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Additional essays by Helen Benedict can be found at http://www.featurewell.com. When you reach the site, just type "Helen Benedict" in the Advanced Search window. ALL ESSAYS ARE COPYRIGHTED AND CANNOT BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT PERMISSION.
For Women Warriors, Deep Wounds, Little Care
See link Memorial Day link to right.
Female Vets Fight Another Battle at Home: Restoring their Spirits
by Helen Benedict
Over this past year, I have talked to forty or so women soldiers for my forthcoming book, The Lonely Soldier: Women at War in Iraq, and it has become clear to me that they have a set of needs quite different from those of men. All soldiers must deal with the roadside bombs, mortar and grenade attacks, and gunfire that are a part of daily life in this war, where the front line is everywhere and not even bases are safe; and all soldiers must cope with seeing the dead and wounded close up and with, perhaps, having killed. But women have additional burdens: they are sexually harassed by their male comrades day in and day out; one in three is sexually attacked or raped; and they are pressured every minute to conform to a military culture that is intractably male. "The Army consistently tries to make women into men," as Sergeant Sarah Scully of the Military Police wrote to me. "Any sign that you are a woman means you are automatically ridiculed or treated as inferior."
When women run obstacle courses during training, men line up to ogle their breasts and shout crude remarks. When women walk into the "chow hall," hundreds of eyes undress them. When they reach or bend to pick up something, men whistle, groan, and stare. This goes on every hour of every day, and creates an excruciating self-consciousness and sense of being trapped that few men ever experience.
"Put that thing down!" the drill instructor kept yelling at one female Marine. "Now pick it up! Put it down again! Pick it up again!" The instructor was purposely humiliating her by forcing her to bend over in front of the male recruits, again and again.
Air Force Sergeant Marti Ribeiro was harassed like this from boot camp all the way through her eight years in the military. "I ended up waging my own war against an enemy dressed in the same uniform as mine. I had a senior non-commissioned officer harass me on a regular basis. He would constantly quiz me about my sex life, show up at the barracks at odd hours of the night, and ask personal questions that no supervisor should ever have the right to ask. I had a colonel sexually harass me in ways I'm too embarrassed to explain. Men stared at me all the time. Once my sergeant sat with me at lunch in the chow hall, and he said, 'I feel like I’m in a fish bowl, the way all the men's eyes are boring into your back.' I told him, 'That's what my life is like.'"
During her second deployment in 2006, to Afghanistan, Ribeiro decided that this time would be different. "Excuse my language, but I decided to be a 'bitch.' So I stepped off the plane into my own personal hell. Yes I was able to put up a wall, but at a price... I'm normally a very bubbly person, almost cheerleader-like, but that disappeared behind the wall, and to this day I don't know if I've ever really regained that part of my personality." As a result, she said, she never felt protected by her comrades, or part of the camaraderie that is so important for a soldier's survival. "You want to maintain your personality, but it's not possible. You have to put up a front and act like one of the boys—even if it means losing who you are."
Women soldiers are always "losing who they are" to protect themselves in the testosterone-dominated military culture, and when they come home, they cannot always find those lost selves. This leaves them feeling alienated from their friends, families, their own children and their former personas. Yet, if they turn to the traditional outlets for help—the V.A., or the various veterans’ support groups—they find themselves back in an organization that mirrors the very culture they need to escape: male-dominated, hierarchical, and misogynistic. For women who need help with recovering from sexual assault, let alone with finding the person they lost out there in the battlefield, this only makes them feel worse.
A few forward-thinking women veterans have addressed this problem by creating organizations for women vets of Iraq and Afghanistan that avoid mirroring the military. One is called W.O.W., Women Organizing Women (www.vetwow.com). The other is a brand new organization called S.W.A.N., the Service Women Action Network (www.servicewomen.org). The idea behind both organizations is to create a non-threatening support group that will put women veterans in touch with one another, and provide advice and services that the VA often sorely lacks, from help with military sexual assault to getting the benefits soldiers are due.
More women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan than in any earlier war in American history. Whatever we may think of these wars, we need to help these women when they come home. Tell your veteran friends about WOW and SWAN, and support these groups in their missions. Help them help others, so that we can all begin to heal the scars of war.
Helen Benedict is the author of The Lonely Soldier: Woman at War in Iraq, forthcoming from Beacon Press. You can read her story "The Private Lives of Woman Soldiers" at Salon.com.
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Posted at 08:44 AM in Veterans Day, Women's Rights | Permalink
The Private War of Women Soldiers
(www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/07/women_in_military)
by Helen Benedict
As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fill President Bush's unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can't help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don't mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear.
I mean from their own comrades -- the men.
I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, interviewing them for up to 10 hours each for a book I am writing on the topic, and every one of them said the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.
The female soldiers who were at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, for example, where U.S. troops go to demobilize, told me they were warned not to go out at night alone.
"They call Camp Arifjan 'generator city' because it's so loud with generators that even if a woman screams she can't be heard," said Abbie Pickett, 24, a specialist with the 229th Combat Support Engineering Company who spent 15 months in Iraq from 2004-05. Yet, she points out, this is a base, where soldiers are supposed to be safe.
Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. "The knife wasn't for the Iraqis," she told me. "It was for the guys on my own side."
Comprehensive statistics on the sexual assault of female soldiers in Iraq have not been collected, but early numbers revealed a problem so bad that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a task force in 2004 to investigate. As a result, the Defense Department put up a Web site in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal and to help women report it. It also initiated required classes on sexual assault and harassment. The military's definition of sexual assault includes "rape; nonconsensual sodomy; unwanted inappropriate sexual contact or fondling; or attempts to commit these acts."
Unfortunately, with a greater number of women serving in Iraq than ever before, these measures are not keeping women safe. When you add in the high numbers of war-wrecked soldiers being redeployed, and the fact that the military is waiving criminal and violent records for more than one in 10 new Army recruits, the picture for women looks bleak indeed.
Last year, Col. Janis Karpinski caused a stir by publicly reporting that in 2003, three female soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq, which can get up to 126 degrees in the summer, because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being raped by male soldiers if they walked to the latrines after dark. The Army has called her charges unsubstantiated, but Karpinski told me she sticks by them. (Karpinski has been a figure of controversy in the military ever since she was demoted from brigadier general for her role as commander of Abu Ghraib. As the highest-ranking official to lose her job over the torture scandal, she claims she was scapegoated, and has become an outspoken critic of the military's treatment of women. In turn, the Army has accused her of sour grapes.)
"I sat right there when the doctor briefing that information said these women had died in their cots," Karpinski told me. "I also heard the deputy commander tell him not to say anything about it because that would bring attention to the problem." The latrines were far away and unlit, she explained, and male soldiers were jumping women who went to them at night, dragging them into the Port-a-Johns, and raping or abusing them. "In that heat, if you don't hydrate for as many hours as you've been out on duty, day after day, you can die." She said the deaths were reported as non-hostile fatalities, with no further explanation.
Not everyone realizes how different the Iraq war is for women than any other American war in history. More than 160,500 American female soldiers have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East since the war began in 2003, which means one in seven soldiers is a woman. Women now make up 15 percent of active duty forces, four times more than in the 1991 Gulf War. At least 450 women have been wounded in Iraq, and 71 have died -- more female casualties and deaths than in the Korean, Vietnam and first Gulf Wars combined. And women are fighting in combat.
Officially, the Pentagon prohibits women from serving in ground combat units such as the infantry, citing their lack of upper-body strength and a reluctance to put girls and mothers in harm's way. But mention this ban to any female soldier in Iraq and she will scoff.
"Of course we were in combat!" said Laura Naylor, 25, who served with the Army Combat Military Police in Baghdad from 2003-04. "We were interchangeable with the infantry. They came to our police stations and helped pull security, and we helped them search houses and search people. That's how it is in Iraq."
Women are fighting in ground combat because there is no choice. This is a war with no front lines or safe zones, no hiding from in-flying mortars, car and roadside bombs, and not enough soldiers. As a result, women are coming home with missing limbs, mutilating wounds and severe trauma, just like the men.
All the women I interviewed held dangerous jobs in Iraq. They drove trucks along bomb-ridden roads, acted as gunners atop tanks and unarmored vehicles, raided houses, guarded prisoners, rescued the wounded in the midst of battle, and searched Iraqis at checkpoints. Some watched their best friends die, some were wounded, all saw the death and mutilation of Iraqi children and citizens.
Yet, despite the equal risks women are taking, they are still being treated as inferior soldiers and sex toys by many of their male colleagues. As Pickett told me, "It's like sending three women to live in a frat house."
Rape, sexual assault and harassment are nothing new to the military. They were a serious problem for the Women's Army Corps in Vietnam, and the rapes and sexual hounding of Navy women at Tailhook in 1991 and of Army women at Aberdeen in 1996 became national news. A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all the wars since, who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military. And in a third study, conducted in 1992-93 with female veterans of the Gulf War and earlier wars, 90 percent said they had been sexually harassed in the military, which means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.
"That's one of the things I hated the most," said Caryle García, 24, who, like Naylor, served with the Combat Military Police in Baghdad from 2003-04. García was wounded by a roadside bomb, which knocked her unconscious and filled her with shrapnel. "You walk into the chow hall and there's a bunch of guys who just stop eating and stare at you. Every time you bend down, somebody will say something. It got to the point where I was afraid to walk past certain people because I didn't want to hear their comments. It really gets you down."
"There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke," said Montoya, the soldier who carried a knife for protection. "This guy out there, he told me he thinks the military sends women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them sane. He said in Vietnam they had prostitutes to keep them from going crazy, but they don't have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead."
Pickett heard the same attitude from her fellow soldiers. "My engineering company was in the first Gulf War, and back then it had only two females," she said. "One was labeled a whore because she had a boyfriend, and the other one was a bitch because she wouldn't sleep around. And that's how they were still referred to all these years later."
In the current Iraq war, which Pickett spent refueling and driving trucks over the bomb-ridden roads, she was one of 19 women in a 160-troop unit. She said the men imported cases of porn, and talked such filth at the women all the time that she became worn down by it. "We shouldn't have to think every day, 'How am I going to go out there and deal with being harassed?'" she said. "We should just have to think about going out and doing our job."
Pickett herself was sexually attacked when she was training in Nicaragua before being deployed to Iraq. "I was sexually assaulted by a superior officer when I was 19, but I didn't know where to turn, so I never reported it," she told me.
Jennifer Spranger, 23, who was deployed at the beginning of the war with the Military Police to build and guard Camp Bucca, a prison camp for Iraqis, had a similar experience.
"My team leader offered me up to $250 for a hand job. He would always make sure that we were out alone together at the beginning, and he wouldn't stop pressuring me for sex. If somebody did that to my daughter I'd want to kill the guy. But you can't fit in if you make waves about it. You rat somebody out, you're screwed. You're gonna be a loner until they eventually push you out."
Spranger and several other women told me the military climate is so severe on whistle-blowers that even they regarded the women who reported rape as incapable traitors. You have to handle it on your own and shut up, is how they saw it. Only on their return home, with time and distance, did they become outraged at how much sexual persecution of women goes on.
Having the courage to report a rape is difficult enough for civilians, where unsympathetic police, victim-blaming myths, and simple fear prevent 59 percent of rapes from being reported, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. But within the military, reporting is even more risky. Military platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a rape has no realistic chance of remaining anonymous. She will have to face her assailant day after day, and put up with rumors, resentment and blame from other soldiers. Furthermore, she runs the risk of being punished by her assailant if he is her superior.
These barriers to reporting are so well recognized that even the Defense Department has been scrambling to mend the situation, at least for the public eye. It won't go so far as to actually gather statistics on rape and assault in Iraq (it only counts reported rapes in raw numbers for all combat areas in the Middle East combined), but in 2006 the DOD did finally wake up to the idea that anonymous reporting might help women come forward, and updated its Web site accordingly.
The Web site looks good, although some may object that it seems to pay more attention to telling women how to avoid an assault than telling men not to commit one. It defines rape, sexual assault and harassment, and makes clear that these behaviors are illegal. The site now also explains that a soldier can report a rape anonymously to a special department, SAPR (Sexual Assault Prevention and Response), without triggering an official investigation -- a procedure called "restricted reporting." And it promises the soldier a victim's advocate and medical care.
On closer scrutiny, however, the picture is less rosy: Only active and federal duty soldiers can go to SAPR for help, which means that neither inactive reservists nor veterans are eligible; soldiers are encouraged to report rapes to a chaplain, and chaplains are not trained as rape counselors; if soldiers tell a friend about an assault, that friend is legally obliged to report it to officials; soldiers must disclose their rank, gender, age, race, service, and the date, time and/or location of the assault, which in the closed world of a military unit hardly amounts to anonymity; and, in practice, since most people in the Army are men, the soldier will likely find herself reporting her sexual assault to a man -- something rape counselors know does not work. Worse, no measures will be taken against the accused assailant unless the victim agrees to stop being anonymous.
The DOD insists on the success of its reforms, the proof being that the number of reported military sexual assaults rose by 1,700 from 2004 to a total of 2,374 in 2005. "The success of the SAPR program is in direct correlation with the increased numbers of reported sexual assaults," Cynthia Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman, wrote to me in an e-mail.
In fact, as anyone familiar with sexual assault statistics knows, nobody can ever tell whether increases in rape rates are due to more reporting or more rapes.
My own interviewees and advocates on behalf of women veterans say these reforms are not working. They say there is a huge gap between what the military promises to do on its Web site and what it does in practice, and that the traditional view that reporting an assault betrays your fellow soldiers still prevails.
"Are soldiers who report sexual assaults in the military still seen as betraying their comrades?" I asked Smith.
"Our soldiers are being fully trained that sexual assault is the most under-reported crime," she wrote in reply. "In that training, not reporting a sexual assault is the betrayal to their comrades."
Back in real life, Pickett watched several of her friends try to report sexual harassment and assault since the 2005 reforms, and she said that none of them were sent a victim's advocate, a counselor or a chaplain. "These women are turning perpetrators in and they're not getting anyone to speak on their behalf," she told me. "There's no one sitting in that room with you, so you're feeling all alone." In the end, she added, it boils down to the woman's word vs. the man's, and he is the one with the advocate, not her.
Meanwhile, the studies I have cited, along with the other past and present studies of veterans, who feel freer to talk than soldiers because they are out of the military, show that women soldiers are suffering post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence of military sexual abuse. All soldiers with PTSD come home to some combination of sleeplessness, nightmares, bursts of temper, flashbacks, panic attacks, fear and an inability to cope with everyday life. They often turn to drugs or alcohol for escape. Some become depressed, others commit suicide. Many are too emotionally numb to relate to their families or children. But those who have been sexually assaulted also lose their self-respect, feel they have lost control over their lives, and are particularly prone to self-destruction.
I have yet to meet an Iraq war veteran of either sex who does not suffer from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, but officially the number of Iraq veterans with PTSD is estimated to be about 30 percent for those newly back from war, according to a 2004 study of combat veterans in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The extent and severity of PTSD in women who have had to cope with both combat and sexual assault in Iraq is still being studied, but as it is known that these are two of the highest predictors of PTSD, it is logical to assume that the combination is pretty bad. "When you are sexually assaulted by people who are your comrades, PTSD can be worse than in other circumstances," said Paula Shnurr, a research professor of psychiatry who conducted a new Veterans Administration study of therapy for women veterans with PTSD, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "You feel incompetent and helpless, like children feel when abused by the very people who are supposed to look after them," Schnurr told me. "The people you depend on have attacked you."
I am not claiming that sexual persecution is universal in the military, or that it is inevitable. Several soldiers I interviewed told me that if a commander won't tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen, and studies back this up. Jennifer Hogg, 25, who was a sergeant in the Army's National Guard, said her company treated her well because she had a commander who wouldn't permit the mistreatment of women. But another National Guard soldier, Demond Mullins, 25, who served with the infantry in Iraq for a year, from 2004 to '05, told me that although there were no problems in his unit he heard from his commanders that there were rapes in other units in his camp. "One time a woman was taking a shower late, and guys went and held the door closed so she couldn't get out, while one guy went in to rape her," he said.
While commanders of some units are apparently less vigilant about policing rape, others engage in it themselves, a phenomenon known in the military as "command rape." Because the military is hierarchical, and because soldiers are trained to obey and never question their superiors, men of rank can assault their juniors with impunity. In most cases, women soldiers are the juniors, 18 to 20 years old, and are new to the military and war, thus vulnerable to bullying and exploitation.
Callie Wight, a psychosocial counselor in women veterans' health in Los Angeles, has been treating women who were sexually assaulted in the military for the past 11 years. In all that time, she told me, she has only seen a handful of cases where a woman reported an assault to her commander with any success in getting the assailant punished. "Most commanders dismiss it," she said. A nine-month study of military rape by the Denver Post in 2003 found that nearly 5,000 accused military sex offenders had avoided prosecution since 1992.
At the moment, the most shocking case of military sexual assault is that of Army Spc. Suzanne Swift, 21, who served in Iraq in 2004. Swift was coerced into sex by one commanding officer, which is legally defined as rape by the military, and harassed by two others before she finally broke rank and told. As a result, the other soldiers treated her like a traitor for months.
Unable to face returning to the assailant, she went AWOL during a leave at home, and was arrested and put in jail for desertion. At first the Army offered her a deal: It would reduce her punishment if Swift would sign a statement saying that she had never been raped. She refused, saying she wouldn't let the Army force her to lie.
The Army court-martialed Swift, and stripped her of her rank. She spent December in prison and was then sent to Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, far away from her family. She must stay in the Army for two more years, and may face redeployment. The men who assaulted her received nothing but reprimanding letters.
Swift's mother, Sara Rich, has set up a Web site with a petition calling for her daughter's release: More than 6,700 veterans and soldiers have signed it, and 102 of them signed their names to stories of their own sexual persecution in the military.
Swift's case, and those of her petitioners, illustrate the real attitude of the military toward women and sexual assault, the one that underlies its fancy Web site and claims that it supports soldiers who've been raped.
The real attitude is this: If you tell, you are going to get punished. The assailant, meanwhile, will go free.
Which brings up an issue that lies at the core of every soldier's heart: comradeship.
It is for their comrades that soldiers enlist and reenlist. It is for their "battle buddies" that they risk their lives and put up with all the miseries of sandstorms, polluted water, lack of sanitation, and danger. Soldiers go back to Iraq, even if they've turned against the war, so as not to let their buddies down. Comradeship is what gets men through war, and is what has always got men through war. You protect your battle buddy, and your battle buddy protects you.
As an Iraq veteran put it to me, "There's nobody you love like you love a person who's willing to take a bullet for you."
So how does this work for women? A few find buddies among the other women in their squads, but for most there are no other women, so their battle buddies are men. Some of these men are trustworthy. Many are not.
How can a man who pressures you for sex every day, who treats you like a prostitute, who threatens or punishes you if you refuse him, or who actually attacks you, be counted on to watch your back in battle?
"Battle buddy bullshit," said García from the Military Police. "I didn't trust anybody in my company after a few months. I saw so many girls get screwed over, the sexual harassment. I didn't trust anybody and I still don't."
If this is a result of the way women are treated in the military, where does it leave them when it comes to battle camaraderie? I asked soldier after soldier this, and they all gave me the same answer:
Alone.
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Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Wherein Lies the Truth (The Practical Writer, Penguin Books, 2004.)
by Helen Benedict
"Fiction steps in where the ordinary articulateness of human beings fails. It gives the human soul a voice."
I teach in a prominent journalism school and recently I committed heresy: I published a novel. It was about a Dominican-American teenage mother and was written in the voice of the girl herself.
Immediately, my students wanted to know why I had treated this subject as fiction. Why didn't I just go out and write about a real teenage mother, the way they would? Why did I have to let them down, the suggestion seemed to be, by making things up?
Then I shocked them even further. I told them that I had chosen fiction because I believed it could get me nearer to the truth.
The kind of truth I am talking about is the subjective truth of what it means to be a human being in the world. It is the substance of what happens to people not just on the outside, but within: the longings, the moral decisions, the defiance, suffering, pain and triumphs of the human soul.
This sort of truth has always been the subject matter of fiction because it is hidden from the public eye. It lies in secrets and private experiences. It rests in the silences that follow broken-off words and truncated sentences, and in the spaces between bouts of self-awareness. It hides in the blanks on a reporter's tape-recorder, behind the door after the journalist leaves and inside the mind where no interviewer can go.
Fiction steps in where the ordinary articulateness of human beings fails. It gives the human soul a voice.
But if these truths about the human condition are so hidden, my students might ask, how does a fiction writer get to them? Through research, a lifetime of experience, analysis and, above all, the imagination.
To give an example: Had I written "Bad Angel" about a real teenage mother, my ability to get at the truth of her experience would have been restricted by all sorts of factors: Her sense of privacy, the limits of her ability to express and examine herself, my obligation not to expose her every fault to the world, my inability to know what she was thinking unless she told me, and my uncertainty about how much of that was honest. Even had I interviewed her for years, I would have been limited by what she chose to say and whether she knew how to say it, as well as by my fear of exploiting her. I would have always been the white journalist trying to peek into her world, and she would have always been the Other, the way the poor and dark-skinned are so often depicted in the press. In short, I would never have been able to understand her enough to write in her voice or from her point of view.
I saw these limitations reflected in the many books of interviews with teenage mothers I read to research my novel. These girls were happy to talk about why they got pregnant and whether they would stay in school, but not one admitted to feeling loneliness, despair, rage or even irritation with her baby, let alone to neglecting or abusing the child. Yet I knew that teenage mothers often do abuse their babies. I also knew, as a mother and former teenager myself, that motherhood cannot exist without moments of blinding rage; and that teenagehood is inevitably accompanied by loneliness and moods. Furthermore, I knew that being a teenager and a mother are inherently contradictory: the first is self-absorbed, the second by necessity self-sacrificing. Yet this conflict was not even touched upon by any of the girls interviewed for the books I read. Why? Because the girls either could not, or would not, admit to these feelings. As a fiction writer, however, I could.
Let me use another example. Could Vladimir Nabokov have exposed the dark and tortured soul of his obsessive nymphet-lover if he had merely interviewed a Humbert Humbert? I happen to have read dozens of interviews with rapists and child molesters conducted in prisons, and none of them touched the understanding Nabokov achieved with "Lolita." Instead of giving us sociological jargon about pedophelia, a psychological profile of arrested development, or quotes from some therapy-saturated child molester ("Yeah, I felt her up 'cause my Dad abused me when I was five"), he gives us Humbert Humbert's soul, with all its blights and beauties, its fury and remorse.
"I stood listening to that musical vibration [of children at play] from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord."
In that one sentence, Nabokov gives us the epiphanic moment when Humbert Humbert realizes that he has irreparably robbed Lolita of her childhood. But this is no confessional at a prison therapy session, offered up in the hope of winning parole. This is a poignant and intelligent revelation, H.H.'s first and only moment of true unselfishness. By giving us this sentence, with all the weight of what has come before it, Nabokov uses his knowledge of human nature to make us simultaneously sympathize with and abhor H.H. -- he makes us understand him much more profoundly than could any interviewer. And the way he does it is the way the best fiction writers always do it -- he conjures us, through the power of his language and imagination, inside Humbert Humbert, so that we cannot stand aloof and condemn him without thought or insight. We cannot dehumanize him because Nabokov makes us become him, forcing us to see all the facets of his personality, the monstrous and the poignant, the insufferable and the pathetic. And in doing so, Nabokov makes us just that little bit more human ourselves.
For several centuries now, readers have appreciated this magician-like ability of writers to get us inside characters and at certain truths. We have looked to writers from Shakespeare to Tolstoy for moral and philosophical guidance, and for critical evaluations of ourselves and our societies. Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair were among many authors whose fiction changed the way we saw social injustice, for example; some even changed laws. Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, James Baldwin, Samuel Becket -- these and a multitude of others have held up mirrors to the human soul that have altered our thinking and the way we see and create our art. Until this current era, novelists have held a respected role as examiners of society and investigators of the human psyche; as thinkers from whom we learn certain kinds of truths and honesty that no other form of writing can offer.
But something, alas, has changed. Readers are no longer willing to take an author so seriously. Many readers seem to have lost the patience or willingness to look to fiction for moral, philosophical or even social truths. If this were simply part of the general post-1960s reaction against authority there would be less to lament, but the problem is that million of readers are turning instead to self-help books, memoirs or nonfiction, as if these forms contain better truths than fiction. All a book has to do is claim to be fact to be given the kind of attention that almost no literary novel can command anymore. Serious fiction is losing respect, and sales to boot. Many readers would rather see a reporter interview a teenage mother than see a novelist create one. Others seem to consider cold facts about how a computer works more important than the troubling mysteries of the human psyche. The novel and its unique access to the truths of the human soul has fallen with a crash.
The reasons for this fall are many. It is partly the fault of deconstructionism, mixed in with Freudianism, which destroyed the mystique of the author and put critics on the throne. Suddenly, authors became hapless beings batted about by the tides of fashion, formalism, cultural traditions and their own circumstances. Whatever messages they tried to impart were probably unconscious, certainly unintended: The poor saps would be the last to know.
Then, on top of deconstructionism came our current Information Age, in which people are driven to feel so inadequate and ignorant that they are afraid to spend time reading anything but hard fact. This, coupled with the late millennium version of a lifestyle -- work twelve hours a day, spend your leisure time at the gym and forgo sleep -- has given people the illusion that reading fiction is an expendable luxury. Who has time for the subtleties of fiction when the Web, television, movies, radio, newspapers and a torrent of nonfiction books all promise to fill us with the facts we need to join rush hour on the information highway? I see this attitude in my students. "I don't read fiction," they declare with a self-righteous ring. "I only have time for fact."
When people make a statement like this, what they are saying is that fiction contains nothing important; that the only facts that mean anything are the exterior, checkable kinds of facts. Insights into the human experience, examinations of the conscience, the reality behind closed doors -- these sorts of matters count for naught.
Underlying the current distrust of fiction, and the mistaken attitude that important truths are not to be found in it, is something more than the fall of the author or the worship of facts, however: it is fear of imagination. I see this most strikingly among my reporter friends and students, the people whose business it is to write nonfiction. After all, the journalist's creed is never to make things up. They have been trained to think of books as little fact missiles, packed with Useful Information that will make them better people, like vitamin pills. So when I explain to my fellow reporters that my understanding of my teenage mother came not from research but from what I know of human nature, they blanche.
"But you must have based it on someone you met," they say. No, I didn't. "Then on interviews you did - is she a composite character?" No, she isn't. Sometimes I have even been asked, "Well, were you a teenage mother then?" No, I have to say again, I made it all up. They don't want to believe that an author may be able to imagine what it's like to be a teenage mother (or a nymphet-lover) better than such a person can explain it herself. A current ad for a nonfiction writing program reveals this same fear in its proclamation, "Truth is stronger than fiction" -- as if fiction contains no truth at all.
I witnessed how much imagination is feared, and misunderstood, when I read from my novel to an audience containing a number of anthropologists. After I had finished, one raised his hand. "But aren't you exploiting this girl?" he asked.
"This is fiction," I replied. "She doesn't exist. There is no real girl to exploit. I made her up."
The anthropologist didn't get it. I was using this girl for my own means, he insisted; had I at least offered her my advance? Didn't I feel guilty for invading her privacy?
"You can't exploit a fictional character," I replied again. "Fictional characters have no privacy."
The anthropologist could not believe that my character was a figment of imagination because he did not understand how fiction originates. And because he didn't understand how fiction originates, he did not want to believe me. Either I was lying and the girl did exist. Or I was telling the truth and the girl was invented -- in which case why should he believe anything I wrote at all?
But fiction is not, as many non-writers seem to think, a random grab-bag of uninformed, made up whimsies, as undisciplined and unreasoned as a dream. Nor is it simply reporting with the names changed. It is an amalgam of experience, education, reading, insight, analysis, conversations, observation and conscious research. Tom Wolfe could not be more wrong when he accuses novelists of failing to use the reporter's pen. Novelists never stop reporting. They spend their lives observing, thinking, watching, analyzing. And most of them conduct purposeful research as well. Many of George Eliot's novels are historical, packed with accurate details about times way before she was born; likewise for Dickens and Tolstoy. Emile Zola, Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane all lived and researched the harsh worlds they wrote about. Today's novelists are no different: Andrea Barrett, John Updike, Robert Stone, Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, all these writers and most of their comrades research constantly for their fiction, mining not only concrete facts but truths about the soul. Even if, as a Freudian might say, fictional characters are nothing but extensions of the author, they still contain all the knowledge, insight, wisdom and experience that author has collected throughout his or her life. In fact, I would wager that the novelists who do not haunt libraries, but rely solely upon their imaginations and memories, are a minority -- and they, too, are drawing from a lifetime of meticulous observation. And it is exactly because of this lifetime of work that fiction writers -- at least the best of them -- can and ought to be believed.
All this is not to say that nonfiction has no value. The very knowledge that an extraordinary story actually happened makes that story especially fascinating. Nonfiction writers have an essential role as recorders of events, exposers of wrongdoing, explorers of mysteries and explainers of history. They can affect politics and laws in a way fiction rarely does. Nevertheless, even though they can make arguments and challenge injustice, the interior is still hidden. Nonfiction is always dependent on what can be found out and verified, and it is always limited by the private, the secret, the unrealized and the unarticulated. Nonfiction always keeps the reader on the outside.
Perhaps this is why some readers prefer nonfiction -- perhaps they are, in a sense, hiding. The distance between reader and subject in nonfiction is so much greater than in fiction that perhaps it feels safer. After all, it is easier to read about the suffering of The Other than to be pulled into feeling it oneself. Perhaps people resist fiction because, even in this era of voyeurism and confession, there is still a fear of putting oneself in another's shoes.
If that is so, what a loss. In this time of ethnic and religious factionalism, of deep division between East and West, of racial division and gender hostility, fiction offers a service that readers -- and publishers --would do well to heed: It gives us the chance to escape the cages of our bodies and lives and fly over impossible boundaries to become somebody else. It gives us the ability to break out of myopia and its ensuing prejudices and narrow-mindedness. Above all, fiction gives us the chance to understand the world from the Other's point of view -- not from the distant outside, but from deep within.
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The Frightened Muse (2001-2006)
by Helen Benedict posted on Featurewell.com
UPDATED, 2006
“The deaths in New York were horrible and irreparable, but they did not make us special. They did not make us more important than any other country in any other war. This is what Primo Levi understood about his war, and what we need to understand about ours.”
The week after I left New York to live and write in Paris for a year, the World Trade Center was destroyed and one of my French cousins killed his wife and himself, leaving behind their four children.
Great material for a novel, people suggested.
Café and croissant in the mornings gave way to CNN as I, like so many, sat glued to those endless images of the flaming, collapsing towers the whole world now knows so well. Emails poured in from terrified friends in the States, and phone calls from bewildered relatives in Paris. The French I met regarded me with horror and pity when I told them I’m from New York, as if I had just blurted out that I was dying of cancer.
“Put it all in a story,” people kept saying.
The day after the attacks, on September 12th., I went to my cousins’ funeral. The two coffins lay side by side in the church, polished wooden caskets covered in flowers and candles. The official story was that it was a double suicide, but everyone there knew the truth. I stood in the pew behind the newly orphaned children, four boys aged 22, 18, 16, and only 12, and watched their jaws clench and release, their eyes filling with tears. How will these boys ever have a chance at happiness now? I wondered. How, having been so cruelly abandoned, will they ever feel worthy of love again?
“It was a crime passionnel,” one of the relatives said, and for a minute I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the crime of murderous fanaticism or the crime of murderous jealousy.
“He was brutal,” another relative tried to explain, a word that needs no translation. “He beat his wife in front of the children, and he beat the children too. When his wife tried to leave him and the boys for someone else, he killed her. The youngest child found the bodies.”
French television showed bodies floating down from the Twin Tower windows, swooping like autumn leaves. The world seemed drenched in murder and suicides.
“When are you going to write about it?” people kept asking. But my muse, terrified by all this horror, had gone into hiding.
After the sermon, a macabre and inappropriate eulogy to love being stronger than death, and to a god who has his reasons even for such tragedies as these, all of us in the church were invited to walk up to the coffins and say our own brands of goodbyes. Many of the mourners were teenagers because my cousin’s wife was a teacher, and they filed slowly past, each clutching a single white rose. Most people made the sign of the cross over both coffins, laying their hands on them in farewell, but a few of the wife’s family refused to touch the coffin of her husband; they knew he had murdered her. I thought of the desperation she must have felt to be willing to leave her children and my heart raged at what men do to women; and then, remembering the events in New York, at what men do to men.
And then I understood why I couldn’t render this into fiction: It was too soon. To use events like these in a novel, one must have an idea of what they mean, how they weave into the fabric of daily life. One must know what they have taught us. The attacks on New York, the deaths of my cousins - these were too raw for interpretation. To use them so soon would read like opportunistic melodrama, as if I would stop at nothing to make a story. It would feel shameless.
Now, five years later, the Twin Tower attack has become the stuff of fiction, as well as of other forms of writing – not only in books but in movies. Reams of personal essays, poems, plays, memoirs, and stories have been written about it, and with a few noble exceptions, they are either self-serving, self-pitying, or self-obsessed. I reviewed a novel that shamelessly kills off a teenager’s mother in the Towers to give the story its plot. I’ve read essays that dwell on how the attacks have changed the writer’s self-image, eating habits, love life, or exercise regime. Over and over again, these accounts feature one inflated word that blocks out all perspective and wisdom: Me. Clichés of suffering and heroism are already obliterating the lessons we should have learned from this tragedy: that we are not special, not protected, and not innocent.
To be able to write of war or tragedy in the midst of it, to make sense of it, one must not only have distance but humility. By this I mean the sort of humility that Primo Levi, for instance, revealed in his writings about the Holocaust. Never did Levi claim to be braver, stronger, or more sensitive than anyone else; he would not even admit to exceptional suffering. Quite the opposite. Every word he wrote brought out the universality of his experience, the recognition that his suffering in Auschwitz was neither new nor unique but had been and continues to be shared by millions of people all over the world, all the time, in one way or another. His tone was the inverse of self-pity. This recognition of the way suffering humbles and unites one with the rest of the world is the very recognition I have found missing in America – glaringly among our politicians, but among a disturbing number of our writers, too.
In the cemetery after my cousins’ double funeral, the family stood in the cool autumn sun and watched in silence while both coffins were lowered into a grave, one at a time, by a grotesquely clanking machine. The littlest boy was the only one weeping by now, his small face oddly expressionless as the tears spilled again and again from his eyes.
After the burial, we gathered outside the cemetery, not knowing which to talk about first – the New York attacks or the private horror in the family. ”C’est la vie,” my French relatives kept saying with a characteristic shrug. “La vie est dur mais il faut continuer, n’est-ce-pas?” And in those phrases – “That’s life,” “Life is hard but one must go on,” – I heard a wisdom that comes from centuries of war and suffering.
My friends in New York wrote that they were finding it hard to go on; that everyone was in shock. It wasn’t only the dead, the fear of another attack, the horror of the war we were now in, and the lost jobs and security, it was the sense that everything that mattered before had stopped mattering. My writer and artist friends, like me, felt knocked askew. Our subject matter, our obsessions, our carefully crafted observations about life had all been flung away.
My nine-year-old daughter, who was in Paris with me, found herself crying without knowing why. “Will Central Park still be there when we get back, Mommy, or will someone drop a bomb on it?” she asked. This is what we were all wondering: did the life we knew, the life we’d lived and studied all our lives for our art, even exist anymore? Now, five years later, we find that it does – and it doesn’t. Now we struggle not only to find how to deal with the Trade Tower attacks in our art, but the war in Iraq, the deaths we are causing, the mess we have created in the world.
Now, when I think back to that first week after September 11th., when these questions were still fresh and painful, I see what the French mean when they say, “We must go on.” For we did go on, even then. The four orphaned boys, whose father had just rejected them in the most cruel and grotesque of ways, still had to rise every morning, just as everyone had to, for the sun is indifferent to human travails. In fact, as if to trumpet this very indifference, the sun chose that week to become its most beautiful. It took to rising just outside my window at seven every morning, peeking boldly between the rooftops, infusing the sky with audacious streaks of luminous orange and rose, before the scudding gray clouds of Paris covered it over. Or perhaps the sun was not showing indifference, but hope.
I walked for hours every day, trying to see beyond all this tragedy and fear so I could find my frightened muse. Above me, the graceful zinc roofs were slick with rain. Below me the sidewalks were littered with dying leaves, for autumn comes earlier in Paris than it does in New York. The leaves fell off the chestnut trees first, turning rust at the edges, then flinging themselves down so heavily that when one hit me in the chest, it felt like a slap. And that was when, between the roofs and the sidewalks, on the walls of the houses, I discovered the plaques:
“In memory of the 112 inhabitants of this house whose 40 children were deported to die in the German camps in 1942.”
Or, “Here lived Monsieur Elias Zajdner, who died for France at the age of 41. The former Resistance fighter was deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis in May, 1944 with his three sons, Albert, aged 21, and Solomon and Bernard, aged 15. We will never forget.”
The plaques are everywhere in Paris, I found, some old, some new, and they are always startlingly specific.
“In memory of the 24 girls, aged eight to fourteen, who were taken from this house by the Nazis and deported and killed in the camps in 1942...”
My skin rose in cold bumps as I read them. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, America claimed to have lost its innocence, but no one in France claimed to have ever had it. “La vie est dur,” the French say instead. “Life is hard.”
The morning after the destruction in New York, Paris swung into an anti-terrorist mode I had never seen in the U.S. and have not to this day: They called it Le plan vigi-pirate - the vigilant plan against terrorism. The very day after Sept. 11th., every public garbage can had been sealed overnight. Guards were checking bags at the entrances to parks, museums, synagogues, large stores and institutions, and they continued to do so for months. My daughter’s teacher told us that all school outings had been forbidden, and that no one was allowed to park a car in front of a school. When the police saw an unattended package or abandoned vehicle, they blew it up. None of this would have prevented what happened in New York, but it showed that in Europe, readiness for terrorism has long been a way of life. So when America beat it breast and demanded for sympathy and revenge, turning the genuine compassion of the French to scorn and disgust, I felt ashamed. The deaths in New York were horrible and irreparable, but they did not make us special. They did not make us more important than any other country in any other war. This is what Primo Levi understood about his war, and what we need to understand about ours.
September at last drew to a close, that dreadful September of deaths and murders. The sun rose, the stomach grew hungry, family tragedies raged and passed. Our bags were searched, our sense of security was revealed for the illusion it always was, our myopia was shaken. But in the midst of all this, we still had to shop and eat, talk and make love, work, and do our best not to behave badly – we still had to go on. I took my daily walks through Paris, the buildings gleamed in their usual grace, people smiled and did something kind, and the bread was as fluffy and sweet as ever. And I knew that although the muse was hiding, it was only waiting until enough was understood to come out in the open again.
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Racism Railroaded Justice in Jogger Rape Case
by Helen Benedict (published in NEWSDAY, Viewpoint, 10/23/02, p.36)
Now that new evidence casts doubt on the guilt of the five Harlem men serving time for the rape and beating of the Central Park jogger in 1989, the case is looking like a horrible repetition of this country’s racist history concerning sex crimes.
These men have spent about 10-13 years in prison for a crime that convicted rapist and murderer Matias Reyes now says he committed alone. New DNA evidence backs him up, and new police interrogations indicate that none of the men has ever seen Reyes. It looks like a bad day for justice in New York.
From the start, this case bore an uncanny resemblance to earlier incidents of black men unjustly accused of and sometimes lynched for raping white women. Take the Scottsboro Boys in 1931.
Two unemployed white women were riding a freight train, hobo style, to Chattanooga, TN, along with many other youths, black and white. A fight broke out and the white men were forced off the train. When news of the fight reached the next town, in Alabama, along with the knowledge that white women were aboard, a posse of 75 white men formed, already talking of rape. The minute the train arrived, nine of the black youths, aged 13-20, were arrested. The women tried to flee but were cornered and questioned by the posse. Pressed to say if they had been raped, one said yes, the other no.
The women were jailed on vagrancy and prostitution charges, where they were relentlessly questioned. The nine youths only escaped lynching by being arrested. After a three day trial, eight of them were sentenced to death for the alleged rape by an all white, male jury. After years of trials, none was executed.
That was the 1930s. One would hope that civil rights and the women’s movement would have put to rest the old idea that black men rape white women as revenge against white men. But then look at the CP jogger case.
Within days after that story came to light, the New York press was covering it as a case of racial hatred. At the time I was writing a book about the press’s coverage of sex crimes, so I read all the stories. Every newspaper in New York except Newsday covered the crime as racially motivated, despite police denials that this was so. The boys were described as a “wolfpack” “wilding” through the park, and in many reports the racism was barely tempered. “Like something out of ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ packs of bloodthirsty teens from the tenements, bursting with boredom and rage, roam the streets getting kicks from an evening of ultra-violence.” (New York Post, 4/22/89).
The few reporters who did point out flaws in the prosecution’s case were drowned out by the furor over race. The Village Voice was the only paper to cover the attack as a case of violence against women. My interviews with reporters and editors on the story revealed the thinking behind their coverage. The jogger was attacked just after the Howard Beach and Yuusef Hawkins cases, both involving black men killed by whites, so the idea that black men would be out for revenge was on everybody’s mind. Several journalists told me they didn’t think violence against women was an issue, but racial violence was. As one said, “Racism is the big story in New York. Men-women relations are not.”
Only The City Sun and The Amsterdam News, the two major African-American newspapers of New York City at the time, paid any real attention to the youths’ claims that their confessions were coerced. Unfortunately, much of their reporting so slandered the jogger that it was hard to take seriously. Now it looks as if the youths had a point. They were no angels; they have admitted to rampaging through the park, attacking people. But it looks as if they might have been rounded up, accused and convicted in much the same way as the Scottsboro Boys.
What blinded the press to balance? Partly the police, who were enacting their own version of the same stereotypes - plus, perhaps, covering up their sloppy work. But another reason was that lurking beneath virtually every story about rape are the old racist myths: That the most common kind of rape is black against white (in fact, most rapes are committed within races). And that black men avenge themselves on their oppressors by raping white women.
The root of these myths lie in the history of rape coverage in this country, for it was only in stories about lynching that respectable newspapers started covering rape at all. Historians say that although only a third of all documented lynchings were based on accusations of rape, which the lynchers never substantiated, newspapers covered these lynchings the most. The obsession with interracial rape has continued ever since. The jogger case was no exception. Had the accused been white instead of black and Hispanic, the press might have talked about why men attack women and why they gang rape. And they might have looked harder at whether those particular young men raped the jogger at all.
Next time a rape case hits the press, let’s look at rape for what it is - a crime against women. And let us wipe the old myths about race and rape from American society for good.
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