Amy O’Loughlin is a freelance writer and book reviewer whose work has appeared in American History, World War II, ForeWord Reviews, USARiseUp, and other publications. She blogs at Off the Bookshelf.
Red Cloud (seated, second from left) and other Sioux chiefs.
The Heart of Everything That Is tells the little-known story of Red Cloud, a ruthless Lakota chief who brought together the warring tribes of the Great Plains to fight the US government and halt its relentless westward expansion.
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend By Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
Simon & Schuster. 432 pages.
For nearly three hundred years, white settlers and American Indians engaged in mutually destructive warfare. The bloodshed followed the path of white Western migration—from the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, where colonists coming ashore in 1607 were met with a volley of the Powhatan’s arrows, to far Western lands like the Montana territory, where General Custer and his soldiers made their last stand in 1876, overrun by Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors on the banks of the Little Bighorn River.
Their stunning victory in the Battle of the Little Bighorn immortalized the names of great Indian chiefs like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. But in The Heart of Everything That Is, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin make the case that a relatively obscure Oglala Lakota chief called Red Cloud was actually the era’s most fearsome and effective Indian leader, a brilliant tactician of guerrilla warfare who a decade before Little Bighorn had beaten the US Army in a bloody conflict known as “Red Cloud’s War.”
In her deeply personal account of life in post-earthquake Haiti, journalist Amy Wilentz looks at how outsiders' distorted views of the country have misrepresented its culture and history and encumbered its progress.
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti By Amy Wilentz
Simon & Schuster. 352 pages.
Amy Wilentz first visited Haiti in 1986, when she was a writer for Time magazine and the ousting of dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was underway. Admittedly, Wilentz was not the type of foreign correspondent who traveled from war zone to war zone, or from one uprising to the next in pursuit of a grand and dramatic news event. Rather, Wilentz’s journalistic demeanor ran more along the lines of observational witness; she was a spectator of all that surrounded her, and sparked her imagination and curiosity.
Yet, when it came to Haiti, there was something “eternal” about the country that called to Wilentz. She had read The Comedians, Graham Greene’s 1966 novel about the reign of Jean-Claude’s father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and scenes from the book remained etched in her mind.
Elected president in 1957, Papa Doc Duvalier is one of history’s most unforgettable political figures. His fourteen-year reign was the longest and most brutal in Haiti’s history. To quash political dissent, and protect himself from being overthrown, Duvalier created the Tonton Macoute, a personal police force that terrorized citizens and assassinated anyone Duvalier thought was a threat. In 1971, when Jean-Claude succeeded his father as president, Duvalier-style despotism continued.
From her office in Manhattan, Wilentz perused the daily news written by Haitian exiles in the 1980s, which heralded Baby Doc’s impending departure from power. Wilentz felt an impulse to witness the end of the Duvalier era. Plus, she wanted a firsthand look at the Tonton Macoute, which was still in use by Baby Doc. With guns tucked into their waistlines and hats lowered over their sunglasses, the Tonton Macoute haughtily prowled Haiti’s streets to search for so-called troublemakers.
Thus began Wilentz’s love affair with Haiti. Her decades-long relationship with “La Perle des Antilles” (“The Pearl of the Caribbean”) has been anything but straightforward, simple, effortless, or predictable. In her first book about Haiti, The Rainy Season, Wilentz chronicled a nation and a people that were oppressed by the Duvalier regimes’ terror and totalitarianism. In her latest book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo, a deeply personal narrative about post-earthquake Haiti and Wilentz’s connection to the place, she revisits the country to listen to Haitians and recount her astute, unvarnished impressions.
Hello, Fred Voodoo
Wilentz’s experiences on her initial trip to Haiti commenced her “Haitian education,” and introduced her to stereotypes of Haitians invented by the outside world. One stereotype that persisted was the idea of “Fred Voodoo” — a dismissive term used by many reporters to refer to the ordinary Haitian man (or woman) on the street. “Fred Voodoo” could be a presidential candidate, a market lady, a renowned academic, a taxi driver, an unwed mother, or an Army general.
In 1986, Wilentz routinely interviewed Haitians, who told her what it was like to not have enough food for themselves and their families, and who wondered what it was like to live in a real house, not a shantytown shack. They discussed what it would be like to live freely and vote openly for a president who cares about ordinary Haitians and their suffering. They talked about democracy.
That was in 1986.
In 2010, after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck, many Haitians Wilentz interviewed still said a lot of the same things. Although this time they added more details of death and dying, blood, pandemonium, loss, amputation, starvation, and fear.
Returning to Haiti almost didn’t happen for Wilentz. She knew an abundance of international relief groups with “their money [and] their development résumés” would descend on a nation that already had more than ten thousand aid organizations in operation before the earthquake. She wasn’t sure she could tolerate a “salvation fantasy” from the international community, in which well-intentioned, post-disaster relief workers insist their presence would solve Haiti’s unmanageable, centuries-old troubles. Exasperated by the media’s reductionist portrayals of Haitians in despair — which she calls “the objectification of the Haitians’ victimization” — Wilentz wondered if she could “bear to watch the difficult lives of most Haitians rendered even more unbearable by this dreadful event.”
But she could not stay away. Within two weeks of the earthquake, Wilentz was back in Haiti for what may have been her thirtieth or fortieth visit. (She lost count after so many years.) The experience was consequential. She explains:
This book in your hands, then, is my attempt to put Haiti back together again for myself, to understand why all the simplest hopes and dreams of the men and women [that outsiders] call Fred Voodoo have been abandoned, and to stack the pieces flung apart by the earthquake back up into some semblance of the real country. I wanted to figure out, after so many attempts by so many to uphold democracy, why Fred and all his brothers and sisters have become, in our eyes at least, mere victims, to be counted up on one ledger or another as interesting statistics, casualties of dictatorship, of poverty, of disaster, of outside interference, of neglect, of history — of whatever you want to point a finger at — rather than as active commanders of their own destiny.
Amy Wilentz. Paula Goldman
“Nothing You See Is What It Seems to Be.”
The long-standing misapprehension about Haiti and Haitian identity has everything to do with the country’s history, religion, culture, isolation, and relationship to the United States. As Wilentz discusses in great detail, and with keen insight: “[Haiti] defies categorization.… It’s eccentric and unexpected. At every corner, in every conversation, with every new event, Haiti makes you think, it challenges you.”
One of the many indeterminable stereotypes about Haitians is that “ninety percent of Haitians are Catholics, and one hundred percent are voudouisant, or voodoo worshippers.” Wilentz attended several voodoo ceremonies, during which various African gods were worshiped and spirit possession occurred. At the end of these “stunningly theatrical and participatory” services, she wondered whether Haitians really believe in voodoo, or if its practice is more tradition than conviction.
Wilentz knows this question is formalistic, and the answer is as enigmatic as the country itself. “Tou sa ou we, se pa sa,” a Haitian proverb warns. It translates to: “Nothing you see is what it seems to be.” Still, Wilentz doesn’t sit back and leave a gap in her analysis. She delves deeply into voodoo’s cultural importance.
“For most Haitians at a ceremony,” Wilentz asserts, “this is community, escape, entertainment, and as much transcendence as is allowed to them. For others, the ceremony represents Haitian patrimony and inheritance, and they take pride in it even when they have little or no religious belief.… This is a culture that values theater and a certain degree of artifice, even a great degree. Artifice and duplicity were natural and necessary survival methods during slavery.… How much of what the white man sees in Haiti is specifically a show for the white man to see — and this not just in terms of voodoo ceremonies, and not just today?”
Although an answer is unattainable, a look at Haitian history is instructive. In 1804, after obtaining freedom from France in the only successful slave-led revolution in history, Haiti became the first independent black nation in the Western world, but its legitimacy was suspect because it was ruled by descendants of slaves. After wresting power and prosperity from a European colonial power, Haiti was regarded by many as a nation that “never really had the right to exist.” As Frederick Douglass said in a speech at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, “We have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.”
Haiti is much like the U.S. and France, countries whose histories cite revolution as a defining force that established sovereignty and national identity. Haiti’s revolutionary forefathers — Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines — maintain a presence in many Haitians’ minds similar to that of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson for Americans. Folklore has it that Dessalines “ripped the white stripe from the French tricolore in order to create the new red and blue Haitian flag, [sending] the message [that] the white man will have nothing to do with [Haitians’] destiny.”
It wasn’t to be.
For more than a century, France forced Haiti to pay reparations for the loss of the slave economy, while the slaveholding U.S. imposed a burdensome embargo that crippled the fledgling nation’s integration into the world economy. The U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and it has meddled in the country’s affairs ever since.
Wilentz explains that, for almost all of the twentieth century, only U.S.-approved Haitians were allowed to become president in Haiti. She also cites a U.S.-led military intervention in 1994, Operation Uphold Democracy, that re-imposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Aristide had been overthrown by the Haitian Army just three years before the U.S. intervention.)
“I cannot recall another U.S. military deployment that performed regime change by reinstating an unseated leader,” Wilentz writes.”But Haiti is always singular, and so is America’s long, torrid relationship with it.”
Wilentz continues:
How Haiti works in general has historically had more to do with foreigners than is the case in most other countries, and this has never been so obvious as in the post-earthquake era. With so many coming down to assist in relief and reconstruction, so much of it concentrated in the capital, it has sometimes felt as though the country is being taken over by a new occupation, by a different kind of army.…
Rather than disrupting old ways of thinking about Haiti, the earthquake allowed many commentators, political analysts, and columnists to restate what they’d always imagined to be true about the world’s first black republic. The white Western world has a tendency, when confronted by Haiti’s intractable problems, to fall back on easy stereotypes and a deep-rooted, unconscious racism that suggests to them that this is all “depressing” and “hopeless,” and that somehow all the problems are the fault of this irresponsible, ungovernable people, with their weird old African customs and religion. It’s all Fred Voodoo’s fault.
But in fact, this depression and hopelessness come from “experts” who don’t understand Haiti, don’t acknowledge its strengths (and don’t know them), don’t get its culture or are philosophically opposed to what they assume its culture is, and don’t know its history in any meaningful way.
Despite billions of dollars in aid that flowed into Haiti, and thousands of relief workers who donated their time, it’s no secret that the country remains in disrepair. Wilentz is unsparing in her criticism of the failures of the international community and the Haitian government, and her writing on their dereliction is superb. She is unafraid to ask whether it is worth continuing to provide humanitarian assistance to a “kleptocratic” country that lacks a “functioning government that works for the people.”
Two Westerners who receive indisputable praise from Wilentz for “getting Haiti” are Megan Coffee, a doctor who cares for tuberculosis patients at her perpetually under-resourced Port-au-Prince clinic, and actor Sean Penn, who ran a refugee camp and moved refugees to real housing within days of the earthquake.
In the end, the most profound and perplexing question Wilentz asks, and tries to answer, is: “All the outsiders who come to Haiti, and come again, and never absolutely leave … what is it they get out of Haiti? This is the mystery I was trying to solve, after all. What do I get out of Haiti?”
At this point, Farewell, Fred Voodoo comes full circle. Wilentz’s love affair continues, yet it is changed. Indeed, Wilentz is changed. After “years of being schooled by Haiti,” she realizes the lessons have exacted an emotional toll.
“This book is … what I’m doing to relieve the pain,” she confides. “Putting down these marks across my computer screen: I can feel the release.… Yet what I’ve done in Haiti, what I’ve achieved with marks on paper, I cannot help but feel is useless, especially in the wake of this terrible disaster.”
Is Farewell, Fred Voodoo Wilentz’s goodbye letter to Haiti? For both her readers and a country that has been misunderstood for so long, I hope it is not so.
In a poignant family memoir, veteran journalist Mark Whitaker describes his long road to truth and reconciliation with his parents, a biracial couple brought together by a shared faith and torn apart by their separate frailties.
My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir By Mark Whitaker
Simon & Schuster. 368 pages.
There is a saying among reporters: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Few have taken this advice as literally as Mark Whitaker has done in My Long Trip Home. In Whitaker’s poignant family memoir, the veteran CNN journalist and first African American to lead a national news magazine details his journey to discover the unspoken truths, hidden motivations, and deep-rooted hurts that shadowed his upbringing and defined his tortured relationship with his father.
On a superficial level, My Long Trip Home will remind some readers of Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father. Whitaker was born in 1957 to an interracial couple. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a white, tenured professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania; his father, Cleophaus Sylvester “Syl” Whitaker Jr., was the first black student admitted to the doctoral program in political science at Princeton University.
Even as a child, Whitaker was the “spitting image” of his father, he writes. Both shared the same worry lines in their foreheads that creased in moments of seriousness and reflection. “I think Mark, like Syl, has a fundamentally happy and open temperament,” his mother wrote in a letter, “which will probably be quite resistant to sobering influences. We trust he won’t have to meet anything too sobering.”
Unfortunately, Whitaker’s life was more difficult than his mother had hoped. His parents divorced when he was five, and his mother struggled as a single parent to raise him and his younger brother, Paul. He and his father had a tenuous and sporadic relationship, further complicated by Syl’s emerging battle with alcoholism.
To ferret out the complex dynamics of his family’s history, Whitaker relies on the investigative reporting techniques he learned from his three decades of experience as a journalist. Whitaker currently serves as the executive vice president and managing editor of CNN Worldwide. He formerly worked as a reporter and editor at Newsweek and as the Washington bureau chief for NBC News. Whitaker knows how to work a story. Although here he is investigating his own personal history, he approaches it in the same manner he would for any other journalistic assignment: carefully, candidly, and with reasoned prose.
Some of the details, he knew. He knew that his mother was born in Cameroon, Africa, to Protestant missionaries, and grew up in France. He knew his father was born in Pittsburgh, the only son of once-prosperous business owners. Because Syl had rarely mentioned his own father when his boys were growing up, Whitaker believed there had been some kind of friction between the two. He knew that his parents met at Swarthmore, where Jeanne was a professor and Syl was a student. He knew his parents’ marriage as an interracial couple was a brave move in the 1950s, when miscegenation laws remained in effect in many states. He knew his father was a luminary in the field of African studies. And he knew his mother suffered from bouts of depression after his parents’ six-year marriage ended.
Yet, all of this was superficial knowledge. It didn’t get Whitaker very far when he decided he wanted to write a memoir about his father. He needed to delve deeper into the family’s past. “I discovered,” he writes, “that the truth was far more revealing than what I thought I knew and that the story wasn’t just about him, it was about all of us.”
Whitaker began by interviewing family, friends, and colleagues of his parents. He gathered letters, newspaper clippings, diaries, and photographs. He examined his parents’ voluminous scholarly works. And, much to his amazement, he uncovered an illuminating family relic: Cleophaus Sylvester Whitaker Sr.’s autobiography, an eleven-page document crafted in 1973.
In it, Whitaker’s grandfather recounts his life and origins. He was the son of a slave who was “set loose from the plantation” when the Civil War ended. In 1916, at the age of eighteen, Cleophaus headed north from Kansas as part of the Great Migration, a movement of millions of blacks from the Jim Crow South to the urban North, in search of factory jobs and less hostile segregation. He married and fathered three daughters, but his first wife died of tuberculosis. He later remarried and had a son, Syl.
The autobiography was most telling in what it did not mention — the shattered relationship between Cleophaus and his son. Whitaker eventually deduced that Cleophaus physically and psychologically abused Syl. The revelation cleared up a “mistaken assumption” he had about his father, Whitaker writes:
I always thought my father had inherited all of his magnetism from his mother, [a “light-skinned beauty” with an “elegant … and entertaining way of speaking”] …. I had never considered the impact my father’s father had on his life … and for the first time I learned what a force of nature C.S. Whitaker Sr. was in his own right.
Their fierce bickering began in Syl’s teens when he asked his family to stop calling him by his “demeaning” nickname, “Junior.” He insisted upon “Syl,” a shortened version of his middle name. It took months for “Syl” to stick, but his father persisted in calling Syl by his old nickname “out of prideful pique.” Cleophaus’s flagrant philandering strained their relationship even more. Syl saw the anguish his father’s infidelity exacted on his mother, and he became her “champion.” Thereafter, a “bitter chill fell over their relationship.”
It was around this time that Syl was introduced to Quakerism by his Baptist bible school teacher, who encouraged Syl to attend a summer Quaker work camp in Ithaca, New York. The experience changed his life. Syl embraced the religion’s “teachings about simplicity and pacifism and the subtle power of silent prayer, so different from the raucous call-and response of the black church services he was used to.” When it came time to contemplate college, members of the American Friends Service Committee advised Syl to attend Swarthmore, a prestigious liberal arts college founded by nineteenth-century Quaker reformers outside Philadelphia.
Love and Liberation
Mark Whitaker. Pete Williams
In the years before World War II, Jeanne Theis’s family lived in the Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in central France. Edouard Theis, Whitaker’s grandfather, was the parish’s assistant pastor. After France signed an armistice with Nazi Germany in 1940, Theis learned that the Nazis had banned higher education for girls in the occupied countries. Theis, a progressive thinker committed to a philosophy of “nonviolence and a just social and international order,” wanted his daughters educated. He heard that famed American philanthropist Martha Sharp, who had helped Jewish refugees escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, was organizing a boat trip from Europe to New York for children who had American connections. Whitaker’s grandmother was a U.S. citizen, which meant the family could obtain State Department visas. Six of the eight Theis girls were among the twenty-seven refugees that Sharp brought to America several months later. All of the sisters except for fourteen-year-old Jeanne stayed with relatives in Ohio. Jeanne went to live with the Enders family, fellow Protestant missionaries who lived in Swarthmore.
In 1943, Vichy authorities arrested Theis and two of his colleagues for hiding thousands of Jewish refugees in Le Chambon and guiding them to safer locales. The three men were briefly held in an internment camp, but shortly after German forces surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad, they were inexplicably released. Theis fled underground and joined a resistance group that helped Jews escape into Switzerland. It wasn’t until 1945, when Theis traveled to Swarthmore on a speaking tour, that Jeanne learned of her beloved father’s awe-inspiring valor during the war.
Jeanne’s ardent interest in Syl developed during his junior year at Swarthmore. A French instructor, Jeanne organized a production in the original French of a Jean Giraudoux play about Captain Cook’s arrival in the tropics. The cast needed someone to play the tribal leader, and one person who had the “perfect look for the part” came to mind: Syl Whitaker, one of the few black students at Swarthmore. Syl did not speak French, though. Jeanne became Syl’s coach, and they trained together until he could master a “convincing accent.” During their rehearsals, Jeanne couldn’t help noticing how handsome Syl was, and Syl picked up on Jeanne’s gestures and began “wooing” her.
They started dating secretly, fearful of the fallout within the Swarthmore community if their relationship were exposed. Syl soon “grasped that he had started something that could only be made respectable in the eyes of the college and the broader society of mid-1950s America by giving it the sanctity of an engagement.” Whether or not the twenty-year-old was prepared for a serious commitment, it came barreling at him.
For Jeanne, falling in love with Syl was an “intellectual process” as well as a physical one. Whitaker explains:
She fell in love with the idea of him. He was handsome in a way that … appealed to her, perhaps because she had spent her early childhood in Africa. She respected his bravery in coming to a virtually all-white school like Swarthmore and good-naturedly confronting the racism he encountered in his life. And she was moved that he took his faith so seriously, that coming from such different backgrounds they shared the same commitment to battling the world’s evils by turning the other cheek rather than demanding an eye for an eye.
Syl and Jeanne married in 1956. Jeanne gave birth to Mark, and two years later, Paul. In 1961, the Whitakers moved to Princeton after Syl was offered a teaching-assistant position there. Jeanne gave up her tenured position at Swarthmore and found an unfulfilling, temporary teaching job at Princeton.
The move undermined the family’s structure, and cracks began to show in the Whitakers’ marriage. Much to her chagrin, Jeanne learned how unconventional Princeton was compared to the sedate haven of Swarthmore. The faculty held a “liberated” mindset that rejected the “fuddy-duddy bourgeois morality of early 1960s America.” Syl began drinking often and heavily. He also started cheating on Jeanne and asked her for an open marriage. Heartbroken, confused, and humiliated, Jeanne wondered how Syl could so easily scuttle his marriage vows and abandon their Quaker values.
The following year, UCLA offered Syl a professorship. Thinking that new surroundings in California might patch-up their troubled marriage, Jeanne accompanied Syl and tried to make a happy home life for Mark and Paul. Within a year, the couple divorced.
Sins of the Father
Jeanne retained custody after the divorce, yet “her mind was a horror chamber of regret and self-recrimination,” Whitaker writes. Money was scarce, forcing the family to live a peripatetic lifestyle as Jeanne switched from job to job in pursuit of a lucrative teaching position. Stability came into their lives in 1964, when Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, hired her as an assistant professor.
His father’s visits were intermittent, and oftentimes years would lapse before Syl reappeared in Whitaker’s life. When father and son were together, their arguments and Syl’s immobilizing drunkenness frequently cut the outings short. Syl’s life and career also took on a nomadic routine. Whitaker witnessed his father reach the height of academe when he was asked to return to Princeton to start its first African American studies program and become a fellow at its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs — only to lose that position, and several more prestigious professorships, because of his erratic behavior. By deftly relating the hapless tumbles that ruined Syl’s reputation as “an exciting new voice” in the field, Whitaker offers an empathetic portrait of his father as a battered and tragic figure.
Meanwhile, the son spent his early life in a “quiet rage.” Whitaker’s sense of abandonment intensified his anger and destabilized his self-esteem. He began to eat compulsively; by the time he entered junior high school, he weighed over 200 pounds. His relationship with his brother deteriorated, leading to physically violent confrontations. Whitaker examines his difficult passage from boyhood to adulthood to fatherhood, caught between the polar extremes of his parents’ moral weaknesses: Jeanne’s “formidable shield of diffidence,” which locked her in a self-made shelter of passivity, and Syl’s self-destructiveness, a “life [that] had come to resemble his father’s more than he ever wanted to contemplate.”
In Whitaker’s case, his eventual reconciliation with his family began in high school. As a student at George School, a Quaker academy in Pennsylvania, Whitaker made strides in overcoming his anger and pondering differing ideas about who he was. Interestingly, Whitaker’s progress toward self-knowledge took shape with Syl’s influence, not in spite of it:
One reason I was glad to see my father was that at George School, for the first time in my life, I was reflecting on my racial identity. Until then, I had spent most of my life in small college towns where there were hardly any black people of my age, or any age. During our visits to Pittsburgh, I connected with that part of my heritage, but apart from that I knew only the virtually all-white environments of Norton, and Swarthmore, and Grenoble [France]. Now at George School, I was reading Native Son by Richard Wright, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, with their bracing portraits of what it was like to be black in places like the South Side of Chicago and Harlem. Although written in a previous generation, they raised powerful questions about whether any black American, of any shade or upbringing, could be untouched by racism, conscious or unconscious.
When I asked my father what he thought, [he said]: “I’ve been wondering how long it would take for you to ask me that …. You won’t believe this, but some of your ancestors looked even less black than you do … and could pass for white. But that doesn’t matter as far as American society is concerned. Mixed-race, light skin, we’re all black. But I want you to know that it will be up to you to decide how you want to be black. That will always be your choice.”
Whitaker’s story becomes less engaging in the latter portion of the book, but he has insightful observations to make about the maturing relationship between Jeanne and her sons. In the 1980s, his younger brother Paul found college life anxiety-provoking. He planned to move to San Francisco to start a new life. Their mother disapproved. Whitaker favored the plan:
When my mother told me how upset she was about the idea of Paul traveling alone to San Francisco, I took his side. At the time, I had a theory about the roles that she had unconsciously assigned the two of us. I was supposed to be the successful son who went forth into the world and earned her reflected glory, while Paul would be the helpless one who was so dependent on her that he would never venture far from home. The differences in the way she treated us bothered me on both of our accounts, and now I found myself rooting for him to escape her fretful orbit.
Paul ended up moving to San Francisco. Eventually, he finished college, earned a doctorate, and built a successful psychology practice in San Diego.
The older brother, too, found his way. In his rise from a humble Newsweek intern to its first African American editor, who oversaw the magazine’s coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay, and the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, Whitaker outshone his father’s tragic career. As a loving husband and father, he succeeded in breaking the vicious circle of dysfunctional family anger created by both his father and paternal grandfather. As a forgiving son, he forged a new bond with his mother, free of resentment and misunderstandings, and shed the bitterness he felt toward his father, who died in 2008.
Going to the heart of his remarkable memoir, Whitaker alludes to a French proverb, “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” — “To understand all is to forgive all.” “That’s the adage we all know,” Whitaker writes. “Yet if I learned anything from my journey, it’s that sometimes it has to happen the other way around.”
Correction, April 10, 2012: An earlier version of the article implied that the saying, “To understand all is to forgive all,” was invented by Leo Tolstoy. It is actually a French proverb that Tolstoy quoted. The text has been updated to reflect this.
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam By Eliza Griswold
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages.
In terms of geography, the tenth parallel is simply the circle of latitude that girdles planet Earth seven hundred miles north of the equator. But in journalist Eliza Griswold’s new book, it is a “faith-based fault line” that encompasses some of the world’s hottest religious hot spots — Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia in Africa, and Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia — and serves as a vehicle for her to explore the complicated and centuries-old conflict between Christianity and Islam.
Griswold got her inspiration for The Tenth Parallel during a visit in 2003 to Khartoum, Sudan, with evangelist Franklin Graham, the eldest son of influential preacher Billy Graham and personal pastor to George W. Bush. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Franklin Graham had denounced Islam as “evil” and “wicked” and declared that Muslims are enslaved by their religion. “Vilified by Muslims worldwide” for these statements, Graham, undaunted, saw this trip — his first to northern Sudan — as a golden opportunity to evangelize Muslim-dominated Khartoum.
At the time, the Sudanese government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was carrying out a murderous jihad against both Christians and Muslims in southern Sudan, and would soon perpetrate genocide in the western region of Darfur. Despite this bloodshed, Griswold says, Bashir hoped that a face-to-face with Graham, America’s most powerful evangelist, would “curry favor with Washington” and encourage the US to lift economic sanctions on Sudan. Griswold writes:
In Bashir’s palace’s sepulchral marble reception room, the two men argued pointedly over who could convert whom. Each adhered to a very different worldview: theirs were opposing fundamentalisms based on the belief that there was one — and only one — way to believe in God. At the same time, their religious politics spilled over into a fight between cultures, and represented the way in which the world’s Muslims and the West have come to misunderstand each other. Being a witness to this conversation was like watching emissaries from two different civilizations square off over a plate of pistachios.
Soon afterward, I started to travel in the band between the equator and the tenth parallel …. I wanted to see how Christianity and Islam are actually lived every day by huge numbers of vulnerable, marginal believers — individuals who are also part of the global story of poverty, development strategy, climate-change forecasts, and so on …. I wanted to go … where wars in the name of religion are not Internet media campaigns to “control a narrative” but actual wars fought from village to village and street corner to street corner. Most of all, I wanted to record the interwoven stories of those who inhabit this territory, and whose religious beliefs pattern their daily perseverance.
Among those whose stories Griswold records is Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the Anglican Church of Nigeria and leader of eighteen million Anglicans. Stopping the threat that Islam poses to Christianity is his life’s work. And yet recently Akinola has also taken an antagonistic view of the “profligate West” and “liberal Western Christians,” who he believes have forsaken biblical faith and left “African Christians, already in peril among Muslims, to defend themselves against the sins of the West.” In Akinola’s view, Griswold explains, “the relationship between liberal Protestants and Islam is straightforward: if Western Christians abandon conservative morals, then the global Church will be weakened in its struggle against Islam.”
“When you have [an attack on Christians], and there are no arrests,” Akinola tells Griswold, ”Christians become dhimmi, the status within Islam that allows Christians and Jews to be seen as second-class citizens. You are subject to the Muslims. You have no rights … I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God …. [But] I’ve said it before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence.”
In Indonesia, Griswold seeks out Ibnu Ahmad, a member of Indonesia’s terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the Al Qaeda-connected group responsible for the bombings in Bali in 2002. Lately, however, disagreements over the definition of jihad — namely, whether or not holy war sanctions the killing of civilians — have caused divisions among JI militants.
“Although no one in JI liked to admit it,” Griswold notes, “their bombings generally killed innocent bystanders: fellow Muslims, not enemies of Islam. Ibnu Ahmad opposed the killing of fellow Muslims as a way of spreading radical Islam. In theory, he was intent on returning to the seventh-century way of life, dress, and devotion practiced by the Salafs, the first three generations of the [Prophet Muhammad’s] followers.”
The rift over jihad plays out in Ahmad’s own family. Salahuddin, his younger brother, believes that anyone who does not “espouse all-out war in the name of Islam [is] a kafir, an unbeliever, and every unbeliever must be killed” — including Ibnu Ahmad.
Crafting an unflinching, straightforward account of the tensions and turmoil on the tenth parallel is no easy feat — especially when contemplating more than two millennia of religious history and centuries of geopolitical misadventures. But in The Tenth Parallel, Griswold demonstrates an exceptional understanding of the conflict’s dimensions and succeeds in unraveling its hydra-headed nature. She also provides superbly concise portraits of the religious moderates and hard-liners, would-be reformers, missionaries, jihadis, and militants who have a stake in the conflict. “Geography [is] religious destiny,” Griswold points out — and nowhere is that more true than on the tenth parallel.
Update, August 3, 2013: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.
The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans By Mark Jacobson
Simon & Schuster. 368 pages.
After journalist Mark Jacobson comes into possession of a lampshade — purportedly made out of human skin at a Nazi concentration camp and pilfered from an abandoned house in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans — he takes a voyage into the unfathomable.
Jacobson describes this journey in his new book, The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans, initially focusing on the roundabout way he got ahold of the grisly artifact. In the chaotic wake of Katrina, Dave Dominici — a “gap-toothed” junkie and convicted cemetery bandit — was rummaging through a pile of left-behind belongings in a home in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans when he spotted the lampshade sitting on top of the heap, “like a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae,” “glistening” in the glow of his flashlight.
“Don’t ask me where I got the idea of what it was,” Dominici tells Jacobson. “But I’d been watching some Hitler stuff on the History Channel … You have to trust your instincts, know when something’s special … That’s why I say it was from Katrina. If it wasn’t for the storm, I never would have found it.”
Dominici showed the lampshade to Skip Henderson, a New Orleans friend of Jacobson’s, whose collecting of collectibles — Fender guitars, wristwatches, records — is a “life-defining joy.” Skip holds it in his hands.
Now he began to grok it, the material of the lampshade itself. The warmth of it. The greasy, silky, dusty feel of it. The veined, translucent look of it.
“What’s this made out of, anyhow?” Skip asked.
“That’s made from the skin of Jews,” Dominici replied.
“What?”
“Hitler made skin from the Jews!” Dominici returned, louder now, with a kind of goony certainty.
Skip bought the shade from Dominici. But owning the lampshade and contemplating its horror started to distress Skip and disrupt his sleep. He bowed out and sent it to Jacobson. “You’re the journalist, you figure out what it is,” he says to him.
So begins Jacobson’s globetrotting mystery tour to learn everything he can about his newly acquired “parcel of terror.” He starts at Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany. “If you are interested in lampshades, allegedly made out of human skin,” he writes, “Buchenwald is the place.” While camp commandant Karl Koch “imposed a reign of relentless cruelty … marked by innovative tortures” at Buchenwald, his redheaded, “legendarily hot-blooded” wife, Ilse Koch, inflicted her own special brand of brutality. According to a US prosecutor at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, the “Bitch of Buchenwald” ordered tattooed human skin to be made into lampshades for her home.
There’s a problem, though, with the provenance of Jacobson’s lampshade. Even though DNA tests certify that it is indeed made of human skin, the skin is not tattooed. So, Jacobson agonizes. Could his lampshade really be an authentic Buchwald artifact, or could it be one of those “illusionary tchotchkes of terror, the product of Allied propaganda and the brutalized imagination of prisoners?”
The characters Jacobson encounters, as he travels to Germany and Jerusalem and hops back and forth from New York to New Orleans, add insight and color to The Lampshade. Among others, Jacobson seeks out neo-Nazi David Duke, “Louisiana’s most famous fascist,” who’s living “under the radar” in Germany and finishing up his latest book, Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question. He also interviews a Holocaust denier who calls himself Denier Bud.
“It is my goal to lead the Holocaust denier movement away from the stench of anti-Semitism,” Denier Bud tells Jacobson. “I don’t think the Jews should be punished or suffer unduly for continuing to spread the lie about what happened to them during World War Two. They were a society under stress, so it is easy to sympathize with their motives. What I’m looking for is a Jew-friendly solution to the Holocaust hoax problem.”
Distinguished Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer advises Jacobson to continue telling the story of the lampshade no matter how much or how little certainty about its origin he may finally uncover:
For Bauer, oral history was mutually beneficial to the teller and the listener. In the past decades, he’d heard so many stories. “Thousands of terrible stories, rattling around in my brain.” Some of these narratives were more revealing than others, but all of them, even the lies, had value. One day, however, the last survivor will die. Then, even though he and many other historians had written down the stories, finding the truth of things will become more difficult because the voices, “the sound of them, the voice of the teller, will never be heard again.”
The Lampshade is a multifaceted, indelible, and haunting tale full of silences and unknowns. Jacobson recognizes that the sweep and scope of human history is shaped by the interconnectedness of all things, and The Lampshade serves as a commentary on this “commonality.”
“As I stared off into the Buchenwald fog,” he writes,
I felt a connection between this place of terror, where the lampshade supposedly had come from, and where it ended up, in the New Orleans flood. The lampshade had its secrets, things I needed to know ….
But the inconclusiveness did place the lampshade in a unique, and possibly illuminating, existential position. Here was an example of an object that … had served as a most repellent symbol of racial terror, an icon of genocide. Yet it [may not] be possible to know who had died and who had done the killing …. The lampshade was an everyman, an every victim.
… It sounded insane then and it sounded insane now. But I had hopes, inchoate as they might be, that this purported symbol of racist lunacy, product of the worst humanity could conjure, might through its everyman DNA somehow stand as a tortured symbol of commonality.
It was just a thought.
Update, August 4, 2013: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.
After three months of working for a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Chiclayo, Peru, and being totally immersed in Peruvian culture, I could finally speak Spanish. Now I received compliments on my fluency instead of the “what the fuck are you saying?” facial expressions that my initial attempts at communication had received. Yes, my Spanish was good, thanks to necessity. And yet … it sure would be nice to say exactly what I meant. (Subtleties are lost in translation.)
Humor had carried me far, but quite frankly, I was lonely. Of course I enjoyed the company of my Chiclayano friends. But having at least one other foreigner — My People — around to share the experience would have been nice. There’s a fine line between feeling proudly independent and unintentionally isolated.
I needed an escape, and I was sure of the solution: a brief reunion with My People in the town of Máncora. I’d heard there were English-speaking tourists in Máncora, so I decided to treat myself to a short vacation. It was time! Time to crack jokes with people who had heard of Arrested Development. Time to share my enthusiasm over the musical genius of Beirut instead of Grupo Cinco. Time for a break from the stares and whistles I got as one of the only white people walking down the streets of Chiclayo.
Not My People
But when I finally arrived in Máncora, I didn’t fit in.
How could this be? Weren’t these Western globetrotters My People? The league of backpackers with whom I’d shared conversation countless times, listening wide-eyed to each other’s tales of rash job-quitting and subsequent adventuring? Patting each other on the back for choosing the road less traveled (though increasingly trodden)?
But My People now made me nervous. In my first encounters, I felt desperate to fit in. Insecure. Eager for approval. This wasn’t the PB&J synergy I remembered! This didn’t feel comfortable; this felt like … junior high. What’s more, These People spoke a language that I couldn’t decipher, raving about “the green” and “wax brands.” Now it was my turn: What the fuck are you saying? (Maybe a surftown wasn’t the wisest choice for first contact.)
And then I experienced another kind of nervousness: If I didn’t fit in with them, then with whom? I’d lost my true north and needed to get away from These People, people I thought I knew, but who had morphed into confusion instead. I headed beach-ward with a book, where my pale, pale self also failed to fit in. At least I didn’t feel the need to impress the sand or sea. But on my way, I met Paola.
Actually, it was Robert who called out to me.
“Are you an English speaker?”
I turned around to face an odd pair. A tall, bearded 60-year-old American strolling alongside a 29-year-old Colombian beauty with facial piercings and a guarded expression. I accompanied them to a café, ditching my beach plan in favor of the possibility of finding community with a pair of misfits.
Robert and Paola
I can’t remember why Robert called out to me, but I’m glad he did. He rarely speaks to women (only part of the complex character that is Robert), and if he hadn’t randomly selected me to be the anomaly, I would never have known Paola, the enigma.
Paola was short, but her powerful presence made you forget this. She walked with a rigid posture and a stiff neck and her chest puffed out. Not in a seductive way, but more like she was trying to emulate a 250-pound bouncer, as if to defy her delicate features. She had a glowing complexion that made her look 22, thanks to a regime of using saliva as a moisturizer. (Gross? You wouldn’t think so if you saw the results.)
Robert was a wonder to listen to. World knowledge poured out of him. He offered me a glimpse into his elaborate web of conspiracy theories, weaving together patterns of suspicion and rumor. His communication lacked any discernable narrative form; rather it was held together by a logic to which only he was privy. Somehow, he transitioned to the subject of Paola, who had been sitting there looking bored. Half of Robert’s speech was in English, of which she didn’t understand a word.
“We have a child together.”
Wow. Paola would later elaborate a bit more for me: They’d had a one-night stand several years earlier, and had been tied to each other because of The Child ever since. This was the first time they’d seen each other in years. They met in Máncora to sort out a few things.
“We’re meeting again here, now, because Paola has a very important decision to make. She is going to decide the name of The Child, and in doing so, she will determine its identity.”
Again—wow. And I’d thought my Máncorian mission was an ambitious one.
Robert then went on a tirade about how Paola was dooming The Child by marrying a Jewish Argentinian and considering giving The Child his surname. With her background, this was like putting a giant target on The Child — hadn’t she heard of the Rosenbergs?
Robert talked straight through the meal. I tried to keep up with the conversation, while Paola sat, looking guarded and bored. She didn’t know it, but Robert was now divulging her life story to me, a complete stranger.
I tried to include her in the conversation.
“Robert está contándome la historia completa de tu vida.” Robert’s telling me your whole life story.
Paola’s People
It was at that point, I think, where I won her confidence. For the next two days, she never lost the scrutiny in her eyes, sizing up every person she met or even passed on the street, but I was now Hers. (Yes! Loner no more.) Maybe she felt bad that I had to sit and listen to Robert’s rants. (I didn’t mind.) Maybe she was thankful that I hadn’t been too quick to judge Robert (or her). I don’t know why, but she took me under her beautiful wing.
For two days I was with Paola’s People.
Paola opened my eyes to a whole new world. I had been living in Peru for three months and had never seen it in this light. Around the time that she met Robert, she’d spent several months living in Máncora and had gotten to know many of the locals. Through her, I met The Artisans. Niño Manuel was their benevolent leader, although at about 55, he certainly wasn’t a niño, a child — at least not physically. His specialty was hat-making and his creations seemed inspired by Dr. Seuss. At any time of the day, you could find him with His People, gathered under the tree across from his booth and sharing a beer or box of wine. When I met Niño Manuel, he pointed out all the people in town I couldn’t trust (including police and informants) and introduced me to the Good People. One particular charmer welcomed me by placing bottle caps over his eyes and doing his best impression of a stingray. (I didn’t get it either. But it was a nice sentiment.)
The Escape
Yes, Paola had introduced me to the beating heart of Máncora, and through The Artisans, I learned about Escape economics. The Artisans were wonderful and kind. Anytime I walked passed one or some of them — anywhere in town — they’d call out to me in chorus and insist that I share their drink. Because they were always drinking. Because their economy demanded it. The decline of the fishing industry (due to the decline of fish stocks) has made tourism a particularly vital source of income for Máncorians. Unlike the cultural tourism of Machu Picchu, Máncora attracts party tourism; it is a party town. Westerners (My People?) escape to Máncora to drink and smoke all day and night, and then they return to their ordered, tranquil lives.
But Máncorians continually live in the Escape. Almost everyone I met was struggling with drug and alcohol abuse. Although, struggling is a relative term, I suppose, because they all just accepted it as normal. I’d be sitting on the beach, having a beer with a friend, and glance over to catch him shooting up. Once, at about 10 a.m., I asked my hostel’s owner, Carlos, if he was drunk. “Of course … as always!” he answered with a grin.
I supposed they just embraced it, but it was something very ugly to me. And yet, what’s a party town without partiers? What would happen to Máncora if its citizens rejected this lifestyle? Is the alternative of poverty any better? It was an unsettling realization that these lives depended on profits from partying.
That night, as the sun set over our box of wine and chicken dinner, Paola informed me that we were going to her friends’ place. “They are Colombian artisans, too. You’ll like them.”
We made our way to a giant lawn decked with hammocks and blankets, where Paola’s friends awaited us: the three Lost Boys. One Boy had a single feather earring dangling from one ear. Like Paola, these 18- to 20-year-old nomads had been displaced from their homeland. We spent the night drinking and playing music. Paola was right: The Boys were playful and kind, and I liked them immediately.
At some point, The Boys began to play an old Colombian folk song about what a wonderful life it would be when the fighting was over. Paola sang. I don’t know when it happened, but she started to weep. Legs crossed, chest slightly deflated, she sang and wept straight through. Her voice wavered but never broke. The song ended.
“Otra vez … otra vez …” Again … again, she pleaded.
The Boys said nothing; they just started the song again and watched Paola. They played the song three times.
“It’s not true. It never came true.” Paola wept and we listened.
Paola explained to me that to be born Colombian means that when you think back to the friends you had in elementary school, you know that most of them are dead. And the ones who aren’t are the ones who left their home. As she had done. As the Lost Boys had done.
The Teacher
I could never fully understand Paola’s tragedy; I had never experienced anything close to it. But by explaining it to me, by allowing me audience to her song, she had invited me in. In spite of her great loss, Paola gave me so much in the few days I knew her.
Somehow, in the middle of Máncora, I’d found a true teacher.
Paola was the epitome of grace, of strength, of sadness. She taught me about culture and belonging, about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a child. The entire time we spent together, she called me “niña,” little girl. She may have only been a few years my senior (and looked about my age, thanks to the miracle of spit), but she seemed to have 45 years of life experience on me.
Because she had expanded my understanding of culture and belonging, I saw new potential in Chiclayo. So I’d have to wait a while longer to drop Arrested Development lines with My People, wherever they were. (Whoever they were.) And, yes, I would inevitably be treated as the town idiot for my imperfect language skills, at least a few more times. But now, three more months seemed less daunting, less lonely.
We use cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the site. Cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser, as they are essential for the working of the site’s basic functionality. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this site. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent, and you have the option to opt out of using them.
Necessary cookies are essential for the basic functionality and security features of this website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that are not necessary for the website to function and are used to collect user personal data via analytics or other embedded content are termed non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to using these cookies.
