Recovering Humanity Amid Terror

When I first moved to Chicago, in November 1985, I came alone from Omaha. My wife, who grew up in Nebraska, chose to stay there until the fall semester was over. She was teaching across the river in the Council Bluffs, Iowa, public schools. I needed to settle in with my new job and find an apartment, after which we would move our belongings from Omaha. That happened in December. Jean house-sat for a carpenter friend in Omaha who vacationed in the winter until she too moved to Chicago in late January of 1986.

During those initial weeks, I stayed in a home owned by a widow in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the University of Chicago. She had a spare room to rent. We talked on a few nights as I got used to my new setting, and I learned she was Swiss but had emigrated from Czechoslovakia after World War II. She had married a Czech and was trapped with him in Prague after Hitler’s armies invaded Czechoslovakia.

In Switzerland, she presumably would have been safe. But one night, she told me, the Gestapo took her into custody because her failure to fly the Nazi flag outside their home raised suspicions. During the interrogation, they pulled out her fingernails, an absolutely excruciating torture intended to force her to reveal whatever they thought she knew about something or other, which she maintained was nothing. She simply had not flown a flag. Maybe it was a slow night for the German secret police in Prague. But the nightmare still haunted her in Chicago more than 40 years later. She seemed withdrawn and shy, telling me all this in a low but calm and insistent voice. Perhaps my willingness to listen, a trait developed as a journalist and interviewer, put her at ease about talking to me. I am not sure. It just happened.

After the war, and I don’t remember how, she found her way to the United States and was able to build a new life in Chicago. For her, this nation became a safe haven, an escape from terror.

The point of relating this brief story is that it made a huge impression on me. It made me acutely aware on a very personal level of how trauma shapes and distorts personality and lingers in the subconscious. I could not imagine reliving her experience. Just being a patient listener was deeply humbling. It is one thing to know of such horrors from a distance or from reading about them, quite another to sit across the kitchen table from a person who can share with you how she was subjected to them.

The world is still full of people experiencing such horrors even today. Certainly, the nightmare of the Russian invasion of Ukraine comes to mind, with all the trauma it will leave in its wake even if the Ukrainians succeed in defending their freedom from what clearly is now an insane regime in Moscow. There is also the war in Syria, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the list goes on. Many in America have a profound tendency to compartmentalize, to choose categories, such as white Europeans, with whom we will sympathize, and to exclude from consideration Africans and Latin Americans, for instance, even though the reality of their own suffering is often no less traumatic.

This reality has in recent days become very clear in Chicago, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in his remarkably callous fashion, added to his short list of Washington, D.C., and New York, as sanctuary cities to which he would dispatch unannounced busloads of migrants from the southern border with no preparation for their arrival, in order to protest federal border policy according to his own far-right vision of who belongs in America and who does not. In response, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has welcomed them and called for donations, but that alone will not solve the long-term problem.

With that in mind, a small volume atop a pile of book award submissions from five years ago kept calling to me. Busy with other work, I ignored it, but it would not go away. It sat there atop this small pile on the floor, perhaps getting more attention because I had not yet decided what to do with that pile. I was not ready to cull more books from my collection. That pile was a remnant from the last year I had served as a judge for the Society of Midland Authors book awards contest. It had not made the cut, and to be honest, I had scanned it at the time. There are too many submissions, and too little time, to read every book thoroughly. Each judge uses their own techniques to manage that problem, which can involve evaluating 70 to 100 books in some categories in a matter of two or three months. My approach was to scan the first 20 pages to see if the book absolutely captivated me, then to concentrate on thoroughly reading the smaller contingent that made the cut, so that I could give potential winners the attention they deserved. With three judges on each panel, we sometimes influenced each other, suggesting attention to something that one judge found particularly meritorious. It was a collaborative effort.

None of that means the books left behind did not merit attention. They simply did not make it to the final rounds. Think of it as a preliminary heat in an athletic competition.

So it was with Human Rights and Wrongs, a 111-page collection of true stories by psychologist Adrianne Aron, who lives in Berkeley, California, and somewhat accidentally found her mission in life. She is a go-to expert for lawyers seeking to document asylum claims for immigrants who have suffered more trauma than most of us could handle. Sometimes, they can’t handle it either, but somehow, they made it to the U.S. and are seeking mercy and refuge, which is not always granted. To protect them, Aron does not use their real names, but she conveys very real stories with the flair of an aspiring fiction writer. If only what she relates were fiction. But these are real people, and she displays a unique and very human knack for finding ways to unravel the real story behind someone’s plea for asylum despite layers of fear, emotional numbness, and very often, cultural misunderstanding and language barriers.

I will offer two examples. One involves a woman from El Salvador whose religious beliefs became the shield against reality that allowed her to avoid becoming detached from reality through post-traumatic stress. The other involves a Haitian man, arrested while defending himself from a drunken attacker, whose (mis)understanding of his rights in American courts was quite naturally molded by the rampantly unjust proceedings he had experienced in Haiti. Judges cannot (or should not) assume that asylum seekers see the world through the highly educated eyes of the social circles in which judges circulate. The need for a more diverse judiciary, in fact, stems in part from the frequent inability of privileged people to understand the world and experiences from which most refugees have emerged.

The Salvadoreña, whom Aron calls “Ms. Amaya,” was a simple mother from a rural community who had a story to tell, but her lawyers feared that, if she told it all, she would not be credible. Yet, not allowing her to tell her whole story would deprive her of the power to tell her own story as she knew it. It would continue the process of disempowering her that had begun in Central America when soldiers came to her house, accusing her of hiding arms of which she knew mothing. The soldiers took her to an army post, where she was gang-raped and tortured for four days before being released. She prayed to the Virgin Mary for salvation for her children’s sake and thanked her when it was over and she was still alive. As the detention wore on with other ordeals, she saw the hand of God in causing soldiers’ lit matches to go out when they threatened to set her on fire, and when their rifles misfired as she expected to be shot. But how could she know this was an intimidation tactic common in Latin America? It fell to Aron, the psychologist, to document the use of such tactics and to show that Ms. Amaya’s deep faith in divine intervention and mercy in fact protected her from the sort of deep psychological damage she might otherwise have suffered from confronting the reality of what was done to her. Religion gave her a belief structure that fit with her culture and afforded her some sense of divine protection.

Having helped make a successful case for Ms. Amaya’s grant of asylum, Aron also thought it wise not to mention in her brief that some of the oppressive tactics used by the Salvadoran military were actually consistent with those taught to visiting Latin American military officers by the U.S. School of the Americas. Challenging the judge’s world view might not have led to the best results for her client. Save that education for another day.

Reprinted from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonton_Macoute.

Louis Antoine was attacked by a drunk one day who stumbled into his path on the way out of a bar. As local police arrived, they saw him striking back. He ended up in the police car; the drunk walked away. Louis peed his pants from fear on the way to the station. After growing up in Haiti, being beaten by the Tonton Macoutes, the murderous gangsters who enforced the rule of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier when he was a child and who had killed both his mother and father, he expected nothing but the worst when hustled into the back of a police car. One obstacle to retaining the political asylum granted him earlier was that he did not understand what he had pled to in court and, speaking Haitian Kreyol, did not understand the proceedings. Nor did he understand that the purpose of the French translator sitting with him was to help represent him because he spoke only Kreyol, not French. Why had he not asked for translation into a language he understood? It was not his experience that the defendant was allowed to understand. In Haiti, the French-speaking elite simply handed down decisions to the less fortunate masses. Simply put, he was unaware of rights in America that he had never experienced in Haiti. The psychologist’s job was to explain all this, based on the horrific injustices that Louis Antoine had experienced in Haiti. The man had shown the resourcefulness to save money and find his way to the United States, seeking a better life, so it was not emotional inhibition or trauma that held him back, but lack of knowledge of how the system worked. It fell to Aron to document his history and make clear where the American system had failed him until she helped reframe his case.

Underlying these and several other poignant stories is the fact that Aron’s techniques were not simply a matter of professional expertise, but of her very human willingness to listen, to find effective interpreters, and to probe deeply enough to make sense of it all and restore voice and agency to people who had mostly experienced distance and disempowerment from those who determined their fate. The American system has the potential to dispense real justice, but only when staffed and supported by people willing to invest the time and moral imagination to make it work.

For that very reason, although the book is now five years old, every story it tells retains a powerful relevance to current circumstances. We remain a nation that must rise above its petty prejudices to bestow mercy and live up to the very promises that brought Aron’s clients here in the first place.

Jim Schwab

 

Hidden Treasures in Plain Sight

My mother was definitely a neatnik. Everything in its place, but don’t keep too many things in the first place. If something did not have an obvious use, get rid of it. A sentimentalist, she was not.

She lived her life in the suburbs of Cleveland, which is where I grew up. At the age of 29, however, I effectively “flew the coop,” a phrase I’ve hyperlinked for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with its usage. I moved to Iowa, took the helm of a public interest group, later transitioned to graduate school at the University of Iowa, and after completing my degrees, ended up in Chicago. The rest is history, both personal and professional.

That meant that, on occasion, my parents visited our home in Chicago, though I far more frequently visited family in Cleveland. On every occasion that I can recall, at some point she would look around and ask, “What do you want with all these books?” The obvious answer was that I have a voracious reading habit, which she mostly did not share. That made it difficult for her to fathom the extent of the collection, not to mention that most of the books held no attraction for her. Her firstborn had a depth of intellectual curiosity that was also hard for her to fathom, though it clearly drove my academic success, which she respected.

It’s not that the collection was messy. As needed, I have acquired and assembled bookshelves, and I keep the collection well organized. Unlike some bibliophiles, I give away some books that I cannot imagine using anymore; I believe in thinning the herd. My mother, who also was frugal, surely wondered how much all those books had cost. In truth, while I spend a modest amount on books, I have also benefited from my writing habit, something else that was a bit foreign to her, though she tried to understand it as entrepreneurial activity. That habit meant that, as a volunteer book awards judge over many years with the Society of Midland Authors, I received dozens of annual awards entries in either biography and memoirs, or adult nonfiction, the two categories I judged in various years. Judges are permitted to keep the submissions. Some were worth keeping; others, I gave away after the contest was over. Other books arrived as review copies, also complimentary. I have occasionally reviewed books on this blog, but have also done so in magazines and journals.

Shortly after moving to Chicago, I carried my mother’s tradition of frugality into uncharted territory by discovering that Powell’s, a chain of used bookstores, had the habit of putting discards on the sidewalk outside their E. 57th St. store and letting customers take what they wanted. At the time, I lived and worked not far away, so this was very convenient. I would flip through the pile to find what I considered hidden gems and take them home, quietly building my collection and sometimes immediately indulging in great finds. Like a bear drawn to honey, sometimes I also entered the bookstore to find something I was willing to pay for. Used books, often in good condition but cheaper, have exactly the same information as the new versions—imagine that! And unlike a used car, they don’t lose value. They just sit on the shelf, patiently awaiting their opportunity to expand your mind.

I must also acknowledge that my wife and I, on gift dates like birthdays and Christmas, often recognize each other’s reading interests with gifts. Jean’s tastes tend toward mysteries and spy thrillers and similar genres, on one hand, but also, since the rise of Donald Trump, toward the cornucopia of investigative journalism that has arisen in his wake. He is almost certainly the greatest focus of such political journalism since Watergate. My own interests are so varied that I must pose a challenge for her, but she often turns to environmental books and biographies as reliable pleasers. Her instincts about my interests are usually quite accurate.

By now, you may be wondering, after a few weeks of radio silence on this blog, why I am writing a paean to books, including old ones that may need the dust blown off before use. I will confess that recent events, both personal and professional, have kept me off balance enough to delay a new blog post. That is largely an incoherent story of distractions large and small and often unrelated and not worth relating. But the evolving circumstances induced me to spend more time reading, at a deliberate pace, books that I had previously put aside, books that have offered me a different way to see life and the world—even the universe—around me.

The point is that these are not brand-new books that just arrived on my doorstep. While I often may cite and hyperlink older works as sources for facts I use in blog posts on various topics, I have seldom centered whole discussions on them. But thank God they were sitting here because I am realizing some of them deserve attention in their own right, even if they are no longer “hot off the press.” One book, for instance, discusses in searing imagery the impacts of trauma on refugees seeking asylum in America. One hallmark of wisdom for any of us is to realize, no matter how much we know or think we know, how much more we can learn as long as the capacity is still in us. Much of that learning may come from books that in the past just never got our full attention.

So, don’t be surprised if I center a few articles in upcoming weeks and months on those very books, whether they are just three years old or ten or twenty years old, or even older. I will certainly be selective and purposeful about it, but I will give them their due while also discussing current issues and examining the new books that come my way. But I simply want to share the gems that have emerged from those back shelves. They are giving me a whole new motivation to learn and share.

Now, if someone could just come over and help me find that missing copy of Les Miserables . . . .

Jim Schwab

NO JOB FOR WALLFLOWERS

I have a team of friends and acquaintances whom I have put to work for the moment. All are experts on one or more aspects of floodplain management and disaster recovery. They all volunteered for the job because they care about those subjects deeply. I also regard them as a bit of a personal cheering squad, although their real job is to look at what I am proposing to write and give it the evil eye. I have asked them to review my draft outline for a book for which I am currently developing a proposal for a publisher. The topic is the big Midwest floods of 1993 and 2008. Already, they are responding by questioning my choice of an opening chapter, suggesting points I missed, and offering other advice. All that advice probably contains some really good ideas that will ultimately help me write a better book.

People think writing is a solitary act. It certainly can be. But it is not necessarily the perfect occupation for introverts, at least not the types of insecure, amateur writers who protect their manuscripts from criticism. I want to make clear, however, that I am not equating introversion with that particular brand of immaturity. I know plenty of people with tendencies toward introversion who are capable of accepting and even welcoming criticism, and some extroverts who are remarkably thin-skinned. My real point is that I deliberately recruited my critics to provide me with feedback on my outline, and later, I hope, the actual manuscript, by reaching out to them without fear of the critiques they may provide. I trust their sincerity, and I trust my own ability to discriminate between the various pieces of advice they will offer to determine which are useful and which are not.

One reason is that I do not intend to produce a scholarly work, although there will be scholarship in much of the research. It will not be a technical work, though there will be some technical explanations rendered, I hope, in plain English. It will be a book that requires the skill to construct a narrative that attracts readers who might not otherwise indulge in a book about floods. I hope to produce something that will be both educational and fun and fascinating to read. But I also want a book that is meticulous and accurate to a fault. They can help me with that, at the same time that they all know that I am attempting something they might find very hard, if not impossible, to do—mixing technical expertise with solid narrative story telling. Beneath all the mud and the flood waters lies one hell of a story about the human race. And I regard unearthing that as my forte.

A long-time lawyer friend, Steve Kerschner, who died much too young just over seven years ago from lung cancer, once asked me how such a compulsive extrovert as I seemed to be could be an author who had produced two substantial books in addition to numerous articles. Steve claimed to be an introvert, though when he talked a blue streak on a subject that excited him, he could have fooled me. But sometimes that tendency is the perfect foil for an introspective personality. Steve was an attorney diverted from theology, whose shelves were crammed with books on philosophy by the likes of Kant, Descartes, and Nietzsche. He was genuinely puzzled because I struck him as a paradox. All that work on a 500-page book on the environmental justice movement must have kept me pinned to my computer for hundreds of hours, and how could any extrovert stand to sit there working alone for so long? Steve was not asking out of idle curiosity. He wanted to understand.

Have you ever looked at the appendix at the back of Deeper Shades of Green? I asked him. He said he had not, so I showed him. It listed every person I had interviewed for the book, more than 300 of them, in alphabetical order and with any organizational affiliation that was relevant. There’s your answer, I told Steve: I networked relentlessly. After getting to know one person who might be useful to the story, I would learn from them of five others worth talking to, and I would be down the street or across town finding them, getting their perspectives to round out the story. Sometimes it was almost too much information, and not everyone who helped could get recognized in the narrative for his or her contribution. Sometimes, as Hemingway famously said, you must kill your darlings. He was referring to a writer’s tendency to protect those precious lines or paragraphs that seem so clever that you don’t want to excise them from the manuscript, even if you are not already blind to the ways that they hurt your story. For the extroverted writer who interviews everyone who fails to escape his attention, it can also be a matter of realizing that, no matter how fascinating the interview may have been, the person may not fit neatly into your narrative. You can’t include everyone, but you can learn from them all, and most will somehow enrich your perspective, sometimes in ways you don’t immediately recognize.

And so it is, for this extroverted journalist and author, in recruiting a team of advisers to dissect my plans for this new book, a project I have not even started, for which I have not even completed a full proposal or acquired a publishing contract, though I am sure I will. There is no reason to fear input, no reason to be offended if someone is not overly impressed by my initial conception of what the project should be. If I am capable of producing a quality book at all, then I should be able to sort through all their suggestions, assessments, and objections, even the ones that contradict each other, decide objectively which ones are most useful for advancing my project, and set to work incorporating those ideas into the book, and making them my own.

Now, who was that English writer who said no man is an island?

 

Jim Schwab