Memories of Namibia, Vol. 1

The first installment of a continuing series.

I am scheduled to meet a Russian-born Canadian graduate student in downtown Windhoek on a clear Saturday in mid-March. The city, as it always is on weekends, is eerily quiet, abandoned. I wait in front of the post office on Independence Avenue, directly across the street from Post Street Mall.

She arrives. We start to walk towards a restaurant where we will eat a late lunch. A new arrival to Namibia, she starts asking me questions about the names of the streets. “Why is there a street named after Fidel Castro?” she asks. I give what is probably an overly long answer on the complicated history of Namibia’s movement toward independence. She seems disinterested.

“The contrast of street signs here is so weird,” she finally says. “Earlier today I was standing on the corner of Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela avenues. It was like I had one foot in heaven and the other in hell. One is an angel, the other is a devil.”

When she says this I think to myself: “Such ideas are exactly why the West keeps fucking Africa up.” But I say nothing.

Lessons Learned

I was thinking the other day about where I was ten years ago. I had been in a poetry program at New York University for six weeks and was ready to quit. So I packed my stuff into a U-Haul and moved to Cooperstown, New York, where I lived in an apartment above a hair salon and worked first as a laser engraver of baseball bats, then as a data entry “specialist” for a health care company, then finally in the job I wanted, as a researcher at the Baseball Hall of Fame. I stayed in Cooperstown about 14 months, during which time I got engaged to my wife. I remember the agony of loneliness of those 14 months, when I lived most of the time by myself, in a place that seemed like it was in the middle of nowhere. I wanted very much to get married, and spent the last couple months in Cooperstown counting down the days to my December wedding. I was 23 years old at the time, unsure of who I was or what my place was in the world.

Not long before moving to Cooperstown, I watched a film, Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, that immediately seared itself into my consciousness. The effect of the film–a meditation on love and hatred, life and death, was to make me feel the same urgency that Rilke felt when he wrote, “You must change your life.” I was thinking about that film again the other day…I want to watch it again, to see what effect it has on me now, ten years later.

Nine years after leaving Cooperstown, I find myself once again counting down the days to when I can go “home”–29 left as of this writing. This past week, walking around the streets of Windhoek, I felt as if things were starting to slow down, or rather, that I was slowing them down in order to catch them, because time is once again running short, although it still feels that I have a long way left to go. As I have said to some friends, the time I have left would be a long time if I were serving it in solitary confinement in prison, but a short time if I had to write a book. It is all relative. And to be honest, my current life here seems like a combination of those two states, as I spend much of my time alone in my flat, but work during the days at a feverish pace to get as much as I can out of the archives.

I just had to finish writing my “final report” for the Fulbright program, the one where I put together a few pithy paragraphs about how my time in Namibia has fundamentally altered the future course of human civilization, and so forth. I wrote what I imagined the Fulbright bureaucrats wanted to hear, selecting out those elements of my stay that would appeal to their sense of the Fulbright program’s mission. Here instead I will write what I think are the most important things I have learned during the course of the past nine months.

1. I am now a much more self-aware person. I know much better what makes me angry, what makes me sad, what brings me peace, what matters to me, what does not matter to me. I am not perfect in this regard, but if nothing else the passing months have been a crash course in figuring out things about myself that I probably should have learned long before turning 32.

2. When I am faced with a challenge, I usually find a way to overcome it. There were a lot of small things I learned how to do this year–operate a stick shift, drive on the other side of the road, cook for myself, learn another language, ask difficult questions to people I don’t know. Growing up I’m sure most people who knew me would have described me as a very shy person. While I am still reserved and often quiet in social situations, I don’t think the term “shy” applies to me any longer.

3. I don’t do well with manipulative people. As a foreigner in a poor country, people are frequently trying to manipulate you into helping them in ways both large and small. Some of this is innocuous, like the boys outside the grocery store who ask you to buy them a loaf of bread, but others are more insidious, and the encounters I’ve had with these people–both personal and impersonal–have not gone very well because I’m not very good at saying no, at drawing boundaries, even when I know that I am being manipulated.

4. Life can become too difficult; too chaotic. I think for the last several years I have tried to invite more chaos into my life, but the emotional pounding of the last year has been off the charts in many ways. In September 2008 my daughter had difficult brain surgery. In October she was out of school and in intensive physical therapy trying to recover from that surgery. In November I was cramming for my comprehensive exams. In December I passed them and then found out my wife was pregnant. In January I left for Namibia. I never really had a chance to catch my breath, to figure things out, to put myself back into a “normal” frame of mind. I came back to the States for two weeks in September to witness the birth of my son, then got pushed back onto an airplane for another two months here. At some point, all this just gets to be too much. I now understand how much there is to be said for the comforts of home. I don’t think I’m going to domesticate myself anytime soon, but I definitely now understand that you have to work harder in life to achieve a balance between the crazy and the routine.

5. I have learned a hell of a lot about corporal punishment, torture, and domestic violence. But that is the subject of my research, and maybe I will try to summarize some of my thoughts in a future post.

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

Abortion in a Country Where It’s Illegal

Like a number of other African countries, abortion is illegal in Namibia, from the moment of conception through the ninth month. In this respect it is virtually the exact opposite of the United States, which has some of the most permissive abortion laws in the world. Observing the frequency with which abortions do occur here has furthered some of my own insights on the relationship between abortion and law, and also on the nature of gender relationships here in Namibia.

Despite its illegality, abortion is very common in Namibia, and likely has been for centuries. Most of the interviews I have conducted here deal with the punishments of crimes in the past, and one story that is often related is how, in the time before colonialism (and some maintain, after colonialism began as well), unmarried girls who became pregnant would be taken out to the forest, wrapped in straw, and then burned alive. Given the existence of such extreme penalties for unwelcome offspring (another precolonial tradition demanded the murder of newborn twins, who were a bad omen for the community), it is unsurprising that women developed the knowledge necessary to abort fetuses. For much of the twentieth century women went to traditional healers for homeopathic remedies that could be quite dangerous to the life of the woman. Reports from district surgeons for the South African administration, dating from the 1930s, describe the deaths that frequently resulted from the application of these methods. Nonetheless, the colonial administration stiffened penalties for abortion. Aside from whatever moral objections they may have held to the practice, the growth of the African population was also essential to the wealth of the colony’s white settlers, who relied on Africans as cheap labour for farms, mines, and railroads.

As Meredith McKittrick has observed in her own work on Namibia, the greatest change that occurred here in the twentieth century was undoubtedly the development and spread of Christianity, to the point where today perhaps 95 to 98 percent of the country’s population is Christian (there is an extremely small Muslim community here that does seem to be growing, however). Among other things, Christianity brought with it the religion of “development” and “technology” and the esteem with which traditional healers were once regarded has gradually abated over the years. Though some women continue to go to traditional healers for abortion remedies, other practices have taken hold.

During the last nine months that I have stayed here, I have heard much gossip about abortion among the Namibian women I know. In cases of unwanted pregnancy, extreme measures are often used. Some women will swallow shards of broken glass, others will drink toxic housecleaning substances in order to induce themselves. These drastic measures seem to be the most popular in rural areas. Here in Windhoek, there is a lucrative underground supply of abortion pills, RU-486, which are easily smuggled into the country from South Africa, where abortion is legal (and where some Namibian women go to have abortions done legally, although this kind of travel is too expensive for most people in this country). The pills sell for the equivalent of around US $75. The women who purchase them take them home, swallow them, and “bleed out” the pregnancy. This, too, can also be dangerous, because there is absolutely no medical consultation or supervision of the procedure.

A few years ago a member of Parliament tried to introduce legislation legalizing abortion in Namibia, but the public outcry forced her to withdraw the suggestion. There are thus no statistics on the frequency of abortion here. My best guess would be that the figure would rival the percentage of pregnancies which are aborted in the U.S., and perhaps surpass them. The law is, and always has been, manifestly incapable of preventing abortion from occuring. From my vantage point, it seems clear that the primary effect of keeping abortion illegal is not to prevent abortions, but rather to criminalize women’s sexuality and to endanger women’s lives. It is an effort by men to exert control over female bodies, although it is necessarily a partial failure in this regard, as men are, as they have always been, incapable of stopping the practice from occurring.

It would be nice to leave the matter here and not attempt to apply anything that I have written to the heated debate over abortion in the U.S., but one thing I have definitely realized this year is that we Americans can’t help but take anything occurring in the world and attempt to force it into our own cultural discourses. What I will say is that some of what I have written is likely inapplicable to the United States, which as an industrialized, wealthy nation with a much different religious and social history has its own internal gender dynamics. I would also point out that if abortion is so prevalent in a country where it has never been legal, and where the technology, equipment, and expertise necessary to conduct safe abortions have never been present, how do abortion foes in the United States, where the practice has been legal for over a hundred years (if you count both the post-Roe years and also the time before the mid-nineteenth century, when abortion was outlawed), and where the technology and knowledge necessary for conducting abortions is so common, expect the law to prevent abortions from occurring? Is their goal to reduce the number of abortions, or is it to have the law inscribe their own system of morality?

Living Permanently in a Temporary Place

I woke up Wednesday morning this week with an acute stomach virus that has put me out of commission for most of the past four days. The worst of the virus passed in a day, but was severe enough to make me think I had contracted dysentery or some other exotic illness that once sent European colonizers to their graves. It wasn’t that, but it was bad enough to land me in bed for much of the past 96 hours, a perch from which I have had ample opportunity to stare at the interior of my bedroom: the white ceiling with brown wooden planks, the white cabinets, the brown curtains, the clothes strewn along the top of the chair, the laundry basket, the rickety white fan.

The room is very white. It occurs to me that I have never really tried to make it my own. I have been living here almost nine full months, and yet still I look at the top ledge of the closet and see the suitcases and backpacks I hauled with me when I first reached Namibia on January 14. All this time they have just been sitting there, waiting to be filled again when I go home.

Home: it seems such a strange concept at the moment. When I was “home” for two weeks last month, I felt as if I was staying in a nice bed and breakfast, with comfortable pillows, hearty meals, and warm smiles. Back here in Windhoek everything feels very impersonal and modernist, in a dated, 1970s kind of way. To add to the impression, this week–when I have been well enough–I have passed the time watching Ingmar Bergman’s 1970s television miniseries Scenes From a Marriage, in which the two main characters gradually peel away all the layers of conformity, normalcy, and politeness until they reach a solid core of anger, fear, and longing. And now as I type this, I find myself listening to avant-garde free jazz from, you guessed it, the 1970s. An astounding array of instruments parade across my eardrums–flutes, drums, electric bass, saxophones, trumpets, cymbals, etc. It barely holds itself together. This is my African experience.

What I have come to realize is that my experience in Namibia, which officially ends November 16th, a date that still seems endless lifetimes away from now, has been a profoundly interior one. I have made a few friends. I have traveled much of the country. I have worked. But I have also isolated myself, to greater and greater degrees, the longer I have stayed here. This is why, I think, this blog has moved from relatively frequent communication to increasingly infrequent, discordant missives. The experience has become so interior, so personal, that I do not think I will ever be able to communicate its significance to anyone. In that sense, perhaps, this has been something like a spiritual journey, but one that must remain unresolved.

It is not that being in “Africa” is somehow uniquely unsettling or incomprehensible. No, people here are in many ways a lot like people everywhere else, allowing for any number of cultural idiosyncracies. (And I include in this group, by the way, the people of the “North” who live in extreme poverty and relative isolation from the lightning-fast communication that now defines the rest of the world.) I think, in the end, my interior journey would have been very similar had it occurred in Russia, or Sweden, or Brazil, or any number of other countries. It has less to do with where I am, and more to do with the fact of distance itself: the many, many thousands of miles that separate me from my six-year-old daughter, my one-month old son, and my wife. In retrospect, this trip was really a reckless and stupid thing to do. It was also probably selfish. But second-guessing this path would be like regretting the setting of the sun in the evening. Because when I analyze my life up to this point–and I’ve had a lot of time to do just that over this year–I realize that a lot of things led me to this point, brought me here, showed me this.

I know that Fulbrighters staying in Africa are supposed to project back home a sense of excitement and adventure: the eager young scholar wearing cargo pants and a safari hat as he studies the mating habits of rhinos, or the selfless law student journeying into the dirt and grime of the urban township to expose the plight of HIV on orphaned children. I wish I had pictures to show you of me standing in a huge, empty landscape, golden plateaus of ancient rock gleaming in the dying sun, or likewise, images of the white American Christ come to lay his hands on the sick and the lame of the Third World. But I’m far too world-weary a person for that. Instead what I can offer is this image of me, here, sitting at my kitchen table, listening to jazz music, expelling a quotidian virus from my system and ruminating on my blog, the aphorisms of Bergman still echoing in my skull.

Back Again

When I started this blog at the beginning of 2009, just before I left the U.S. for a ten month jaunt in Namibia, I imagined it would be something that other people would want to read: a blog about a remote corner of Africa, scarcely inhabited. I would fill posts with useful anecdotes and observations about life, politics, and culture. In short, it would capture a small piece of a nice little adventure.

Well, I’m now more than eight months in, with less than two months to go, and “adventure” strikes me as a disgusting word for reasons I can’t quite specify. I am writing this post on my laptop in my flat in Eros Park. It is well past midnight here, but I don’t feel like going to sleep. I’ve been spending the after-hours surfing the web, doing a little work, but yeah, mostly surfing the web. I am listening to jazz music right now. It vaguely lightens my mood, but mostly I feel depressed and homesick. In the time I have been gone, my 5-year-old daughter has finished her year in kindergarten, started the first grade, and next week is going with her grandparents to Disney World. My son is now almost three weeks old, being cared for by his mother, my wife. In the next two months I will miss my daughter’s sixth birthday, and my wife’s 32nd birthday.

I suppose at this point it is customary for me to say that these sacrifices are in the name of some noble cause…providing malarial nets for poor children or helping people with HIV. But here in Namibia I do neither of these things. I spend a lot of time in the archives. I look at dusty old documents about insignificant court cases that are sixty, seventy, eighty years old. When I am outside of Windhoek and in the north, I walk into people’s homes and ask them strange questions about physical torture, fear, and death. I record these conversations and type out the words that were spoken later. I think some of the people I interview are amused by me, but many seem genuinely frightened. This is sometimes only apparent afterwards, when you listen back again to the interview, and hear the hesitation that creeps into the voices of the people speaking. Today I was listening back again to an interview I conducted with an eighty year old woman last month. She was doing fine with my questions for the first 10 minutes or so, but then (and this escaped my attention at the time) her granddaughter, sitting in another room, started shouting to her that she should shut her mouth or otherwise I would have her killed. I only heard this later, on the tape. After that the old woman’s demeanor changed noticeably: her answers grew more reluctant, short, evasive. She sensed danger. While I was cycling through my usual list of questions, she was probably wondering what I might have done to her if she answered me in the wrong way.

There are lots of sophisticated ways to interpret an encounter like this one, and I am sure I could faithfully recite most of them. But it’s bullshit. The granddaughter was actually an ignorant girl who needlessly frightened her grandmother for no reason other than that I was a white man asking questions. I’d say that this attitude is a legacy of colonialism, but this girl would have been born after the last South African tanks left her region. There are virtually no white people living anywhere near her. What she knows about me is based on ignorance, rumor, and fear. Thinking about it now makes me angry, not because it ruined an interview, because I have plenty of those, but rather because this sort of thing exists in the world and is far too common. I mean, really. What has the world come to when a tall white guy can’t go around an African village and ask people about corporal punishment without being regarded as suspicious?

Oh, right. The world came to that a long time ago. We’re just living in the aftermath.

To get back to the “sacrifice” I have made for this research: I knew when I undertook this journey that I wanted things to be hard. But I am now getting to the point where I want them to be easier again. I wanted to research something that causes most other people to look away. I wanted to stare at something that makes other people uncomfortable. I think I’m reaching the point now where I’m ready to start looking the other way again.

About this radio silence…

So I just realized that I haven’t posted anything on this blog at all for the past month, not since I recounted my experience of killing a goat. I have been wondering to myself why this is the case and I think the best answer that I’ve been able to come up with is that, six months into my stay here (and with 4 1/2 months left, which will not be enough time to do all I need to do here), I no longer regard this experience as some sort of adventuresome travel through a “Namibian landscape.” It now just feels like my life; things that I regarded as strange or worth noting down a few months ago now pass by me without much thought. In fact, I am sure that I will need a blog to capture my feelings when I return to the United States this autumn, as by then the “American landscape” will seem like a much bigger mind-fuck than the Namibian one I now inhabit.

Regarding my research, I am now starting to think that there is a story worth telling here, a story about corporal punishment, torture, violence, abuse, scandal, and “power” broadly defined, in the Foucauldian sense. The story is built off fragments–a note jotted down with pen and paper by a South African administrator 70 or 80 years ago, an aside uttered during an hour-long interview conducted a few weeks ago–so that the “archive” for this research is extremely unstable and flimsy. That is the way I want it because I have always regarded history as more art than science. As I progress my own inadequacies loom larger: the languages I don’t know, the perspectives I don’t know how to see, my own clumsiness in talking to people about punishment and pain. What’s more, my own almost pornographic fascination with the human body, contorted in pain, has made me wonder if perhaps I am just some sadistic fuck who has lost his way. I try to remember why I started this business in the first place. I wanted the opportunity to teach and the opportunity to write. I wanted the things I wrote to matter, not in the popular sense that they would appeal to many people, but in the narrower sense that those who read what I wrote would be affected by my words. I didn’t want to produce another boring monograph about gender, agency, or resistance. I wanted to discard the assumptions that guide so many works on Africa, that guide them still even as the authors claim to be subverting them: that there is a binary distinction between the colonizer and the colonized, resistance and appeasement, white and black, tradition and modernity, and so forth.

But that’s sort of a boring historiographical argument. What I really wanted to do was to write about something that makes other people want to turn and look the other way. You know, after you reach the point where you think there is nothing left to say, where there is a well of nausea growing in your throat…I wanted to be the asshole who asked the next question.

Do I still want these things? Yes, I think so, although I have a harder time now placing it within the arc of some career in academia, regurgitating nonsense to a seminar of bored undergraduates sexting each other in a lecture hall. No, that’s not quite fair, because I’ve had good experiences teaching in the past. You find a face that is friendly and eager to learn and you teach to that person. You let them know that the world isn’t about marking attendance and it isn’t about worrying about what’s written on the syllabus. You act like you don’t give a shit about those things because you don’t give a shit about those things.

I just finished Season 3 of the Wire–my nightly escape from living alone in a foreign country far from home–and I feel more and more like Bunny Colvin, sick and tired of the bullshit that infests every institution in the world. I’m not exactly sure how that relates to anything, but it seems to. The immediacy of the interviews I’ve done and the documents I’ve looked at in the past few months defies everything that I was taught to look for in assessing history. The usual signposts are gone, the language that might be used to describe what I’m studying appears trite and ridiculous.

In a little more than a month I am slated to give a public lecture at the National Archives of Namibia on my research topic. I have no idea what I’m going to say. Maybe I will just bring my epokolo with me and start flogging people until the police come and arrest me.

If the tone of this post is rambling and somber, I apologize. Living now in the southern hemisphere, I am going through my second winter in six months. It is cold here at night and it gets dark very early. It has been surreal keeping in contact with friends back in the States, watching fireworks, barbecuing, and generally getting along like it’s the middle of summer or something.

Animals Are Passing From Our Lives

So my three week trip to the northern edge of Namibia came to an end on Saturday, after I had collected 26 interviews, several omapokolo, and perhaps 100 photographs. The north surprised me in a number of ways, but I was most struck by the great tall Makalani palm trees that grew everywhere near eeshana filled with water from the seasonal flooding earlier in the year. Now Namibia has passed into its winter, and though temperatures here in Windhoek dip down near freezing overnight, in the north the air remains pleasantly mild and dry. The endless flat landscape also presents a contrast to hilly Windhoek, but the comparative surplus of people in the north, crowded as it is with countless villages that spill off the main highways along sandy roads, makes the “rural” north feel surprisingly more congested than Namibia’s only urban center.

But enough with my faux-imperial word paintings. What I really want to write is that, on my second Sunday staying at the Mahapu homestead in Omusheshe, I slaughtered a goat. I didn’t have to do it; but the opportunity was offered to me and I could not say no. I had never killed a mammal before, and of course until last year I had lived as a strict vegetarian for some five years. But the midday saw me with knife in hand, waiting for my opportunity. The goat (pictured above) was tied to a tree. He seemed to understand that he was soon going to die, and he was very afraid, baying loudly for help. For some reason I had the thought that I should comfort him. I walked over and stroked the fur on the top of his head and neck, and told him that I was sorry for what was about to happen to him. But the truth was I did not know what was about to happen to him.

Three boys staying at the homestead came and untied him from the tree. He was dragged over to the center of a small courtyard and forced to lie down on his side. Then someone explained what was going to happen: because the goat was an uncastrated male, they would have to cut off his penis and testicles before he died. The reason for this, I was told, was that otherwise he would start pissing all over the place when the knife went through his neck. The logic of this order still does not entirely make sense to me, but the boys seemed sure of the need to do it in this way. I was told not to start cutting his throat until his genitals had been removed.

So it turns out that goats don’t like to have their balls cut off. As soon as the knife starts removing the penis they scream quite loudly. It took the boys 30 seconds to remove the genitals entirely, and then I was told to begin killing him. I repeated to him (but really to myself) the words that I had heard my friend Rachel say before we killed two chickens earlier in the year: “I am sorry my friend but you are not mine.” Then I started cutting.

I would have thought that one could kill a goat very quickly by slicing his throat open, but the truth of the matter is that it takes a long time, no matter how deeply you cut. I would guess I was cutting for at least one minute, maybe two, before my knife could go no further. And still, STILL, the goat could be heard trying to get air into his lungs which were quickly filling with blood. I distinctly remember looking at his eyes while this was happening. He looked quite dead but the breathing sounds continued for a good 30 seconds more before they finally lessened and then stopped altogether. Once he had stopped breathing, one of the boys, who was holding my camera, asked me to smile next to the goat’s dead body. I refused, saying, “No, this is serious. This is not a joke.” My hands, arms, and part of my face were covered with the blood that had spurted out as I had cut through his neck.

Then we started taking the goat apart piece by piece. In villages such as Omusheshe, every part of a slaughtered goat is used: the brain, stomach, intestines, heart, kidneys, liver and more are all eaten. The skin is used to make blankets, mats, rugs, or wall coverings. The testicles are used to make the handle for a tool. Nothing is wasted. We took about 20 minutes to skin the goat, hack off his limbs, saw off his head entirely, and empty out his bowels. Finally, when we were nearly finished, and the goat was laying in bloody pieces in front of us, I joked, “Maybe we should take him to the vet to see if they can save his life.” The boys laughed, though one of the youngest then said, very seriously, “I think he is now in heaven.”

I moved away from the carcas. As I stepped back, I accidentally landed on the paw of a dog who had been watching us. He squealed in pain. I apologized profusely to him.

A Depressing Day

So this blog has been rather quiet recently, owing to my family’s visit here in Namibia during the month of April. My wife and daughter returned to the United States last Tuesday, and I spent most of the rest of the week mulling over my loneliness at their departure and then enjoying Namibia’s four-day weekend. Yesterday I got back into the research groove a bit, returning to the archives for the first time in too long, and making calls and doing some shopping to prepare for my first extended trip to northern Namibia, which should commence this Sunday and last for perhaps three to four weeks (and thus will produce another extended blackout from this blog). They say that once you pass through Oshivelo on the way to the far north, you enter “real Africa” in Namibia, as opposed to the “Africa for Beginners” that Windhoek provides. People here speak of the “north” as if it is a very different country, and in a way it probably is, as it is separated from Windhoek and the other towns of the central highlands by a kind of “thirst belt” that gives way to the floodplains of the far north, and places one in very close proximity to Angola, and all that implies for the imagination. My landlord asked that I text her at some point during my stay in the north, just to reassure her that I haven’t been abducted by “Angolan rebels.”

Yesterday at the archives I felt a renewed sense of energy over the possibilities that my research offers, combined with a reminder of my own limitations over the languages and dialects I still do not know. Namibia’s diverse linguistic landscape can truly humble someone from a monolinguistic culture such as the United States. The other day while in a fast food joint in Klein Windhoek I noticed that there were at least five languages being spoken simultaneously by the staff, and only one of them, English, would be familiar to 99.99 percent of the American population (or the European population, for that matter).

But when I left the archives yesterday to grab some lunch downtown I found myself thrown back into the reality of poverty that peeks out from the bushes from time to time. I was in a King Pie hoping to get some food when I was confronted by two half-starved young boys sitting on the floor by the door. The moment they saw me they started plaintively wailing, in harmony: “Please sir, just some change. We are so hungry. We have not eaten for days. Please sir. Please.” The line for service at the King Pie was long and they were out of chips, so I just handed over my change to the two boys and left. Later I went to a hot dog stand to grab some food, and there met a young man I had become friends with during my first trip to Namibia three years earlier. Back then he had been a young, bright-eyed student, quick to laugh. Now he is an unemployed college graduate, bitter, living in a dilapidated shack in Ombili (the Oshiwambo word for “sorry”), which is one of the poorest sections of Katutura. I took him out for some food at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, after which we took the remainder of our meal to the Windhoek jail, where a relative of his has been staying for the past seven months awaiting trial on some charge or other that was not clear to me. The jail was an unpleasant place as well: impatient guards, poor conditions, a chaos of people coming and going. Yes, it was an ugly place.

My main impression of Namibia nearly four months into my stay here remains that this is a place of profound disconnections. The beautiful manicured gardens and electric fences of Eros speak to a certain inauthenticity and rootlessness that pervades “the good life” in Namibia. Whenever I find myself in “polite company” among the white or expat community here, I feel that the conversations are just entirely beside the point. I mean, who gives a shit about the boring concerns of the rich and privileged when there are people malnourished, hungry, angry, and resentful right outside those gates? But then I’ve never been accused of being much of a socialite. It’s clear by now that my preferred place in the city is Katutura, where the problems are greater but life is also, at least to my mind, fuller and richer, and yes, (to latch myself to a tired cliche), more authentic.

So next week, to another country, the north, where perhaps I will find something even more authentic still.

Torture, War and “Crime”

When Namibians learn I am from the United States, they usually want to talk politics. Just the other day as I was waiting outside an office on John Meinert street for an interview, the security guard on the premises asked me how Barack Obama was doing as president. In the course of answering I happened to mention Obama’s decision last week to release the OLC memos which proved the Bush administration had sought legal cover for the methods of torture it had deployed on detainees during the past seven years. Yet this topic, which seems to have generated a lot of debate and dissent within the United States (at least judging by my reading of newspapers and blogs), little interested the security guard. He quickly changed the topic: “But why is the U.S. in Baghdad?” he asked. After giving him a somewhat convoluted answer (and really, what is a simple answer to that question?) he interrupted me, saying, “I think it is a terrible thing. So many children in Baghdad have died because of this war. It is just awful.”

I found myself still thinking about this conversation yesterday as I read yet another spirited attack on the institution of torture on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Sullivan has been on an anti-torture crusade for the past several years, demanding full government disclosure and prosecutions for those who authorized, implemented, and then attempted to cover up the United States’s secret torture program. Reading Sullivan the other day in the context of my conversation with the security guard, I realized for the first time that, while I am sympathetic to Sullivan’s arguments in many ways and share his objections to state-sponsored torture, I think the outrage over torture ultimately serves a different purpose: namely, to reify the morality of “normal” war procedures and tactics and thus to shift debate about American power away from its everyday manifestations and abuses and towards a specialized tactic that is, ultimately, of limited relevance in the grand scheme of warfare generally.

Sullivan has repeatedly argued that torture is antithetical to Western civilization, a construct which he apparently thinks has been an overwhelming force for good in the world. According to Sullivan, war has rules; torture is against those rules, hence torture is a war “crime.” Yet to create a category of actions that constitute war “crimes” implicitly accepts that war, in its normal state, is not “criminal”, and is even “lawful.”

And so what, in the realm of war, remains “lawful”? Judging by the past hundred years of world history, we can say that “lawful” war acts include massive carpet bombings of villages, fire-bombings of major metropolitan centers, and the dropping of two atomic bombs on major metropolitan areas, not to mention the more routine, smaller bombings of populated areas that we have seen in the past 20 years in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. These “lawful” acts, taken together, killed millions of people and undoubtedly maimed millions more. But when asked to denounce these acts, most of those who are now most vocally anti-torture will quickly equivocate: “Well, the circumstances sometimes demanded that these things be done,” they might say. Or they might argue that these admittedly harsh methods were necessary in order to protect “freedom” or to prevent greater casualties. What is striking about these excuses is that they are precisely the ones invoked by Dick Cheney and others when called upon to defend torture. We are told that torture saves lives, that it protects Western freedom, etc. etc.

So what is the difference, then, between these two phenomena: torture and modern warfare? Torture, because it is always focused on the individual, necessarily occurs on a much smaller scale. It is alleged that the U.S. torture program was deployed on hundreds of individuals. Meanwhile, the U.S.-led war in Iraq has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, with some agencies putting the estimate at hundreds of thousands. Second, because torture is focused on the individual, the acts of violence are much more specific, much more personal. In order to waterboard someone, you need to have someone else hold down the head, someone to restrain the arms, someone to restrain the legs, etc. Throwing a detainee against a wall is a very overtly physically aggressive act. It requires the personal participation of Americans in directly and intentionally inflicting pain on defenseless people. On the other hand, the mass casualties of modern warfare are entirely anonymous. Someone presses a button or flips a switch, a bomb is dropped, and the arms, torsos, and limbs of defenseless people are ripped to shreds. Some are killed instantly; others die slowly, others merely suffer pain for the rest of their lives, or for a long time after the attack.

This, I think, is where the real difference lies. Americans want to feel good about the violence they commit and support. It is much harder to feel good about a torture session used against a specific person; much easier to ignore or “move past” the random death and dismemberment that accompanies modern warfare.

Yet this distinction is precisely the one that the anti-torture crowd is trying to strengthen. In a sense, then, the outrage over torture works as a kind of moral antiseptic for warfare as it has been generally practiced in the post-industrial age. To seek prosecution for those who authorized the repeated waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, while remaining silent about the greater violence inflicted through normal military procedures, would serve simply to morally “return” America to the place where it can once again feel good about the wars it conducts and the violence it creates.

That would be a move that neither I nor the Namibian security guard would support.

What Makes A Scandal?

Due to the nature of my research, I always pay attention whenever news of corporal punishment reaches me through the various news filters of the Internet. Earlier this week I came across one such incident through Andrew Sullivan’s blog. He posted a video of a “girl” (her age is unclear from the video) being flogged by one man, while other men hold down her legs and arms. A translation of the video reveals that the girl, as she was being flogged, begged the men just to kill her, while a man instructed those restraining her to “hold her legs tighter.” A crowd of men gathered around to silently watch the punishment. According to the story, she was guilty of being seen leaving a building with a married man. Her punishment was 34 strokes with a weapon that appears to be like a heavy belt. Sullivan, in his commentary on the video, described it as “grueling” and “hard to watch.”

However, when I clicked through the link and watched, I found myself unfazed. Because my daily research involves researching floggings and interviewing people who have been flogged, I have a better idea of the range of severity of pain that can accompany such punishments. In that light, a few things about the video stuck out for me. First, the man beating her was sitting on his knees; the girl was lying on the ground. Thus, the man was not putting the full force of his weight into the blows; not even close, in fact. Even more, he is not swinging the object especially hard. He raises the belt no higher than his head, then delivers the blow. Third, he was not putting much space in between his blows: each one followed the other in rapid succession, meaning that the entire flogging is done with in a few minutes.Finally, the woman herself has not been stripped naked. She is still wearing her clothes.

All these elements are relevant given the details of the floggings I have been researching. Typically, a flogging victim was forced to strip naked. He would then be required to bend over a stool or chair while as many as twelve men pinned down his arms and legs. The weapon used was not a belt, but rather a long (maybe 5 feet) piece of very strong wood cut from a palm tree. It typically had a sharp end. The person delivering the blows was also standing, and he would use the full force of his weight, all his leverage, to deliver each stroke, cutting into the victim’s flesh with each delivery. Also, he typically spaced the blows, so as to prolong the agony of punishment: a victim might receive two or three blows, then be forced to wait one minute before the flogging would continue. Thus, judged against the floggings I have been studying, the punishment found in this video is rather mild (which is not to say that it is not also extremely painful for the victim).

After watching the video, I found myself wondering why it was receiving such international coverage. There are a few reasons, which I would like to discuss roughly in the order of their importance. First, the punishment is directed towards the body itself. A video of a woman being sent to a jail cell would not be very interesting, and further, punishments directed towards the body are regarded in Western discourses as less civilized than other forms of punishment. Thus, even in the United States, which still allows for the death penalty, the state has, over time, abandoned simpler methods of killing criminals that explicitly targeted the body, such as firing squads, hangings, and beheadings, in favor of methods which silently put the body to sleep, such as gassing, lethal injection, and electrocution. By adopting these methods we convince ourselves of our own humanity, even though when it comes to the amount of pain inflicted on the prisoner there are many reasons to prefer the guillotine and the firing squad over the doctor’s needle.

Second, the victim is a woman. Accounts of the punishment describe her as a “girl” in order to maximize the outrage of viewers, but given the nature of her crime she has also reached the point of sexual maturity. Discourses which invariably protest the treatment of “women and children” act in ways that infantilize and depoliticize women. They take on an image that we can understand and take comfort in, that of the passive victim in need of masculine protection. Third, the punishment took place in Pakistan, an Islamic country regarded as dangerous and irrational by many Westerners. It is also a country with a distinct geo-political importance for the United States, and as history has shown time and time again, accounts which make arguments about the mistreatment of women are often used as grounds for intervening in that nation’s affairs, either diplomatically or militarily. Fourth, the punishment seems to us to be grossly unfair. Not only does the crime itself, being seen alone with a married man, appear to us to be innocuous in content, but the married man who was her accomplice has not also been punished. Thus the video provides us with a glimpse into a society that is fundamentally unjust and misogynistic.

As much as the video was upsetting to Sullivan (and I am sure many others) it also reifies a certain world order that must be comforting to the Western mind: the United States, home to the largest prison population in the world and the largest number of inmates in solitary confinement, has sufficiently refined its judicial tactics that it would never be so barbarous as to beat a woman in the middle of the street simply for being seen in the company of a married man. That sort of cruelty is left to the irrational Third World, which has failed to embrace the tenets of scientific rationalism and secular government.

There is still something else which gnaws at me: in Pakistan, this incident was presumably of mild importance. A woman broke a social taboo and she was punished. I would guess her wounds have largely healed by now, though she will carry a stigma with her for quite some time, perhaps the rest of her life. But in the dissemination of this video she, as well as everyone else in the video, has been reduced to a prop, a flat character in an easy morality tale. Flogging itself has often been described as embodying a dramaturgy of power, in which the powerful elements of society stage a conflict, the outcome of which is predetermined, with the weaker elements. But the discourses that surround videos such as this one also represent dramaturgies of power: between a West that constructs an East that is alien and dangerous. This is all very Saidian, of course. Where Said missed the mark, however, was in implying that these discourses were somehow totalizing and global in their effect. They are not. They exist in a certain echo chamber, the purpose of which is not just to construct the Other, but also to use that construction in order to avoid asking more difficult questions about “home.” And just as the dramaturgy of power displayed in the video is itself something of a mirage (after all, the presence of the video camera, and the spread of the images it captured, speaks to a weakness in the power of those who inflicted the punishment), so too must the West now face the critical gaze of those it wishes to exclude. In this global discourse, corporal punishment can not only be read as a human injustice; it can also be interpreted as a critique, an answer, to the carceral networks (whose victims are also chosen primarily along lines of class, race, and gender) that have become the West’s greatest scandal.