A Language older than Words Page 21

  Perhaps, once again, this is all displacement of responsibility. If I want to have goose stew, maybe I shouldn't rationalize, but just grab a hatchet and kill one. But I don't know.

  I killed the goose. After I warned him, he killed the wounded hen, then a rooster, then another hen. Still I hesitated.

  A few days later I returned from errands to find yet another hen dead, with the skin ripped from her skull. She looked as though she'd been scalped. The goose’s face was bloody, and blood flecked red across his white breast. I said to him, "That's it," and picked up a stick. I used it again to corner him. He must have known the stakes were higher this time, because he kept ducking under the stick and racing away. I finally caught him, and held his large body close, one wing trapped against my chest, the other under my right arm. I remember his eyes were wide, and I could see the black of pupil, blue of iris, white of fear, red of lid, white of feathers, and red of hen's blood.

  I dropped the stick, and on the way to the chopping block picked up the hatchet in my left hand. I laid down his head. He did not stretch it like the Pekin of so long ago, but held his neck in a tight S that afforded no room to strike. Finally, more through random movement than cooperation, he straightened his neck enough that I could hit it cleanly. I broke his neck, but did not cut all the way through; I struck again and his head came free. Blood exploded from his neck, his mouth gaped and closed, gasping for breath, his chest heaved, pushing air past taut vocal cords to give voice for the last few times of his already completed life. His wings moved hard against my breast and arm, and finally I released them to spread. Blood covered the block, and the dogs— who had long ceased hurting the birds—approached to lap it up. I hung him to bleed, then scalded and picked him. I eviscerated him and put him into the refrigerator to cool. The next day I would make a stew.

  That night my friend Julie Mayeda took me to dinner. We went to a Thai restaurant, where I ordered chicken and she seafood, and we both tried not to think about the lives represented in our meals. I couldn't get over the look in the goose's eyes. It wasn't so much the fright, but simply the knowledge in my own body that his eyes were now closed, his body now dead. His running as I chased him had been the last his feet felt of the ground that had always been his home, the hatchet descending was the last thing he saw. Julie and I talked of the existential confusion caused by someone's presence one moment and absence the next. The goose was here this afternoon, now he is not. All that remains is meat—no longer even flesh, really—in the refrigerator.Midway through the evening it occurred to me that this had been the hen's last day, too. Since I hadn't killed her, I felt myself not quite so existentially involved. I mentioned this to Julie, who responded, "But that's not right. If you ..." She trailed off.

  I nodded agreement to her unsaid statement. Neither of us spoke. We poked at the meat on our plates, the remains of some creature's existence. I said, "Had I killed the goose last week, the hen would be alive."

  "I didn't want to say that."

  "But..." I paused, and took a bite of chicken. "It's true." I realized I was responsible that day not for one but two deaths, one through the use of a hatchet, the other through inaction. By not killing the goose, I killed the hen as surely as if it had been me and not the goose who tore the skin from her scalp.

  The hardest part for me is always that moment of inevitability, the microsecond after the decision has been made, but before the hatchet begins to fall. At every moment up to then I can let go my hold on the bird, and allow her or him to return to scratch and peck at the dirt, but from that instant the bird, though still fully alive for the time it takes the blade to fall upon its neck, is as good as dead.

  I feel the same each time I hook a fish, and I felt the same the one time I had a deer centered in the sights of my rifle. It was standing in a thicket, and had I been able to discern antlers amongst the tangle of tiny boughs, my finger would have pulled the trigger, and that animal's life would have ended. It is an awful power to hold another's life in your hands.

  This morning I killed a baby goose. Born blind and deformed, it would never have walked. Before I killed it I cradled it in my palms, holding it secure so it could at least once in its life feel the warmth of the sun on the still sticky down of its back. Its head wobbled, and it cried as loud as it could, as loud as any just-born goose can. I stroked her or his neck, and said good-bye.

  When I was younger, I would turn off my feelings before I killed a fish, or a bird, or a grasshopper, or fly. I would look with almost disinterested eye at the bluegill on a stringer or the chicken on a chopping block. Something did stir, but it was too deep, and I knew also that if I allowed it to well up I would never go through with what I intended.

  I no longer go away—allow my body to become what Descartes called "a statue made of earth"—while my arm raises and brings down the hatchet. I know that the answer—to what question I've no idea—is not to shy away from death, or even from killing, and especially from feeling. Death is everywhere, and will seek me out no matter where I hide, now and again in the causing, and later in the receiving.

  This understanding came to me, oddly enough, when I was using the toilet. I realized that every time I defecate, I kill millions of bacteria. Every time I drink I swallow microorganisms, every time I scratch my head I kill tiny mites.

  Because life feeds off life, and because every action causes a killing, the purpose of existence cannot be to simply avoid taking lives. That isn't possible. What is possible, however, is to treat others, and thus ourselves, with respect, and to not unnecessarily cause death or suffering. This seems so obvious I'm embarrassed to write it, but it's so frequently and savagely ignored—consider factory farms, the mass rapes and child abuse endemic to our culture, the one hundred and fifty million children enslaved, ad nauseum—that I've no real choice.

  Viktor Frankl died yesterday. Although most famous for his book Man's Search For Meaning, in which he described his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz, and articulated his understanding that those who found meaning in their lives and in their suffering were better able to survive the horrors of the camp, I mention him because of something he said toward the end of his life: "There are only two human races—the race of the decent and the race of the indecent people."

  He is right, of course. To restate this in terms of this book's exploration: there are those who listen and those who do not; those who value life and those who do not; those who do not destroy and those who do. The indigenous author Jack Forbes describes those who would destroy as suffering from a literal illness, a virulent and contagious disease he calls wetiko, or cannibal sickness, because those so afflicted consume the lives of others—human and nonhuman—for private purpose or profit, and do so with no giving back of their own lives.

  There are those who are well, and those who are sick. The distinction really is that stark. Attending to this distinction leads again to the central question of our time, restated: How can those of us who are well learn to respond effectively to those who are not? How can the decent respond to the indecent? If we fail to appreciate and answer this question, those who destroy will in the end cause the cessation of life on this planet, or at least as much of it as they can. The finitude of the planet guarantees that running away is no longer a sufficient response. Those who destroy must be stopped. The question: How?

  On December 17th of 1996, members of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took over the Japanese ambassador's house in Peru and seized some 500 hostages. They released women and children immediately, and for humanitarian reasons released all but seventy-two of the remaining hostages over the next several weeks. Their primary demand for the release of the final group, which included several Supreme Court members, a former chief of Peru's secret police (responsible for the torture and murder of countless civilians), and regional executive officers for many Japan-based transnational corporations, was that imprisoned mrta members be freed.

  Because of my obvious interest in the relationsh
ip between unarmed and armed resistance to the violence of the culture, I spoke with Isaac Velazco, an MRTA member since 1984. In 1988, Velazco was arrested and beaten. He escaped, and fled to Germany.

  I asked him why the MRTA formed. He said, "Tupac Amaru formed because there is nothing resembling democracy for the majority of Peru's citizens. For the perhaps three million privileged Peruvians there is a democracy; but their democracy is our dictatorship, a continuation of the often irrational destruction that's been going on in Peru for five hundred years.

  "Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Peru was home to one of the most advanced cultures of America, where, with collective ownership of the means of production, the problem of hunger was solved. Yes, the Incas subjugated other peoples, sometimes violently, and they were sometimes met with violent resistance. But better scholars than I have shown that even the ruling classes showed respect for the land, and for children. They made sure everyone was fed through a sophisticated network of storehouses.

  Contrast that to today, when one hundred and eighty of every thousand children in Peru die of curable diseases before they're five, and adults die as slave laborers washing gold in the jungles of Madre de Dios. An FAO report suggests poverty will be eliminated in Peru before 2025, not because of improving conditions, but because we'll all be dead of starvation. Our country is turning into a huge concentration camp."

  I asked what the MRTA wants for Peru. He replied, "I am not sure what you mean. We are Peru. We want nothing from Peru. There are others who want plenty from Peru: our oil, wood, fish, gold. Our lives. Capitalism is taking away what is elemental to our lives: our land, rivers, forests are being violated by institutions and individuals who have deafened themselves to the meanings they have for us. The majority in Peru have traditionally lived by hunting and fishing, and small-scale agriculture, by growing bananas, manioc, and fruits. These people are not reaping the benefits—whatever they may be—of neoliberal 'development.' They—we—are being killed. We want to stop this annihilation of our people, and we want our people—the vast majority who are denied a voice in our so-called democracy—to be heard.

  "Truth, as someone once said, is revolutionary. This is one reason those in power routinely lie. The takeover of the ambassadors house, and the consequent attention focused on the appalling conditions in Peru's prisons, conditions which up to then had been for the most part ignored, points out that when those in power lie, the only way to conduct a meaningful dialogue with them is to have in your hands a way to force them to be accountable. Even then you can be sure they will remain true only so long as you continue to hold them tightly in your hands."

  I asked how he became politicized.

  "Because each of us is born into already extant political systems, we are born politicized: we each must either accept (sometimes by default) or reject the political system into which we've been born. Those born and raised farther from the centers of political power are less likely to be influenced by the entire politics of servitude and slavery.

  "I have long opposed capitalism and its effects on my people. I tried unarmed resistance, but soon grew to see that as useless.

  To witness the murder of one's comrades, without a weapon to defend themselves, is a quick way to be convinced of that approach's futility. Almost all MRTA members have had that experience, through the disappearance of their parents, the torture of their brothers, the rape of their sisters; others have suffered the violence in their own flesh, directly."

  If the government were to disappear, I asked, and the MRTA were to govern, what would they do? "Our goal is to build a society that respects the autonomy of each region. We'd continue our current program of respecting each village's grassroots organizations, we'd assist them in electing their own representatives, and together we'd develop the production of food and other necessities. We need to produce and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so."

  I asked whether writing helps bring about social change. "In our villages a high percentage of people do not read or write. But it's important that ones like you, who know how to do it, write so sensitive persons of the middle and upper classes may understand it's possible to live in a world where the lives—and the ways of living—of all beings are respected. This in no way implies it is incompatible to write and take up the rifle. Many poets and sensitive or conscientious intellectuals have done exactly this in Peru and other places."

  The standoff at the ambassador's house ended on April 22— Earth Day here in the United States—of that next spring. It ended the way stand-offs between "decent" and "indecent" people so often do: with the slaughter of the decent by the indecent. A single incident stands out: as Peruvian soldiers burst into the Japanese ambassador's residence, one of the MRTA members ran into the room where a number of the hostages were being held. He aimed his automatic rifle at them, stopped, stared, turned, and walked back out of the room. Moments later he was gunned down trying to surrender.

  I cannot get this image out of my mind. Again and again I picture him aiming the rifle, stopping just before the moment of inevitability, and walking away. I picture him dead. I can think of nothing that better illustrates why the world is dying, or rather being killed, and why the best, most heartfelt efforts of those of us struggling for justice and sanity so often end in betrayal, loss, and sometimes bloodshed—inevitably our own blood and the blood of those we are trying to protect.

  Something that should be abundantly clear by now is that while many of us enter into this struggle because we care about life and about living, the truth is that our enemies, those who are destroying life on this planet, the "indecent race," the cannibals, have shown themselves time and again to be willing, in fact eager, to kill to increase their power. It's that simple.

  The siege at the ambassador's house lasted a little over four months. During those four months prisoners seized by the MRTA played chess, gave and received cooking and music lessons, sang Happy Birthday to each other, and compared their imprisonment to "a cocktail party without liquor." On release, most of the prisoners the MRTA voluntarily let go shook the hand of Nestor Cerpa, head of the MRTA commando that undertook the action, and wished him well. Many asked for his autograph. After their release, some expressed solidarity with the MRTA. These expressions lasted long enough, and came in the face of a repressive enough government force, to make the Stockholm syndrome unlikely.

  During those same four months, members of the MRTA imprisoned by Peru continued their existence in "President" Fujimori's prison tombs ("President" is in quotes because, as often goes unreported in the corporate press, Fujimori disbanded the legislature, overturned the constitution, and enacted a self-coup in 1992). "They will rot," said Fujimori, "and will only get out dead." During those four months, Victor Polay—founder of the MRTA—and other prisoners at Callao Naval Base continued to be confined to tiny cells twenty-five feet underground; they were allowed to walk outside, hooded and alone, for thirty minutes each day. In those four months, prisoners in Yanamayo (12,000 feet) and Chacapalca (more than 15,000 feet, and an eight-hour drive from the nearest village) suffered bitter cold, once again in solitary confinement, in rooms with paneless windows. During those four months, more mrta members—or more

  likely peasants or Indians unfortunate enough to have caught the attention of secret police—were captured, tortured, and in at least one case, murdered. The survivors will probably be sentenced, by faceless military judges in trials lasting only minutes, to life imprisonment in these "prison tombs."

  During those four months, those responsible for the death squad killings of thousands of Peruvians continued to lead comfortable lives, their anxiety eased by a general amnesty issued June 16, 1995 by Fujimori, which quashed all investigations or indictments of human rights violations occurring after May 1980. The hostages released by the MRTA who expressed solidarity received death threats from Peru's secret police. At least one radio reporter who criticized the military was kidnapped and
tortured.

  In those four months, the Peruvian government, central to the region's drug trade, continued to traffic in cocaine; in 1996, one hundred and sixty-nine kilos of cocaine were found in the presidential plane, one hundred and twenty kilos were found in one Peruvian warship, and sixty-two in another. Also that year, Demetrio Chavez Petaherrera, one of the biggest drug kings in Latin America, testified in a public hearing that since 1991 he's been personally paying Peru's drug-czar Vladimiro Montesinos (an ex—CIA informant long linked to drugs, death squads, and the torture of civilians) $50,000 per month in exchange for information on United States Drug Enforcement Agency activities. A few days afterwards, Petaherrera was taken to Callao and tortured until he recanted. And Fujimori's brother, Santiago, his nephew, Isidro Kagami Fujimori, and other of his relatives continued to traffic cocaine through any number of dummy corporations. Some of the profits from this trafficking go to purchase black-market helicopters used to kill civilians.

  The children of Peru continued to starve, the forests continued to fall, and the fisheries continued to be depleted. In other words, Fujimori continued his policy of committing genocide and ecocide to benefit transnational corporations. In other words, it was business as usual in the civilized, industrialized world.

  Fujimori and the military, while pretending to negotiate in good faith, dug five separate tunnels beneath the compound. Two of the miners hired to dig the tunnels died, and the rest disappeared: their families have no idea what happened to them. Members of the security forces—trained in the United States at taxpayer expense, and wearing taxpayer-purchased flak jackets (one of their American instructors called the assault and subsequent massacre "money well spent")—prepared for an assault, and listened to the routine inside the compound through a pin-sized microphone smuggled in when a hostage requested a guitar (as well as microphones hidden in the chess set, and in other amenities brought in to help the hostages pass the time). The CIA helped Fujimori prepare the slaughter.