor of English now. My work is concerned with the representation of violence in literature and the study of empathy. The longer I consider the questions that have guided my life and career, the less I believe that empathy exists beyond a very narrow engagement with the people around me who are like me. Who are around you, who are like you. I worry sometimes that my academic interests are turning me into a sort of voyeur sociopath, who has feelings but suspects that they are considerably more limited and less useful than most would assume. As I read over the essays written by smart, caring people attempting to grapple with this suddenly more unsafe world, I think back to the neighborhood of my youth, where if you chalked the outline of every body that had lain on those streets, you couldn’t take a step without toeing the outline of another tragedy.

The last discussion I had with Jeremy centered on gun control, gun rights, and intent versus contemporary usage in Constitutional rights. While he advocated for gun rights, he was nonetheless disturbed when I sent him information about the connection between the ratification of the Second Amendment and Virginia’s slave-hunting militias. He had a conceal-and-carry license, and frequently encouraged me to buy a gun and take classes in order to better protect myself. In one of our last exchanges, he told me that he wanted to be “the good guy with a gun,” and that he hoped, in spite of my views, I would thank him. Winky face.

I can’t help but wonder, as I re-read those messages, whether a relentless consciousness of the chaos at the gates was what compelled him to have that gun, and if a more immersive vision of it—as I had in my old neighborhood—would have made him feel any differently. But I don’t get to ask him, which is itself a tragedy, because he would have had some interesting thoughts to share.

Biting the Hand That Feeds: Hannibal, Rihanna, and Sexual Harassment

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I had somehow missed The Silence of the Lambs, viewing it only a few years ago, well into my adulthood. After years of making jokes about how “it rubs the lotion on its skin,” my husband got frustrated with my blank looks of incomprehension and queued it up on Netflix. As Buffalo Bill grows increasingly irate with his captive, screaming at her “or else it gets the hose again!”, I burst into tears. A 30 year old woman frantically crying over an often-mocked scene in a 20 year old film.

My husband was unnerved to say the least—he had seen the film when it came out, and since it circulated in popular culture in a recognizable way for him, the line had lost its teeth. It was cheesy, and morphed into a joke. I, on the other hand, had no context for the line, and had heard it for years as a cutesy phrase that referenced a film I’d never watched. Having it replaced in its proper milieu was jarring. Instead of a tacky scene worthy of ridicule, something about the pronoun—“it”—and the directive about lotion reached around the rational part of my mind and struck me directly in the amygdala.

I unintentionally overlooked the television series Hannibal until two seasons in, when I was looking to kick off last summer with some horror. The glorious cinematography, the powerfully reserved acting, and the beautifully rendered script combined to make a stunning and tense dance of intellect and gore.

The first and second seasons are fixated on the strain between knowledge and ignorance. Will Graham, a special investigator for the FBI, is capable—according to Dr. Lecter—of “pure empathy”; he can mentally reconstruct a murderer’s actions, playing the role of the criminal in his internal recreation of the drama. Special Agent Jack Crawford contacts Will to assist him on a case in which young women of the same physical description have been disappearing. Crawford’s initial role is less that of a capable investigator than a pushy delegator. Dr. Alana Bloom, a purportedly intelligent psychiatrist, has taken an interest in Will, and wants to protect him from what she sees as Crawford’s potentially disruptive pressure. To this end, she introduces Crawford to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who is tasked with monitoring Will.

The show relies on the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of Dr. Lecter operating in the background. Assuming we have seen the unhinged Anthony Hopkins biting the cheek off of a prison guard and recounting eating a liver with “some fava beans and a nice Chianti,” we are faced instead with an eminently rational and restrained Lecter in the show.

Lecter’s self-possessed mien in Hannibal stands in stark contrast to Hopkins’ portrayal, and while the audience knows he is the “bad guy,” the show operates less on the shock value of the murders under investigation or Lecter’s own gastronomical vagaries, and more on how power and knowledge must be—as Michel Foucault insisted—thought together.

Foucault equated knowledge with power, something that those currently struggling under the auspices of austerity in the academe may find laughable, but it’s an equation that is nonetheless compelling for situating current debates about the role of those with knowledge, and what types of knowledge can (or should) be leveraged into power. In Hannibal, Lecter uses his intellect, as well as his privileged status as confidant and guide for Will, to conduct increasingly bizarre experiments on him while the latter is in a fugue state. Lecter manipulates those around him, relentlessly curious about the boundaries of goodness and empathy in those who have the capacity for them.

Foucault is careful to distinguish between knowledge that is laden with power and knowledge that is marginalized. He specifically notes the “disqualified knowledges” of the mentally ill, but broadens this to say that “We are concerned, rather, with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods, or concepts of science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and functioning” of a discipline (Power/Knowledge 84). In regards to this, he parses the way in which power is only thought of as something that is exerted, rather than something that is naturalized and replicated without direct activity.

As shorthand, it can be thought of as the distinction between the power of having and the power of doing.

Hannibal’s ability to unnerve and disquiet rests not on the “reveal,” as with many crime thrillers. The audience already knows who the villain is, even as the team tries to sort out other cases of varying drama and terror. Instead, the appeal of Hannibal rests almost entirely with the tacit knowledge shared by the audience and Lecter: that he is the antagonist, but we still want to see precisely what he is capable of in relationships. In fact, the least interesting scenes in the show are those that depict him enjoying a meal of a person alone. The tension instead resides in watching Lecter use the knowledge he has of himself—as well as his developing theories about other characters—to his own ends.

I’ve been reflecting on Hannibal throughout the year because its peculiar blend of refinement, psychopathology, and epicureanism holds me in a strange thrall. It reminds me of other debates about power, both the having and the doing, because the show has crafted a world in which the rules of behavior and the exercise of power are nearly illegible to those in the best position to address the atrocities occurring within their midst.

In particular, as I watch the third (and possibly final) season of Hannibal, I’m also embroiled in the ongoing debate about campus sexual harassment, launched in part by Laura Kipnis in her now-famous Chronicle of Higher Education article “Sexual Paranoia Strikes the Academe.” This may seem an odd pairing—a show about a psychiatrist/cannibalistic serial killer and a turgid debate about whether or not professors should be permitted to have sex with students—but I can’t help but think that the same questions about power are at stake.

For those who haven’t followed the discussion, Kipnis’s argument rests on three major elements. The first is that administrators are overstepping their boundaries and are infringing on academic freedom. This is patently true, and doesn’t merit debate. Administrative overreach has been consistently critiqued over the past 30 years, and is getting worse as faculty are increasingly shifted to the status of contingent labor. Furthermore, because of this administrative overreach, it is increasingly clear that non-educators are determining educational policy, always to the detriment of students’ actual development.

Second, she contends that an obvious example of this is new policies prohibiting professor-student romantic relationships. These policies have been implemented at a variety of universities to quell the tide of demonstrations against campus sexual assault. While I personally agree with these policies, I can see the potential problems with them, and am willing to debate them.

Third, she argues that the supposed “sexual panic” on campuses is vastly overinflating a relatively benign problem, and that students’ own sense of exaggerated vulnerability is actually making professors the more vulnerable class. This is ridiculous. Professor-on-student sexual harassment and assault are still significant issues. While student-on-student sexual harassment accounts for 80% of reports on campus, that still leaves a sizable problem. Furthermore, many cases of both varieties go unreported. For example, Kipnis asserts that

For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition.

Here, she is conflating normal misunderstandings with harassment.

My annoyance with the tenor of this discussion has increased with the tone-deafness of Kipnis’ understanding of power and its subtle manifestations.

In Hannibal, the audience is in reluctant collusion with Lecter as he manipulates and slaughters characters. There are—of course—the “ordinary interpersonal entanglements” of daily life. Will Graham and Alanna Bloom share an attraction, but because Alanna is concerned about Will’s mental state, she refuses to enter into a relationship with him. Jack Crawford’s pressure on Will to use his empathy can grow harsh. However, standing in stark contrast to these relatively benign interactions is the maneuvering of Lecter.

Interestingly, both Will and Lecter work from the point of curiosity about human emotions and motivation. While Will is able to adopt the perspective of others who have committed misdeeds in the past, Lecter is able to use his observations to predict future behavior. Both are talented, but only one begins the series with a sense of the way in which his knowledge brings him power. In the first season, Lecter experiments on Will after discovering that he has the symptoms of encephaly. Instead of seeking surgical treatment for his patient, Lecter devises a series of experiments in the clinical setting to encourage Will to lose time. In entrusting his mind to another, Will is violated at both the psychological and bodily levels because he fails to discern how this power can be leveraged against him.

After Will reconstructs a crime scene that includes a grisly totem pole of bodies, he loses time and appears at Lecter’s office door. Lecter tells him that this is the result of his psyche “enduring repeated abuse,” and Will frantically objects that “No, NO! I am NOT abused!” Lecter repeats that Will has an empathy disorder, and that disregarding his disordered psyche is “the abuse I’m referring to.” Here, abuse is relocated as being the act of the person suffering—abuse at his own hand—rather than being visited from the outside. This recalls Kipnis’s argument that it is students’ sense of vulnerability, rather than objective conditions in which they are disempowered, that is the problem.

Will wants to find a physical—objective—cause for his disorder. The viewer already knows that Lecter is hiding some aspect of this from Will, but it is not until the following episode that we see there is indeed a physical cause for Will’s rapidly fraying sanity, a cause that Lecter pressures the neurologist to conceal. Much like the objective problem of sexism within the academe, Will’s disordered brain matter has psychological effects that are erroneously attributed to more ethereal causes.

It is not that Will or Lecter stand in an easy allegorical relationship to students and professors in relation to Kipnis’s argument. Instead, Will and Lecter represent two distinct modes of knowledge, both of which are necessary to understand the real causes, circumstances, and consequences of sexual harassment in the academy and elsewhere. Lecter has power in his superior knowledge of the mind, and is not afraid to leverage it to his own ends. In this sense, we must remember that knowledge is not equivalent to ethics.

Will, on the other hand, has the capacity to understand others on an experiential level—to feel as they feel—but this very gift is also potentially disabling. Neither emotion nor reason are able to wholly grasp the diegetic world of Hannibal. Instead, there is a third term—power, and its subtle operation—with which all of the characters in both the on-screen and real-world dramas must contend.

It would be foolish, however, to equate Lecter’s power with his capacity to do violence on others. Violence is almost beside the point of the show, much like violence is frequently beside the point in terms of sexual violence. It remains popular to say that “rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power.” However, too often, those who remark on this conflate power with violence, as if violence is the only way in which power operates. Power in the world of Hannibal is not Lecter’s murders, or the murders by other various and sundry psychopaths populating the chorus of the show. It is the leveraging of psychological force.

One of the greatest myths that persists to today is that sexual harassment, and sexual violence, are invariably violent in the traditional sense of the word. The ham-handed training on sexual harassment provided by private companies making money off of universities trying to comply with Title IX do little to help this issue, as they have themselves a vested interest in concealing how subtly power circulates in a workplace, classroom, or clinic.

Perhaps this is less than legible for those who have acclimated themselves to shows of force. For example, Mads Mikkelsen, the actor who plays Lecter in Hannibal, was recently featured in Rihanna’s new video “Bitch Better Have My Money.” The video represents Rihanna as a kingpin of some sort whose accountant, Mikkelsen, has stolen her money. She kidnaps and tortures his wife, which doesn’t particularly phase him, so she goes on to torture him.

The video is an interesting contrast to Mikkelsen’s role on Hannibal. While he is still situated in relatively luxurious surroundings, he is ultimately at the whims of Rihanna. Furthermore, some critics have levelled the charge that the video is misogynistic because of the violence she visits on the woman who plays the wife of Mikkelsen. Speculations flew about whether or not this was a revenge fantasy about Rihanna’s real-life former accountant. Feminists of color have (rightly) pointed out that white feminism hasn’t always been welcoming to women of color.

Even the debates surrounding this video illustrate how fraught power is, particularly in relation to those who have been historically oppressed. Of course, the theft of money and sexual harassment or assault are not equivalent. Instead, this clearly illustrates how the public tends to react to obvious displays of violence—particularly from a disadvantaged woman, and in this case, particularly a woman of color—versus its critical acclaim of a white man with an advanced degree who eats people.

Hannibal is more than a show about a dude with “refined tastes,” however. It’s a series that best hits its stride when the audience is gazing on the beautifully plated delectables we know for a fact are composed predominantly of the minor character killed off in the previous scene. It’s a series that does more with an eyebrow raise, a small hand gesture, or a mild remark, than most shows are capable of doing with an ample explosives budget.

And it is loved—and found disturbing—precisely because we recognize that the power wielded by Lecter is at its most insidious when it is least obvious.

Obvious displays of power are few and far between. It would be delightful if tomorrow I could wake up in a world where power had shifted so far from the hands of professors and administrators that students weren’t threatened in a variety of ways by their moods and their decisions. Lecter remarks late in the second season that “Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude,” but even at this point, Lecter still knows much that Will does not.

After all, Hannibal kills both for pleasure and for necessity. He only eats those he considers equivalent to the animals most humans ingest. As he remarks to a character he’s keeping captive, “This isn’t cannibalism, Abel. It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals.”

And so goes Kipnis’ argument. It is only sexual harassment if we pretend that we are equals, and that there are not small, subtle (or even obvious) power dynamics at play. It’s only violence if it looks like it to her.

Power isn’t merely in the exercise thereof. It is in the ability to assess whether or not it was exercised.

We’re More Theon than Sansa: Game of Thrones’ “Subtle” Viewer Trolling

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I can’t seem to gin up the expected outrage about Game of Thrones’ most recent controversial rape scene. From Senator Claire McCaskill’s tweet that “Gratuitous rape scenes are disgusting and unacceptable” to Joanna Robinson’s article “Game of Thrones Absolutely Did Not Need to Go There with Sansa Stark,” many are angry over the nature of the scene. The outrage is to some extent understandable: a beloved main character is raped by a man who was already clearly in the “bad guy” camp. The scene altered the plot line in the book, making Sansa rather than Jeyne Poole the victim. The camera leaves the viewer with Theon’s miserable face, a fact to which Sarah Ditman responded “Apparently violence against a woman counts for more if it distresses a man.” That said, the bulk of my reaction to these critics can be summed up in Amanda Marcotte’s fabulously patient, clear delineation of the flaws in each objection. She does, however, neglect one major point that made me appreciate the scene in an unexpected way—we as viewers are asked to identify with—or empathize with—the right character given the viewership. Before I clarify that argument, let me pace out a few questions in terms of fiction and real-life correlates.

What constitutes a “gratuitous” rape scene? Dividing rape scenes between “justified” and “unjustified” already seems to be treading into very hazy moral territory. While I’m talking about works of fiction, much of the fan resentment is centered around the fact that many women in the non-fictional universe are raped, and that when rape is depicted in film, television, or literature, it should be done in such a way that:

  • Does not make rape “sexy.”
  • Makes sense in terms of what came before in the plot
  • Focuses on the victim character.

I’m not entirely convinced that demanding that rape scenes adhere to a certain set of rules necessarily serves the audience’s best interests. Rape in real life is often as confusing as it is terrifying, and rape in fiction should better reflect the complexities of the crime. In Sapphire’s Push, the incestuous rape scene that opens the novel also includes the victim feeling sexual pleasure in spite of her fear, anger, and confusion. When I first read that scene, I was appalled. In retrospect, given what follows, this depiction makes sense in terms of carefully crafting the utter lack of clarity in the main character’s world. Of course, this was a novel that resisted identification at every turn.

The second parameter insists that the rape be a legible, understandable outcome of previous plot points. I find this to be the weirdest expectation. Rape in real life tends to happen unexpectedly. Retroactive attempts to impose meaning or narrative arc on the events leading up to a rape generally focus on how the victim could have made different choices and thus avoided the rape—which, of course, is the type of victim-blaming we don’t want to see in relation to rape cases. Furthermore, claiming a desire for understanding why it happened tends to also naturalize rape as a logical outcome of some series of events, rather than a grotesque violation.

Why can rape only be included in a work when it “drives the plot forward”? The question of plot works both prior to the rape scene and after the rape scene. The rape scene must have meaning, some argue, and it must be a transformative experience that later results in the character who was victimized having more agency and a stronger sense of self. Well, yes, that would be ideal, but it neglects the fact that rape doesn’t always bring about a radical transformation of a character, and that the expectation of this transformation is… creepy. After all, this isn’t exactly what we’d like to see modeled as a “rite of passage” for young women.

It’s true that the rape of a woman has too often been used as a device to galvanize male characters into action (see Gail Simon’s Women in Refrigerators). But it also remains true that rape doesn’t only affect the victim. Sexual violence is a poison that affects society. While it disproportionately directly affects women, the effects of sexual violence are as far-reaching as its prevalence, and it’s worth considering that when we speak out against rape. Rape damages at physical and psychological levels, and those wounds reach out like skeins of telephone wire, transmitting pain and fear and confusion wherever they land. While I do not mean to argue “but what about the menz?!”, anecdotally, I’ve seen many men care more about the sexual violence visited upon women when it happens in some social proximity. In addition, because they are so often given scripts of vengeance for the violation of “their” woman, they find themselves impotent in the face of a society that tends to frown upon vigilantism, no matter how warranted.

At the level of fiction, men are capable of investing in female characters (although the evidence points towards the fact that most of us identify less with female than male characters). And for me, this is the site of the brilliance of this particular representation of rape in Game of Thrones. The assumed audience is male. While the viewership skews slightly male, it’s considerably more evenly divided than one might expect given the subject matter. With that said, even female audience members—in light of the data—are more likely to judge female characters (and real women in their lives) harshly, an attitude that extends to sexual violence.

Rather than focusing on the sadistic Ramsey, which would have repulsed the audience, or co-opting Sansa’s point-of-view, which would have allowed viewers to vicariously adopt the mantel of “victim-heroine,” they instead chose to focus on Theon. This choice is absolutely essential to the ethical project of the show because it subtly indicts the viewer (assumed male, but also assumed to judge female characters) for standing idly by while the rape epidemic unfolds—quite obviously—all around them.

 

 

 

 

Teaching the Invasion of Iraq 11 Years Out

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What people forget, of course, when they’re confronted with a graphic novel about four lions who look suspiciously like the characters in Disney’s The Lion King is that Pride of Baghdad is indeed based on a true story. It is a comic relatively free of humans, following four lions who escape from the Baghdad Zoo after the initial U.S. bombing campaign, tracing how they evolve in their understandings of freedom, place, and community. Their escape is a surprise (they are released when U.S. bombs blow apart their cages), but each lion reacts to this new-found freedom differently. Noor is delighted—she has been planning an escape for months—but worries that freedom that one doesn’t work for isn’t truly freedom. Safa, on the other hand, was a victim of gang-rape while she was still in the wild, and has no interest in returning to the chaos she perceives as reigning beyond the walls of the zoo. Zill, while he tells nostalgic stories about the sunrises in the wild, largely seems ambivalent about the prospect of freedom; he would like more control, but he also likes being fed regularly. Ali, the cub, is largely unaffected as well. What follows is how I approach explaining to students the relative use of Pride of Baghdad in understanding the variety of positions one may take in regards to the Iraq War.

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Zill and Noor both long to return to the freedom they had as cubs, although they approach this in different ways. While Zill indulges in nostalgia, he doesn’t seek freedom, and their liberation seems barely to affect his attitude. Noor, on the other hand, is actively attempting to craft an escape plan. However, once they are free, Noor shows herself to be capable as a huntress, but is psychologically ill-prepared for freedom. Safa, unlike the other two adult lions, appreciates the zoo for the safety and consistency it provides. After the escape, Safa adapts back to the unpredictability of the larger world swiftly, but she is physically no longer capable of being the huntress she once was.

Each lion approaches the question of freedom from a different angle. Noor, while still inside of the zoo, thinks primarily of the physical bars on the cages as limitations on her freedom. For her, liberty is freedom of movement. Safa, in contrast, does not see freedom in terms of the ability to make choices about where she is. Liberty for Safa is defined by safety from outside threat. She sees the cages as protection, and a regular feeding schedule as safety. 

For example, Safa could represent “staying at home” (i.e. staying out of foreign wars) as a preferable political stance. However, she could also represent the idea that safety can only occur with the sacrifice of certain liberties. Furthermore, she could represent a recognition of the negative potential for foreign intervention, but through her actions, she nonetheless intervenes for the good of her pride.

When I teach Pride of Baghdad, I first approach it considering who the lions represent.

It’s worth considering how they might connect to Iraqi civilians. America was the force that came into the country. Saddam was a brutal dictator. However, under his leadership, there was relative peace and stability for the vast majority of Iraqi civilians. They may or may not have liked living under his regime, but they were relatively safe from threat—unless, of course, you were unlucky enough to draw Saddam’s attention or to be a member of a religious sect or ethnic group he despised.

Consider the lion that Safa and Noor find in the palace. In this scene, we see the lion in his death throes, wasting away while chained within a palatial estate. We of course come to find out that the bear had been stealing his food, but the bear isn’t the only bad guy here. What was removed from that lion that was a part of him?

Teeth and claws—the vehicles of a sort of natural violence, evolved in order to survive, to fight and to eat prey. The chain isn’t the only thing holding him to the wall. The chain signifies something much more basic that has been stripped from him: the right to feed himself and to defend himself. His calls for his Master, the man who did this to him (presumably Saddam or one of his sons), gestures towards the extent to which a dictatorship may remove the most basic freedoms from its citizenry in the name of a particular version of safety.

Noor is immediately willing to hypothesize that this is indeed the end result of their captivity: the removal of the ability to live without the master. Safa, however, emphasizes the distinction between the compassion that the keepers showed and the brutality with which this animal was treated.

But how do we understand the bear’s interruption here? “Ungrateful whores,” he says. What is a whore? Why would this particular insult be used? The bear draws a relationship between this insult and the distinction between a prisoner and a pet. His name, “fajer,” is probably a corruption of “fajr,” which means “dawn,” but also has a related term that means “whore.” Why would the bear have been allowed to keep his teeth and claws when they were removed from the lion? Think in relation to expressions of capriciousness, the whim of the master as a guiding principle, rather than a stable set of laws by which one abides.

In relation to Pride of Baghdad, the value most clearly explicated is freedom, but what does freedom mean in the context of war?

On the other hand, the lions could represent American civilians’ debates in the lead-up to the war. It’s worth thinking about the pro- and anti-war camps in relation to Safa, Noor, and Zill. When is Safa violent? When she is convinced that her family is under threat. Safa is mostly concerned with maintaining her own safety, particularly because of her past. However, she doesn’t shy away from the prospect of protecting those who are weaker. Safa can be regarded as a stand-in for the American public—horrified and traumatized by 9/11, needing to reassert control over their own bodies and on the world stage.

That said, Noor, our revolutionary who wanted nothing more than freedom, finds that to a great extent, the boundaries of the zoo are not that dissimilar to the boundaries of life in the wasteland of a bombed city. No freedom exists without responsibility and without personal sacrifice of safety. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act and other legal frameworks were established to “protect” American citizens, but did nothing so much as create a transparent cage.

When is Zill violent? Consider the page in which he attacks the bear—distinction between a hunter and a fighter. Hunting, as “women’s work” within the pride, denotes a division of labor. Hunting isn’t perceived as violence, but rather as the procurement of food—a simple necessity. Fighting is violence, but it also springs out of necessity for Zill, in reference to defending the females from the bear.

Of course, when we’re considering the causes for violence, we have to consider how we justify violence within our own lives. What is a “justified use of force”?

In general, we think of violence as being justified when it serves to protect. Violence used in the service of protecting the self or another is seen almost universally as a moral exertion of force. This leads us into the question of what constitutes a “just war.” Just wars are based on a set of criteria that must be established to prompt particular action, including a cause celebré of the protection of the self (the nation) or the protection of a significantly weaker force. Just war may be employed only when other avenues have been exhausted. Of course, a part of what this means is the protection of the ideals and values by which we live, and the ideals and values we believe are basic human rights.

Fables are remembered because they filter into our consciousness and give us a series of rules to follow. However, Pride of Baghdad takes the structure of a fable and breaks down the possibility of a particular rule. The lions are killed at the end. This would seem to suggest that, given our sympathetic engagement with the lions throughout the text, that the invasion was wrong, and that we should feel angry at our government for invading. But precisely what do we encounter along the way to that final scene that complicates our understanding?

When the lions are freed from the zoo, is that not (aside from Safa), what they most desire? Who frees them from the zoo? American bombs. Bombs, for Vaughan and Henrichon, have at least as much power to liberate as they do to destroy. However, the final scene shows a fundamental misunderstanding by the troops of the lions. Zill is simply sitting there, watching the horizon with his family, until he is suddenly killed.

The pride’s reaction is very understandable. They turn in anger at the enemy who has suddenly shattered this moment of calm. In the scene following the lions’ deaths, what don’t we see? Faces.

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When you have an icon, the more abstracted it is from reality, the more opportunity you have to identify with it. The flag and the faceless soldiers both are icons through which we’re meant to identify—these are our troops, this is our war. When the soldier stutters that “It…it charged right at us, sir. I didn’t want to put ‘em down, but…” we may feel angry, or we may have a surge of sympathy for the young man suddenly thrust into the position of shooting these animals; we may feel his fear and confusion.

In regards to this, I also think of the lions. When we look at the lions, we see ourselves—they are mimicries of humanity —adjacent to us, but not precisely like us. They are like the Iraqi civilians, but so much closer to our experience through this metaphoric lens. While they have a different perception of the world based on their culture and their expectations about how the world works, they’re still excruciatingly present in their deaths, in a way that most casualties of war are not. When we look at a photograph of a crying mother or a dead man, we see them. But when we look through the prism of the fable, we see us. And in this reflection of ourselves, we see no easy answers as to right and wrong.

What We Don’t Plan For

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This post was supposed to be about Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad, the fictional graphic novel based on the true story of the pride of lions that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo after the initial bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003. Although that work has become freakishly and horrifyingly topical again, given the recent decision by the Obama administration to wage such a campaign against ISIS, my mind is elsewhere this week.

Last week, my students finished Jeremy Love’s brilliant Bayou Volume I, the story of African-American Lee Wagstaff and white Lily Westmoreland, two young friends negotiating the racial politics of 1933 Mississippi. The class was oddly silent for much of the second day, and when one of my (few) African-American students brought up a recent news item in our region, I knew I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t discuss it.

Our class takes place on the idyllic Wittenberg University campus in Springfield, Ohio. Just a little ways down the road, in Beavercreek, John Crawford III was shot to death by the police inside of a Wal-Mart. He was holding a toy pellet gun. Another customer had apparently called the police, claiming that a man was waving a gun around in the store in a threatening manner. After weeks of refusing to release the video for fear of tainting the grand jury, Attorney General Mike DeWine allowed the security footage to be released tonight, only hours after the grand jury declined to indict the officers. The video is horrific. Appalling. “Cold-blooded murder” is the most obvious phrase that pops to mind.

Of course, it was also precisely what I expected.

Last week, we didn’t have the grand jury decision, nor did we have the video. What we did have was one volume of a bizarre little comic that riffs off of Alice in Wonderland. By way of summary, the work opens with Lee by the bayou, preparing to jump in to tie a rope so as to haul up the lynched body of Billy Glass (a character meant to stand in for Emmett Till). Glass had been lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman, his body left in the water.
 

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While she is in the bayou, Lee sees a vision of Billy’s soul, and as we turn the pages, we realize that what we have seen is her memory of the incident, which she is recounting to Lily.
 

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Lily expresses curiosity about the appearance of the dead body (as opposed to Lee’s genuine fear) and even goes so far as to parrot her mother’s racist diatribe about Billy “deserving what he got.” Qiana Whitted’s close reading of this scene is exquisite, telling us that

What we hear, then, in Love’s visual rendering of Lily’s whistle interests me greatly, for those tiny eighth notes generate a tremendous sound. We hear echoes of anti-miscegenation panic, a fear that reverberates unease even as the conversation hastily resumes. We hear the sense of white privilege that attends Lily’s ability to whistle freely, carelessly one could argue, in spite of her naïveté as a child repeating her mother’s words. But I believe that what Love also wants us to hear in this sequence is the “wolf whistle” of a murdered black child, along with the memory of just how much that sound costs. Perhaps what resonates most deeply in the white girl’s whistle are the sounds that Billy (and Emmett) are no longer able to make, were never free to make at all.

Furthermore, the iconic rendering of their faces invites identification, but that identification remains ambivalent. They are both iconic, so neither is closed off. While the racism Lily spews certainly inclines the reader to retract any sympathetic engagement, she is also a child copying her mother’s words. We should all know better, but, the implication is that sometimes we don’t.

Later, Lily loses her locket in the bayou, and blames the loss on Lee, prompting Mrs. Westmoreland to demand Lee work to pay back the value of the locket, a demand to which Calvin, Lee’s father, promptly accedes because he doesn’t want to see his child “hurt over some white girl’s locket.”

While Lily would seem to be a bumbling villain at this point, she tries to go down to the bayou to find the locket and fix her relationship with Lee. She is eaten whole/kidnapped by a Cotton-Eyed Joe, a giant white man, while Lee watches, shaking in fear. As Lee runs away from the bayou in terror, a vision of lynched black bodies in the trees materializes, and she frantically runs through their feet.

Lee’s father is accused of the crime, although there is no evidence, and in a scuffle with the deputies, she is summarily knocked out by a white adult.

She journeys to the prison to see her father, who has been beaten mercilessly, where he tells her that her aunt will take care of her now, assuming that he will be lynched shortly. She decides to enter the bayou to find Lily and clear her father’s name. In this “through-the-looking-glass” moment, she enters a world in which racist caricatures are both personified and aggressive, and her only help is found in Bayou, a slave grown monstrous in his bondage, although he remains kind and fearful of the master.

She falls into one of Cotton-Eyed Joe’s traps immediately after reaching the land on the other side of the bayou, and while Bayou the character stitches her up, the spirit of Billy Glass tells her that she has very little time.

When I approach Bayou, the complexity of Love’s rendering of the racial landscape echoes not only America’s complicated and genocidal past, but also a present in which blacks are put in the unconscionable position of apologizing for history even while demanding justice. When we step through the bayou/looking-glass, we are stepping into America’s hysterical relationship to race, in which we must frequently repeat that it doesn’t matter now even when we encounter the most obvious evidence that it does.

Part of Bayou’s charm is feisty, spunky Lee, who insists that Bayou the character be courageous about his own life. We root for her, even though she is effectively a dead girl walking by the end of volume one. On the other hand, Love makes it clear again and again that Lee does not understand the limitations placed on her in the social structure, and she is hurt because of it. She is our heroine, but she is also before her time. While she may prevail in her quest to exonerate her father and to free Lily, we’ve already been told she won’t survive. Furthermore, we’ve seen her undergo obscene abuse at the hands of white adults, and her dreams or hallucinations indicate to a close reader that she is already—at minimum—a victim of psychological trauma as well.

As we discussed the circumstances of the work, my students tended to stress the historical context. “What it was like back then” was a phrase used frequently during the week we spent on the volume. Still, I stretched. “Why would Love write this in the 2000s?” “It was published in 2009. What was happening during this period that might make this relevant?” There were only 20 minutes left in class when someone bit. She brought up Ferguson, and referenced Beavercreek as well. The room was suddenly evacuated of sound, except for my “very good,” turning to scratch out another tick in the “Contemporary Contexts” on the board. I turned back to the classroom, and I could feel the white students receding. Not all, but many. There was shifting. There was uncomfortable fidgeting. And worst of all, eyes glazed.

They didn’t want this to be another lesson in how whitey was bad, but it was exactly the kinds of reactions I was seeing that I was hoping to critique. I drew attention to my own whiteness by way of tacitly acknowledging the discomfort. I asked—rhetorically—what it meant to have such conversations about race in the contemporary age.

Students of color and a few white students were energized, and we gabbed on about how Bayou could enrich our reactions to these current discussions for 10 minutes. The remainder of the class was lively, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of that moment of out-of-hand rejection of a text that was trying to teach us more productive ways to respond to discussions of race in contemporary America, and by the end of class, I felt deflated.

Perhaps I was more deflated more than usual after a rough class, because I’m currently working on a presentation for MLA on the science of memory, recent neuroscientific findings, and Bayou. I was invested in the text, and contexts, in ways I could only gloss in class. Tentatively entitled “My Children Will Remember All of the Things I Tried to Forget,” I ask us to imagine a mouse alone in a cage whose feet are exposed to electric shocks. Alongside of the shocks, the scent of cherry blossoms is piped into the cage. This is repeated until the mouse demonstrates an aversion to the aroma, and then the mouse has children. The pinkies are isolated from the parents and are never exposed to similar conditions, but nonetheless show a similar antipathy; the scent of cherry blossoms inspires only terror. I recount a study published recently in Nature Neuroscience, in which researchers found that mice do indeed transmit aversion between generations without actual social contact. Somehow, traumatic experience is genetically encoded, etched into the make-up of these animals. I ask if it is not too far of a stretch to believe that, perhaps, humans function in the same way.

Such a finding has fascinating repercussions for the study of intergenerational trauma, long the province of literature scholars, dwelling on the outskirts of “proper” psychological and neuroscientific literature. The finding suggest in part that slavery is not over, and that the subsequent abuses have been writ small on our genetic codes. There are ample studies (some ongoing) demonstrating lingering prejudice in even the most devoted progressives, yet popular thought still turns away.

I spent the weekend trying to shake off the lingering feeling of profound failure, as well as worrying about the grand jury convening on Monday in Xenia, just up the road from my home. What had I said? What had I failed to say? On Monday, I drove into campus a bit before 6am, hoping to plan myself into a less agitated state. And I arrived to find the illustration below on a poster I made at the beginning of the semester, with a cartoon of myself asking “What are you most worried about? What are you most excited about?”
 

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Clearly, someone was listening. Or at least, they were hearing between the lines.

Unethical Empathy: A Case for J.P. Stassen’s Deogratias

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20 years ago, by the end of July, the genocide in Rwanda had ground slowly to a halt as the Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of all but a small margin of the country. I was only 12 years old, but had followed the news coming out of the tiny east African country with an interest bordering on obsession. The images were appalling: row after row of hastily constructed huts and tents, children not much older than me carrying water down dusty roads for miles, a rail-thin mother nursing her baby among piles of cloth. The piles of cloth resolved into human-shaped forms, but they didn’t move. These stood in stark contrast to the bright floral dresses and poufy hair of Christine Shelley, the Clinton administration’s State Department Spokesman, as she awkwardly avoided the “g-word.” Video crews passed through filthy camps, and on occasion, the news anchor warned viewers of upcoming “graphic footage,” usually a wide keloid scar, sometimes spread across a handsome young man’s cheek. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how ambivalent these images were: reporters had largely been dispatched to refugee camps in bordering Uganda and Zaire, where survivors were forced to live alongside those who had tried to kill them.

My experience of horror and pained sympathy was retrospectively unmoored from my ethical stance. I had no idea for whom I had felt, which felt very ominous. This prompted a more critical eye: “Who is being shown here? Where is their suffering coming from? To what end?” It also provoked suspicion of my emotions: “Who am I feeling for? And what is the point of feeling anyways?”

During my graduate program, I was reminded of the source of these questions during two key events. I was invited by my advisor and mentor Gary Weissman to TA a Literature of the Holocaust class, and rather than giving me the job most TAs are tasked with (grading mounds of papers), he insisted I co-teach the course. It was an honor I didn’t take lightly, and I spent weeks researching, trying to better understand how to frame debates about the representation of the Holocaust in an advanced classroom. The course went through works like Elie Weisel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, as well as Art Spieglman’s Maus. By the time we hit Maus, both Gary and I were frustrated (and occasionally unnerved) by some of the responses from students. As we plowed through midterm papers, we kept coming across a phrase again and again: “walking a mile in their shoes.” I’ll return to that in a moment.

The other key event, not long after TAing for Gary, was when the man who would become my husband handed me J.P. Stassen’s Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, a fictional graphic novel following the title character through his lives in the pre- and post-genocide landscapes. In the era before the genocide, he is depicted as a normal young man: going to school, working, getting drunk, and attempting to woo two sisters. In the era afterward, he resembles the images of the refugees I had seen so many years before: torn, dirty shirt, dull, haunted eyes, slouching towards the hope of a bender. His search for urwagwa, a banana beer, is relentless, and only 26 pages into this 79 page work, Deogratias is rendered bestial, becoming a dog as he creeps on all fours through the landscape back to an open tin-roofed shack not quite the width of a bed. Moving back and forth between the present and the past with the title character’s memories as a sort of frame, readers are introduced to a small cast of characters. Deogratias is in love with two Tutsi sisters, Apollinaria and Benina, who are the daughters of Venetia, a local woman and sometime-prostitute. Apollinaria is the product of Venetia’s affair with Father Prior, a Catholic missionary, who is a mentor to Brother Philip. Brother Philip is new to Rwanda, and earnest in his desire to help. The French Sergeant is a more cynical character, as is Julius, an Interahamwe leader (the Interahamwe were the Hutu youth militias responsible for the bulk of killing during the genocide). More minor characters include Augustine, a man of the Twa ethnic group, and Bosco, a Rwandan Patriotic Front officer who has become a drunk after his work to help stop the genocide. Much of the graphic novel is devoted to “slices of life,” brief moments and short conversations that would be casual in any other context.

The Rwandan Genocide took place over 100 days in 1994, starting in April the day after a plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down. While there was a plan in place in the government to slaughter all Tutsis, this was not a “top-down” genocide. As Mahmoud Mamdani discusses in When Victims Become Killers, the Rwandan Genocide was distinct from the Holocaust in part because a large proportion of the population took part in the killing. Between 600,000 and a million Tutsis were killed by a minimum of 200,000 genocidaires in a country of 11 million. While the differences are significant, it is also worth remarking on the similarities. The Rwandan Genocide was as “efficient” as the Holocaust. Unlike Western media representations of the violence, this was not “Africa as usual”. It was a tragedy that was the combined result of decades of colonial rule, Western reluctance to intervene in an area with few natural resources, racial enmities manipulated through the use of propaganda, French support of the genocidal government, a toothless U.N. Peacekeeping force, and many, many other factors.

Deogratias is not the first graphic novel to explore genocide, and certainly is not the most famous. That honor goes to Spiegelman’s landmark Maus, which explored his father’s experiences during the Holocaust and Spiegelman’s own difficulty with both his father and recounting his story. His visual conceit in this work employed a variety of animals (Jews as mice, Germans as cats, etc.) to highlight the factors of race, ethnicity, and nationality in the genocide. Maus is hyper-self-reflexive, Spiegelman frequently weaving scenes of his arguments with his father in the present day among illustrations of his father’s recollections. It is a powerful work interrogating racism, memory, intergenerational relationships, the effects of historical trauma on a family, and what it means to tell a story. As such, it is very “talky”—Spiegelman litters the page with questions and anecdotes, deftly balancing the textual and visual elements of the graphic form.

Deogratias, in contrast, is an intensely quiet graphic novel. The title character rarely speaks, and while we see the pre-genocide world partially through his memories, he never contextualizes them, or connects them to the silent, dirty man we see in the post-genocide era. The characters who speak in the pre-genocide era have relatively normal lives and normal concerns. The characters who speak in the post-genocide era carefully avoid any reference to the events of April-July 1994. What I find perhaps most important about Deogratias is the extent to which Stassen emphasizes the unreliability of images and the emotional responses they provoke in readers.

The comic opens with Deogratias staring blankly into an open-air café set in a hotel. A smiling white man hails him, inviting him to sit and drink. The man, later identified as a French sergeant, attempts to show Deogratias pictures from his recent tour of the gorilla preserves in Rwanda (among Rwanda’s only “natural resources”). One panel is entirely filled with these vacation photographs, so readers may assume that we are sharing Deogratias’s point-of-view, but the following panel reveals that in fact he is not looking at the photographs (see Figure 1). He is staring intently at the beer he is pouring into the glass, while the French sergeant looks briefly confused.
 

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Figure 1

 
At first glance, this would appear to be a relatively minor event in a graphic narrative about genocide, but in fact, it lays out the primary thesis: attempts to “see through the eyes” of those who went through the genocide are always partial, and are limited by the relative privilege of the reader.

This recalls what I found in the Literature of the Holocaust course while struggling to explain to students why “walking a mile in their shoes” was perhaps an inappropriate phrase. While we read novels and memoirs, the imaginative closure students experienced while attempting to envision what was being explained in the text prompted them to fantasize “seeing” the Holocaust. While not the worst use of the imagination—after all, we rely on texts to help us better understand the world—it also underscores an often-overlooked issue: to what extent is it ethical to create metaphors between one’s own experiences and situations of extremity?

Maus, because of its form, offered a corrective against the impulse to closely identify with experiences distant from our own positions of relatively safe U.S. citizens. When one looks at a panel, one is simultaneously invited to see through a window into the world and reminded that what they are seeing is mediated. Students were intensely interested in Maus, but were also able to see the characters’ experiences as distinct from their own lives and emotions.

Deogratias takes the ethical self-reflexivity inherent in the graphic narrative form and uses it to emphasize what the reader generally cannot see from their vantage point in the Global North. The tourism photographs of gorillas are the most common image out of Rwanda aside from those of the genocide, which, as I mentioned above, are often not properly images of Rwanda at all.

Stassen narrows this distance when depicting the pre-genocide era by showing scenes that could occur anywhere in the world. For example, Deogratias waits for Apollinaria outside of school, eager to present her with a comic book as a present. The large heart on the cover suggests its topic is romance, but when we look at the panels through Apollinaria’s perspective, we see a lonely woman on a couch, as well as the corner of a panel depicting an upset or disappointed man (see Figure 2).
 

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Figure 2

 
Deogratias asks her “if we could do the same things as in those stories?” at which point, Apollinaria rejects both the gift and the sentiment. The comic, meant to communicate his love for her, reveals the opposite; the page Apollinaria views shows abandonment and frustration. Immediately afterward, Deogratias is approached by Apollinaria’s sister Benina. Deogratias hides his tears, and promptly presents Benina with the same comic book. Unlike Apollinaria, Benina sees a scene of passionate kissing, overlain by the same question Deogratias had posed to her sister, which is more successful in this case (see Figure 3).
 

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Figure 3

 
As readers, we are prompted to connect with, if not identify with Deogratias. He is the main character, and while his intentions are not always pure, his actions are understandable; he is a teen trying to figure out his way in the world. In addition to the scene’s familiarity—many young men have struggled to woo young women with gifts—it is important to note the ambivalence of the images received by each sister. Neither sees “the whole picture,” wherein the comic depicts both suffering and passion, and only Benina sees the image that Deogratias intends.

In the post-genocide era, however, the reader watches Deogratias as the memories become too strong, and he physically transforms into a dog. The transformation recalls one of the most ominous aspects of post-genocide Rwanda. In Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, he recounts that “The nights were eerily quiet in Rwanda. After the birds fell silent, there were hardly even any animal sounds. I couldn’t understand it. Then I noticed the absence of dogs. What kind of country had no dogs?” (147). The RPF had killed them all because the dogs were eating the corpses.

Deogratias’s transformation is symbolically representative of the trauma undergone by the country. In his continued presence, he is a manifestation also of what is absent in the present day. Over the course of the comic, it becomes clear that not all of the characters we saw in the past have survived to today, but it remains unclear how precisely Deogratias escaped their fates. As a sympathetic Hutu who was intimately connected with a Tutsi family, he would have surely been one of the targets for the Interahamwe. Occasional stray references during the course of the comic suggest he may have been complicit, but at those moments, he retreats into happy memories. It is not until Brother Philip returns and sees Deogratias that the reader understands that Deogratias has been systematically poisoning all of those complicit in the genocide, from the French sergeant to Bosco to Julius.

In addition, Deogratias’s role in the genocide is revealed. In a scene from the genocide itself, the Interhamwe are depicted retreating to the Turquoise Zone. Augustine comes looking for Venetia, Apollinaria, and Benina, and Julius crudely describes the sisters’ rape and murder at the hands of Deogratias and others. The reader is left to wonder why he would be the protagonist.

Herein lies two major aspects of why Deogratias is an essential work. In the first place, it emphasizes how point-of-view in graphic narratives can provide important insights for what it is to “empathize” with images. As readers, we exist in a privileged space in relation to these characters: a space of safety wherein we can choose not to look. Furthermore, what we are shown when we choose to look is suspect as well, because what we see may be only partial. We may misinterpret it. Both the provisional nature of images and the chance of misinterpretation suggest that images can lead us to dangerous conclusions. In the case of the Rwandan Genocide, we conflated perpetrators with victims. We misrecognized the violence as something “naturally African,” something that happens in those places.

The second aspect Deogratias expertly negotiates is the extent to which the reader is allotted access to victim experience, and what victim experiences can be emotionally legible. By invoking empathetic identification with a perpetrator, to some extent Stassen is suggesting a broader complicity in the genocide than simply those hundreds of thousands that did the killing. At the end of the graphic novel, we see through Deogratias’s eyes as the bodies of Benina and Apollinaria are eaten by dogs (see Figure 4). In this moment, we are both visually identified with the culprit and are shown an image from the genocide itself—one considerably more extreme than we saw during those months in 1994.
 

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Figure 4

 
When readers in the Global North seek to “walk a mile in someone’s shoes,” it is perhaps an honest desire to understand experiences of extremity, but we rarely want to recognize where our paths lay in relation to the ones down which we vicariously traipse. Deogratias is a powerful precisely because it exposes us not to the subjective experiences of the victims, but to that of the perpetrator. I am not asserting that victims’ stories are unimportant. I am asserting that Deogratias reminds us that the object of our empathy may not be deserving of it, and that, perhaps more importantly, from our vantage point in relation to the Rwandan Genocide, we were considerably closer to the bystanders who did nothing than to the victims who suffered.