A top-rated show in South Korea, the romantic drama Crash Landing on You drew millions of international viewers and won accolades from Western publications like Time, Variety, Elle, and the Guardian. Netflix
From thrillers like Squid Game to romantic comedies like Crash Landing on You, K-dramas have attracted large and loyal followings outside Korea. While problematic content occasionally crops up, I’ve found a welcome escape—and a welcoming fan community—through their relatable stories.
To put it bluntly, the past few years have been exhausting. That’s been all the more true for the African American community, which has suffered not only a disproportionate number of Covid deaths, but also high-profile killings at the hands of police and White nationalists. Since the pandemic began in 2020, I’ve found myself particularly isolated because of an autoimmune illness, which has made leaving home especially risky and taken away my ability to travel internationally—an outlet I’d relied upon in the past whenever anti-Black racism had gotten to me.
When the lockdowns were at their worst, and Black death seemed everywhere, Hollywood didn’t offer much of a respite—shows and films like Lovecraft Country, Underground, and Antebellum still hit too close to home. Browsing on Netflix one night, I came across Chocolate, a Korean drama about a chef who falls in love with a neurosurgeon. As a child, the doctor dreamed of becoming a professional chef himself, and the two bond over their passion for cooking. At a time when Covid was raging unchecked across the country, this foreign-language tearjerker set in a hospice ward connected deeply with me, helping me to mourn the thousands dying every day. I was hooked. After that first taste, I dove deeply into the catalog of South Korean dramas now available on online streaming platforms. Since then, I’ve become a devoted fan.
In recent years, “K-dramas” have steadily gained a foothold among American audiences, riding a larger “Korean wave” of wildly popular K-pop musical groups like BTS and Blackpink and celebrated Korean filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho (director of the Academy Award-winning 2019 film Parasite). You can see this trend as yet another sign of globalization: the growing interconnectedness of the world’s markets and cultures. As singularly dominant as Hollywood has been over the past century, creators in other countries are increasingly able and eager to get their homegrown work shown widely in global media markets. The flow of blockbuster pop culture is no longer so one-way.
As someone tired of hearing the same stories from American shows and movies, I’ve found it refreshing to see Korean (and Nigerian and Brazilian) perspectives on TV. At the same time, the surging popularity of K-dramas has brought with it a host of concerns about representation and historical accuracy, as recent controversies underscore.
Chinyere Osuji Chinyere Osuji is the author of Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race, uses social science to understand how Blacks interact with ethnic and racial “others,” and has watched Something in the Rain five times. Site | Instagram | Twitter | Clubhouse
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The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase InequalityBy Brink Lindsey and Steven M. TelesOxford University Press. 232 pages.
The rents are too damn high. That’s the conclusion of Brink Lindsey (of the center-right Niskanen Center) and Steven M. Teles (of Johns Hopkins University and Niskanen) in their book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality. By “rents,” Lindsey and Teles don’t mean what you’re late in paying your landlord, but rather “rent” as economists understand it: profits in excess of what a free market would normally allow. In recent years, they argue, large corporations and wealthy individuals have taken larger and larger slices of the economic pie not by creating things of value—inventing the next iPhone-like innovation, say—but by using government policies to quash competition. This involves not just “regulatory capture” (a social-science term for when the industry fox watches the consumer henhouse) but a broader takeover, with all levels of the government—both those who write the rules, and those who enforce them—bending the knee to particular business interests or organized elites.
Helen Benedict’s novel Wolf Season describes how old wounds from the Iraq War linger on in the lives of three women.
Priya Malhotra
Wolf Season By Helen Benedict
Bellevue Literary Press. 320 pages.
In her latest novel Wolf Season, Helen Benedict tells the stories of three women in a small town in upstate New York coping with the trauma of war—not just the direct experience of violence and death, but also the collateral damage it inflicts on loved ones. Rin is a rape-scarred Iraq War veteran who has returned to her hometown of Huntsville. Naema is an Iraqi refugee who lost her husband during the conflict and now works in the town as a doctor. Beth is a military wife dealing with an abusive husband and a troubled child.
What Tomorrow Brings is an intimate portrait of a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan and the challenges its students face in trying to get an education.
In an early scene of What Tomorrow Brings, Pashtana, a seventh-grader at a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan, describes just how much her education means to her. “My biggest hope is to finish school,” she says, smiling brightly. “That’s how my life will turn the corner, and I’ll be on my way.”
Her smile fades. “But I’m worried there are people around me who will try to stop me.”
Chelsea Rudman Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.
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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.
South Africans found the unlikeliest of musical heroes in their struggle against apartheid: a Detroit-born, Mexican American guitarist named Sixto Rodriguez. The documentary Searching for Sugar Man traces Rodriguez’s rapid ascent from obscurity in Motown to mythology in Cape Town — and the equally sudden oblivion that followed.
Searching for Sugar Man Written and directed by Malik Bendjelloul
Sony Pictures Classics. PG-13. 1 hour, 25 minutes.
Searching for Sugar Man tells the true story of Sixto Rodriguez, an unassuming Detroit musician whose politically charged songs transformed him into a dissident hero in apartheid-era South Africa, even as fame and fortune eluded him back home. Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul’s feature-length debut spends its first half describing the mythology that arose in South Africa around this Mexican American singer-songwriter, and then delves — with surprising results — into the mystery of his sudden disappearance from the world stage.
Rodriguez was really big in South Africa. Just how big was he? “Much bigger than the Rolling Stones,” his South African distributor says matter-of-factly. Back home, one of his first U.S. producers hailed Rodriguez, the son of Mexican immigrant parents, as a “prophet.” His critically acclaimed songs invariably led to comparisons with Bob Dylan. So how was it that this outstanding artist bombed commercially in the States and was oblivious to his mega success overseas?
Conservative inflexibility and liberal apathy have endangered the dream of a democratic, secure Jewish state, a prominent American Zionist argues in a new book. But for all his ideas to salvage the two-state solution, Peter Beinart seems really to be documenting its demise.
The Crisis of Zionism By Peter Beinart
Times Books. 304 pages.
What do Palestinian activists and a Jewish Zionist in Manhattan have in common? The opposition of Israeli hard-line conservatives, as it turns out. Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic who now teaches at the City University of New York, argues that the future of Israel is in grave danger — not from the enemies that have long surrounded it, but from its growing extremism internally and the growing apathy of liberal American Jews toward Israel.
In his new book, The Crisis of Zionism, Beinart makes the case that the dream of a democratic Israel is dying, undermined by West Bank settlements and the marginalization of Palestinians. Within the United States, Israel’s longtime ally, Zionist organizations reflexively support Israel’s policies, while liberal Jews have a fading interest in Israeli issues. In both countries, there has been no significant opposition from liberal Zionists to the bellicose policies that endanger Israel’s founding principles of democracy.
Beinart fears the end of the two-state solution that would grant Palestinians and Jews their own nations, believing that the two groups could not live together harmoniously in one state after decades of acrimony. Breaking with many of his fellow Zionists, however, he identifies Jewish settlements in the proposed Palestinian nation as the greatest threat to this goal. “There are, to be sure, many Palestinians who don’t want two states and seek Israel’s destruction,” he writes. “But the best way to ensure their triumph is to keep eating away at the land on which a Palestinian state may be born.”
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 Truongs and the Vos escaped war-ravaged Vietnam, but years later, the wounds of unspoken trauma and regrets have not healed. In a story that spans three decades across three countries, Aimee Phan’s debut novel describes the secret history of two families and the shared pain that both unites and divides them.
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong By Aimee Phan
St. Martin’s Press. 368 pages.
Spanning three decades across three continents, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong is a story of the fierce love, betrayal, anger, heartbreak, and forgiveness that can only exist between family members. Aimee Phan’s debut novel follows three generations of the Truongs and the Vos, two Vietnamese families tied by marriage. The novel illustrates how decisions made by one generation can cast a high, consequential shadow over the next generation, and explores the difficult balance between fulfilling our duty to family and keeping our sense of independence and identity.
Phan’s protagonist, Cherry Truong, is a second-generation Vietnamese American. After getting into a California medical school, Cherry disobeys her family’s wishes by deferring medical school for a prolonged visit to Vietnam to reconnect with her estranged brother, Lum. This is the first major act of rebellion in Cherry’s coming-of-age story.
Lum, who has a gambling addiction, was banished overseas by his family after he accidentally endangered Cherry’s life. Cherry goes to Vietnam to reunite with her brother, but she also has another purpose: Cherry is on a fact-finding mission to uncover her family’s past. Thus begins a narrative journey into the history of the Truongs, Cherry’s paternal side of the family, and the Vos, her mother’s side.
Set against a backdrop of historical events in the post-Vietnam War era, Phan’s story shows the pain of displacement. The year is 1979, four years after Saigon has fallen to North Vietnamese forces. The Truongs are attempting to escape Vietnam, aided by their middle son, Yen, who is waiting for them in France. Daringly, the Truongs set out to flee Vietnam by boat. But the Truong family patriarch, Hung (Cherry’s paternal grandfather), splits up the family. Hung had agreed to buy ship tickets to Malaysia, where the family could apply for political refugee status. However, he is unable to buy a seat for his daughter-in-law’s mother, Kim-Ly Vo (Cherry’s maternal grandmother). The family ends up in a refugee camp in Malaysia, while Kim-Ly stays in Vietnam.
In the refugee camp, the Truongs prepare for their journey to France, but the daughter-in-law, Tuyet (Cherry’s mother), convinces her husband, Sanh, that they should part ways with his family. This decision stems from guilt as well as love. Some years prior, Kim-Ly had tried to marry her daughter to an older and unappealing American officer. This marriage would have essentially guaranteed the Vos safety in America. Tuyet defied her mother’s scheme and ran off with Hung’s son, Sanh (Cherry’s father), instead. This was a blow to the Vo family, which suffered immensely during and after the war. Tuyet’s oldest brother died in a North Vietnamese forced-labor camp. After disappointing her mother yet again by leaving without her for Malaysia, Tuyet is desperate to rectify their relationship. She refuses to go to France by way of Manila, and seeks to immigrate to America, as her mother originally wished. Eventually, Tuyet and Sanh, along with the Vos, end up there, while the rest of the Truongs settle in France.
Later we discover that Hung had chosen not to get a ticket for Kim-Ly on the boat, as he had been holding out spaces for his mistress and illegitimate children. This one selfish decision alters the fate of the Truong and Vo families forever.
‘Our Mistakes Don’t Dictate Our Lives’
Aimee Phan. Julie Thi Underhill
Phan deftly weaves her narrative back and forth through the past and present, and through three countries — France, America, and Vietnam. She describes how her characters grapple with displacement and assimilation, and explores their lives with an impressive level of emotional nuance. They have been shaped by both the tragedies they experience, Phan suggests, and their responses to these tragedies. At one point, Cherry remembers a fable about how “everyone has choices taken away from them,” and how “despair is pushed into our lives … [and] we can only control how we recover.” The experiences of Cherry’s family members parallel the fable. In the face of the great hardships experienced by the Truongs and the Vos, Phan shows us how the family members find different ways of coping — guilt, blame, anger, the displaced expectations of others.
In America, Phan introduces us to the world of Little Saigon, in southern California, where Cherry’s mother, Tuyet, is still atoning. She escaped the refugee camp, but it took her five years to get her mother out. In Little Saigon, Kim-Ly has invested in a successful beauty salon enterprise and has been loaning money to other Vietnamese families with interest. But she will not let Tuyet forget her transgressions.
While the Vos try to adjust to their new life in America, on the other side of the Atlantic the Truongs are pursued by their own past. In France, Yen’s wife, Trinh, suffers from a mental breakdown. Trinh is haunted by her experience in the refugee camp, but she will not seek help because she feels the need to protect her family from the truth.
Trinh is not the only Truong overcome by past traumas. Hung’s wife, Hoa, has been verbally and physically abused by her unfaithful husband. Hung insists that he has done his duty as a father by sticking with his family and not running off with his lover. However, his treatment of Hoa seems to reflect his frustration with losing his chance at happiness. Hoa endures her husband’s abuse and floats through her life without much complaint. When Trinh laments that a “family curse” befell them when they left Vietnam, Hoa replies, “Everyone suffers. We are not special.” When Hung later develops dementia in his old age, Hoa wonders if his illness “was not a tragedy, but rather nature’s way of correcting their relationship.” In one of Hung’s few lucid moments, she confronts him about his infidelities and tells him that his indiscretions will die with him. Hoa accepts misfortune but longs for catharsis.
Phan explores the family members’ relentless desire for reconciliation, and how this is often hampered by memories of the past. Many of the characters seem to remember too much; some, like Trinh, are almost imprisoned by their traumatic memories.
Cherry, who has a photographic memory, wants to make sense of why her family members keep hurting each other. She discovers old letters from her mother, Tuyet, to Kim-Ly, and catches a glimpse of the love letters from her grandfather, Hung, to his mistress. She uncovers some of her family’s secrets and finds proof of past indiscretions.
Yet, despite these revelations, Cherry realizes she is no closer to understanding why her family’s anguish runs so deep. She asks her brother if he thinks it might be better for their family to forget its past, to have “the worst memories erased.” Lum’s reply gets to the core of Phan’s novel. “The things our family did to each other, what we did to each other, they don’t make up who you are,” he says. “Our mistakes don’t dictate our lives.”
Susan M. Lee Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.
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Best of In The Fray 2012. Long before he was a dissident or president, Václav Havel was a playwright. His plays offer the fullest picture of the late Czech writer’s moral vision, which cast aside ideology in favor of a more authentic, more personal “truth and love.”
Václav Havel in front of his favorite painting, Master Theodoric’s portrait of St. Matthew, at Prague’s National Gallery in 1992. Pavel Štecha
One has to be careful quoting Václav Havel’s plays: his characters lie through truths. The meaning of what they say invariably depends not on the words themselves, but who says them, in what circumstances. “The word is insidious,” Havel writes in his comments to the 1972 play Conspirators. “One moment it means a lot, an instant later it means nothing. There are people in whose mouths even the most beautiful word may mean the ugliest thing. The more a person loses his self, the more deftly he can transform truth into lie, and—paradoxically—through truth … deceive the world and himself.”
Havel’s state funeral last month at Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral resembled, as the Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg had anticipated, “a grotesque situation” from one of the writer’s absurd plays. Presiding over the memorial was none other than Václav Klaus, the current Czech president and Havel’s political nemesis.
Grief over Havel’s death had brought the country to a standstill, as anyone who approved of the changes in 1989—the Velvet Revolution that brought a peaceful end to communist rule over Czechoslovakia—suddenly realized the degree to which Havel personified those changes and the once inconceivable possibilities they had opened. Into this national outpouring of warmth and nostalgia stepped Klaus, who had not said a good thing about Havel in fifteen years.
The first words of remembrance spoken at Havel’s funeral came from the mouth of his old foe. “Undoubtedly much is leaving with Václav Havel,” Klaus said. “At the same time, and in particular thanks to his consistent attitudes in life, there is much that is not leaving, and it is now incumbent upon us not to let it go. What is not leaving is the idea that freedom is a value worth sacrificing for, and that it is meaningful to engage in a struggle for truth, when one is convinced of it, even if it includes personal risks.” (A reader of Havel could not help but detect in Klaus’s eulogy echoes of the death speech delivered in his 1987 play Revitalization, conventionally translated as Redevelopment, an allegory about architects charged with the task of bringing an unplanned historic town in line with ordered modernity. “For only we can breathe meaning into this death by interpreting it as a challenge,” goes the sincere but self-deluded lament of the chief architect, Bergman—an exceptionally dubious character on Havel’s long roster of loathsome protagonists.)
It was left to Karel Schwarzenberg, Havel’s former chief of staff, to question the ways that the playwright’s own “struggle for truth” was, in death, being twisted to fit other agendas. His eulogy, which followed Klaus’s, was a deliberate answer to the current president. “Václav Havel, of course, knew that the word ‘truth’ can have a very narrow sense,” Schwarzenberg said. “He also knew that truth, seen in a narrow, self-centered way as the one and only truth, is the cause of discord and intolerance. That is why he took ‘Truth and Love’ as his motto, as only love can make us listen to the truth of another person, to the truth of others. Such love teaches us to be humble, and Václav Havel had more humility than we all do.”
‘Truth Will Touch Us’
Ever since the Czechs came together as a modern nation, the significance of the word pravda—truth—has been pitched to the life and death of Jan Hus, a Czech priest and scholar who sought to reform the Catholic Church a century before Martin Luther. “Truth … will prevail,” the last words Hus uttered before being burned at the stake, became the motto of the newly born nation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and are still inscribed on the presidential banner of the Czech Republic. While staring down the communist regime at the end of last century, Havel and his fellow revolutionaries took to the streets with the chant, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.” Unlike most of his compatriots, Havel knew firsthand of the martyrdom that came with speaking truth: in 1977, his mentor and fellow spokesman for the dissident Charter 77 movement, the philosopher Jan Patočka, died from a stroke following a protracted police interrogation.
Havel saw love and truth not just as political slogans, but as principles of everyday conduct. His ability to listen with empathy to people of divergent opinions allowed him to draw together disparate groups and individuals opposed to the collaborationist regime that enveloped Czechoslovakia following the 1968 Soviet invasion. The nonpartisan Charter 77 movement, which Havel unassumingly led, began as a defense of the right to freedom of expression— specifically, a defense of the Czech rock group Plastic People of the Universe, put on trial essentially for having long hair and being apolitical. In that campaign, Havel found a platform for everyone: when one person’s freedom is violated, everyone’s freedom is violated. Many of Havel’s associates at the time criticized him for reaching out to staunch communists, who, following a takeover by the more pragmatic members of the party, found themselves ostracized for their beliefs. Havel fundamentally disagreed with those beliefs, but some of the communists, such as the writer Pavel Kohout, became Havel’s closest friends. On the other hand, colleagues of a similar political persuasion who compromised themselves for the sake of career became “former acquaintances.” (For a generation that came of age in the 1980s, kariéra had become the Czech word tinted with the most negative of connotations.)
As his friend Schwarzenberg pointed out, love in this way allowed Havel the dissident leader to listen to the truth of other people and build a broad-based movement. But what did an abstract term like “truth” actually mean to Havel? His decades of published writings provide some answers.
“It has been eighteen years since The Memorandum was first staged. I have not read it since then,” writes Havel in a 1983 note on the opening of his play at Vienna’s Burgtheater.
The Memorandum is, of course, not a play about Czechoslovak history, but a broader parable that aspires to say something about the human being and society in general. It is, however, rooted in—what else than?—the experiences that its author had in this tiny part of the world into which he was born and in which he was destined to live. That he at the same time—without suspecting this—predicted the future is not the work of his clairvoyance, but issues from the very miracle of what we mean by art, literature, drama, in which the author is always only the medium through which—in certain fortunate constellations—something speaks that is beyond him: that is to say, truth. The author does not discover this truth; truth reveals itself. He only opens himself to truth’s revelation by serving his cause. He allows himself to be carried by its inner logic and does not attempt to brazenly dominate it. It is therefore not the gift of absolute confidence, but more of stunned resignation that gives us the chance that we will touch truth, or, to be more precise, that truth will touch us.
According to Havel, chance and humility determine whether an author will be touched by truth. The two coincide. Not only does a writer need to be blessed with “fortunate constellations,” he also has to be humble enough to surrender himself to chance, to give up the consistencies he imposes on his subject, to be instead “carried by its inner logic.”
Truthful art must also arise from experience. What Havel does not stress here, but what seeps through his early writings, is his belief in the authenticity of that experience. Havel the young playwright idealized the heroic artist who was uncompromising in deed, word, and character, living his life boldly, with a deep knowledge of self. (Not surprisingly, Walt Whitman was Havel’s poet of truth in his teenage years.)
Havel clarified what he meant by artistic authenticity in his 1957 remarks on Bohumil Hrabal, later to become one of the greatest Czech novelists, but at that time an unpublished writer. Hrabal had a law degree, but had gone on to work all sorts of industrial jobs—at a railroad, a steel mill, a recycling plant. Havel was among the first to discern that Hrabal was blazing a new path for other Czech writers to follow, and he credited it to Hrabal’s authentic way of life:
Hrabal is not a writer who lives a rich life so that he has something to write about, but, on the contrary, a writer who writes because he is living this life, and this life again and again urges him to write. Hrabal is an ordinary person who writes, not a writer who lives like an ordinary person…. What sets him apart from other railroad or steel mill workers is the intensity with which he lives his life…. And this intensity of existence demands that he be distilled to the grain [projadřovat, a neologism] through writing.… [Hrabal] is not a writer-spectator … not a social novelist … not a beatnik … not a Hemingway type who deliberately and at great expense seeks out dangerous, make-or-break situations so that he can verify in them the authenticity of art. He is a type of artist … who realizes all his singularity in the intensity with which he carries out his fate.
Havel, who was born into a family of daring and wealthy entrepreneurs penalized by the communist regime for their success, never had a chance to be an ordinary person. He was a child of privilege, a writer-critic at heart, propelled by circumstances into (not so) ordinary walks of life—in other words, precisely everything that Hrabal was not. But Hrabal’s intensity, a stark contrast to the timidity of the country’s establishment writers, made an impression on Havel and a few others of his generation. Twelve years later, when he had become an enemy of the communist state and public channels of expression were closed to him, Havel would recast himself as an ordinary (and herein lies a crucial difference) citizen who writes. The writer’s vision shaped—and fortified—the ordinary citizen seeking justice.
The Devil’s Truths
The conduit through which Havel opened himself to truth was absurd drama. In 1963, his play The Garden Party, hailed by critics as the first Czech absurd play, premiered at the avant-garde Theater on the Balustrade, where Havel then worked as a stagehand. In a postscript to the published play, Jan Grossman, the theater’s artistic director, explained the appeal of absurd theater:
Absurd theater unmasks evil in its wider context, as an evil that is more dangerous because it has become “ordinary.” It filters into life without warning, furtively; it works through, at first sight, trivial means—the habitualized template, stock phrase, convention, dogma.… Absurd theater is analytical, and, if you want, coldly diagnosing. By principle it does not provide solutions. But this adherence to principle, I would say, does not stem from the certainty that a solution does not exist, but more from the conviction that a solution will never and nowhere, by nobody and by no means, be given. If theater aims to be a physician, it does not want to cure through conventional recipes, but by confronting the patient in the most drastic way with his always feasible annihilation. Not to conjure this annihilation, but to prevent it.… It assumes the role of the devil’s advocate. It takes the devil’s side, so that it may uncover the devil “who has concealed himself.”
In Temptation (1985), Havel’s agonizingly personal variation on the Faustus legend, the devil hides in plain sight. Foustka, a scientist at a research institute, comes to suspect that Fistula, a limping pensioner, is actually a visitor from the netherworld—one clue is the old man’s stench. Fistula explains that he suffers from athlete’s foot, which he treats with sulfur, and on each visit to Foustka’s home ostensibly changes in and out of slippers, which he brings along in a paper bag. Foustka never fully accepts this explanation. Bit by bit he arrives at the conclusion that Fistula’s disturbingly detailed knowledge of his personal dealings is due to preternatural powers, rather than utterly mundane connections. Yet the true cause of Foustka’s eventual downfall is not the devil’s trickery, but his failure to recognize and hold onto the one true relationship in his life. He begins to suspect his lover Vilma, a colleague at the institute, of divulging details from earlier conversations to their boss, who is bent on destroying Foustka. By doubting Vilma’s loyalty, Foustka loses her, the game, himself.
In Havel’s plays, the devil deceives through truth. Characters fixate on the abstractions of various pedestrian “truths” while forgetting their moral obligations to themselves and other people. “These are all truths that have ceased to be human truths—somebody’s truths,” he writes in a commentary on his play Conspirators.
These are truths which are not the result of authentic human realization and of authentic human experience, and which are therefore also not existentially guaranteed by the credibility and identity of their carriers, and by their courage to stand behind them even when they are not in accordance with immediate interest. These are all simply deadened, conventionalized “truths in themselves”—that is to say, truths in which contact with reality has been replaced by something more important: contact with ideological convention.
For people who embrace these external truths, Havel continues, “life moves from the real world of human existence into the semifictional world of stock phrases.” In this politicized environment, “words do not serve reality; reality serves words.” Human communication deteriorates to become a soulless exchange of “ideological stands,” and the flesh-and-blood human being, Havel concludes, ultimately transforms into a “thesis.”
(While his analysis here drew from his experiences living under totalitarianism, Havel saw communism as only a particularly obvious incarnation of the kind of modern society that corrodes moral principles. Consumerist culture, too, was one of his targets.)
In Havel’s view, truth in its fullest sense does not reside in objective facts, or logical propositions, or political ideologies. It is deeply personal: a way of life that upholds the authentic parts of our identities. Love, in turn, is how we authentically relate to other human beings. It is therefore the foundation of truth, rather than a consequence of it. If we as individuals are not rooted in a stable core of belief and relationships, we become caricatures of human beings—not unlike the characters in Havel’s plays.
Their lack of a vital sense of self does not prevent Havel’s characters from seeking out other, ersatz versions of love and truth to sustain them. But these attempts only further their estrangement. In the 1968 play The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, Huml is an inveterate womanizer, married with a mistress and lusting after more, unable to be true to any one relationship. Like Foustka, he is a scientist, but he rejects the scientific validity of an experiment to isolate the essence of the human being. In Huml’s view, science cannot quantify the human heart:
And I am afraid that the key to a genuine comprehension of the human self does not lie in a better or worse understood complexity of man as an object of scientific inquiry, but only—and only—in his complexity as a subject of human approximation, because the infinity of our own humanity is so far the only thing that can—however imperfectly—approximate the infinities of others. In other words, the personal, human, unique relationship that arises between two human selves has been up to now the only thing than can reveal—at least partly—the enigma of those mutual selves, while values such as love, friendship, empathy, compassion, and the unrepeatable and unsubstitutable human resonance—or, conversely, dissonance—are the only tools that this human touch employs. Through everything else we can more or less explain the human being, but we can no more than partly understand it, and therefore, no more than partly comprehend it.
Huml understands that the only truth worth knowing about another human being must be found through love, and yet his flawed nature prevents him from doing so.
Havel the playwright also knew to take a break from serious truths, should they become an obsession. He poked fun at himself in his plays—for example, in Audience (1975), through his alter ego, Ferdinand Vaněk, a dissident writer forced to work at a brewery (Havel had worked for a year rolling barrels at a small-town brewery). The brewmaster promises Vaněk a better job if he will write reports on himself to the secret police in the brewmaster’s name. The absurd situation culminates in this exchange between the two:
Vaněk: Sir, I am really thankful for all you did for me. I appreciate it because I know how rare such a stance is today. You, as they say, pulled a thorn out of my heel. I really don’t know what I would do without your help. That posting in the storage room would be a bigger relief for me than you may think, but I—excuse me—I surely cannot report on myself—
Brewmaster: What reporting? Who the hell is talking about reporting here?
Vaněk: It’s not about myself—it cannot hurt me—it’s about principle! Out of principle I surely cannot participate in …
Brewmaster: In what? Just say it! In what can’t you participate?
Vaněk: In a practice that I disagree with.
(Short, intense pause)
Brewmaster: Hmm. So you can’t. In the end, you can’t. That’s great! Now you really showed yourself! Now you proved yourself! (He gets up and excitedly walks around the room.) And what about myself? You will dump me in this, won’t you! You will sneeze in my face! I can be an asshole! I can waddle through the mud, I am not important, I am only your typical brewery idiot—but his lordship, he cannot participate. I can dirty myself, so that his lordship may remain clean…. Principles! Principles! … You always have a chance, but what chance do I have? No one will look after me, no one is afraid of me, no one will write about me. I am only worth being the dung from which your principles grow, looking for well-heated posts for your heroism, and, in the end, being ridiculed for all this! One day you will return to those actresses of yours, you will be bragging there about how you were spinning barrels, you will be a hero, but what about me? Where can I go back? Who will notice me? Who will appreciate what I did? What do I have from life? What awaits me? What?
Havel recognized the privilege that set him apart, the talent that made him more than just an “ordinary citizen.” To the end of his life he railed against the dangers of an inauthentic, estranged existence: his last play, Leaving (2007), skewered the cloistered egotism of politicians.
The idea that so inspired the martyr Jan Hus and his fourteenth-century followers was the heretical realization that each human being has an intrinsic capacity to know what a just, free, and beautiful life is. Six centuries later, Václav Havel used the medium of absurd plays to explore what happens to a human being who rejects the guidance of this inner compass. That real people all too often come to resemble characters in those plays, while their author was catapulted by life into roles he had not scripted, “issues from the very miracle of what we mean by art.”
Correction, March 31, 2012: Revised several passages in the essay, to clarify and correct the descriptions of the plays Revitalization and Temptation, to remove a claim that Havel wrote the “truth and love” motto “in homage to Hus,” to insert a brief discussion of the anti-career sentiment of Havel and his generation, to correct the timeframe when Havel became an “enemy of the communist state,” and to improve a few word choices. We regret the errors.
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.
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