When Amabelle is following the tour guide, he remarks about Henry I that “He could be anywhere in this palace or nowhere here at all” (279). After following him, Amabelle lapses into her dream of Sebastien, telling herself that “I sense we no longer know the same words, no longer speak the same language” (283). These lines retain a certain echo, as a sense of identity or belonging in a place is ultimately determined in part by how well you are understood, and how well you understand those around you. Throughout the text, Danticat weaves bits of Haitian Kreyol, immediately translated, among the English. However, very few Spanish words appear, the most prominent of those being “perejil.” Why write a text in English centered around the dangerous prospect of mispronouncing a word? Why incorporate so many moments of translation between the creole and the language of the adopted country (the U.S.), but refrain from immersing the reader in the language of the perpetrator? The Parsley Massacre hinged on the pronunciation of a word, but ultimately, it also hinged on a shared and contentious history. History is not just a matter of “Famous men [who] never truly die” (280). Is Danticat attempting to reintegrate the memory of the “nameless and faceless” back into the historical record? Certainly.
But then why not make this a grand love story of Amabelle and Yves finding one another in the wilderness of the massacre? Why repeat “His name is Sebastien Onius” (282, emphasis mine). To what extent is existence tied to memory? But perhaps more importantly for this work, we must ask to what extent existence is predicated on recognition? The lack of recognition of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic—the lack of recognition of their right to be there—is what made the slaughter possible. While the Holocaust began years afterward, it is reminiscent of this more familiar genocide in that the killing is predicated on the denial of a group’s right to live on a particular patch of land. When Amabelle goes to visit Senora Valencia many years after the massacre, she thinks to herself “That she did not recognize me made me feel that I had come back to Alegria and found it had never existed at all” (294). But here, we find an important ambivalence—a coming to knowledge of the distinction between the land and the body—because it is not that Amabelle never existed, but the place where she was had never been. Restrepo is a consideration of perspective. Through variations in perspective in terms of person, cultural positioning, camera angle (particularly the rapid switches between aerial and on-the-ground), and placement in relation to actors, it considers how location changes what can be seen and how it is seen. I was particularly fascinated by the battle scenes in this review of the film. They bear many of the same hallmarks (tracer fire, explosions, crouching, etc.) as the battle scenes depicted in fictional films, yet there is also a distinct visual gulf. The men often stand fully erect behind the barricades, there is not as much fear on their faces (and in many cases, their faces are expression-free), and there is—in an odd way—altogether less energy than the battle scenes in the fictional works we’ve surveyed.
Certainly, this is a distinction between types of battles as well as a commentary on the routine nature (in some sense) of battle. Can it also be a commentary on the placement of the audience? As Phil lay remarked about Iraq in an essay for The New York Times, “If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that in the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means. We can do better.” His idea about the “failure of imagination” is important in terms of complicating our notions of the ethical boundaries between types of experience. While we by no means want to lay claim to the experience of combat simply because of a camera angle of a documentary we watched, in the same breath, we should also acknowledge our responsibility as citizens to imagine ourselves in different positions and how that positionality may affect our ethical stance on issues like war. Of course, the correct answer isn’t necessarily one opposed to combat, nor is it one in full-throated favor of military intervention. What can we gain from this imagining, though, if not a particular position? On one hand, in the case of Restrepo in particular, it could be the process of managing the existential realities of Afghanistan. In Klay’s “Money as a Weapons System,” Bob’s stance that “his was not to question why” is—I think—insufficient for most of us when we think of war. But the existential viewpoint—the conflicts exist outside of opinions on them—can open a line of inquiry about how to improve that reality. This can only occur, of course, by carefully looking at that reality and making the effort to imagine and understand. |
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April 2015
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