The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

Globalization and the Photographic Representation of the Disappeared

Friday, September 5, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

Does the central collective-mourning practice arising from September 11, 2001 -- creating photographic displays of the missing -- connect a highly modernized nation's inhabitants to people in remote and impoverished regions of the world? Can victimhood lead to empathy? Does it produce self-absorption and rage?

In South America, Africa, and Central Asia, women whose loved ones have been abducted and have disappeared as part of brutal political oppression have used the modern technology of photography in their struggle against authoritarianism. The women have long exhibited photographs of the missing to substitute for the absent bodies, and those images of tragedy and defiance have become, through the news media, a global performance of pain. Following the attacks of September 11, New Yorkers did the same, affixing posters of the missing to bus shelters and other public sites. Now the challenge is to find ways to make the global tragedy of terror draw people closer.

» The True 'Desaparecidos' (9/5/2003)

Ariel Dorfman, a writer and human-rights activist, is a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University. A Chilean expatriate, Mr. Dorfman has published many works of fiction and nonfiction, often dealing with themes of tyranny and exile, in both English and Spanish. He will respond to questions and comments on these issues on Friday, September 5, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. Advance questions are encouraged and may be posted now.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Liz McMillen (Moderator):
Hello everyone and welcome to to Colloquy Live. I'm Liz McMillen, and I will be moderating today's chat with Ariel Dorfman.

Welcome, Ariel, and thank you for agreeing to participate. And thank you for your article in this week's Chronicle Review, "The True 'Desaparecidos," which has prompted this discussion.

Ariel writes of the parallels he saw between the display of photos of the disappeared in the developing world, and the same practice that took place after September 11 in New York. It's a very rich topic to explore, and we are eager to get started.

Question from Liz McMillen:
Ariel, much of your work has dealt with tyranny, exile, and oppression, but not, as far I know, with photography. Can you talk a bit about what prompted you to write about the connections between the photographs of the disappeared and those of September 11?

Ariel Dorfman:
My work, like my life, is haunted by themes of violence, resistance, and homelessness, but cannot be understood unless it is seen as dealing simultaneously with representation and the questions of who tells the story, how do we know what is real? I have a whole novel, Mascara, dedicated to a man with an unrecognizable face who, using his camera, captures people at their worst and acquires, therefore, great power over his victims; and my newest play is about Picasso and his lover, the photographer, Dora Maar under the Nazi occupation of Paris, and I explore there whether terror can best be depicted by painting or by something supposedly more documentary, like photos. Ill admit, though, that photography itself has not been my central obsession.

Regarding photos and the disappeared, having spent many decades delving into the dilemma of the missing-- many of them, my own friends -- I was struck by how soon after their own catastrophe New Yorkers began to use the same technique to call attention to their own loss, pain, and lack of knowledge. I thought it was worth taking a closer look. I'm always interested in what joins people from very different countries, social groups, gender, languages. . .

Question from Liz McMillen:
How do you account for the universality of this gesture? Photos of the disappeared began cropping up around the world, in places where photography wasn't as common as it is elsewhere, and well before people could learn about the movement from the Internet. Why, in effect, have the disappeared and the photograph gone hand in hand?

Ariel Dorfman:
When a dictatorship represses its enemies, it always tries to obliterate their version of reality, their capacity to speak for themselves and an extreme form of this is disappearance. Pretend that person had never existed. It turns out that photography claims to register the past exactly as it happened (this is an illusion, but most of us tend, at least in everyday life, to believe that this is so); and in retrospect it seems natural that the relatives of the disappeared (mostly women) should be showing that their loved ones (mostly men) did in fact exist.

We need to recall that those women spend a long part of their days and nights simply looking at those representations of the absent husband, father, son, often speaking to them (as we often do when we have suffered a death in the family, even a normal death), and when the moment of protest arrives, the photos also become more public, first by accompanying the protesting women into the streets and then becoming an instrument that denounces the disappearance, that demands that the body that existed in the past be made present, be returned as flesh and not as celluloid. Strange, isn't it? Photography is taken at its face value: this human being was real once, make him real again. . .

Question from francisco Herrera, Universidad de Panama:
I am in agreement that graphic protest of this sort can generate empathy for the relatives of the missing, and what's more, recognition. I doubt how much more of an effect it can have on local authorities, who are sometimes connected to the disappearances. Can this act contribute to the active capacity of truth commissions, if they exist, or to their creation if they don't?

Ariel Dorfman:
We have to understand that the struggle is not merely of the relatives and their persecutors, and not merely a struggle to bring back or keep alive the "desaparecidos." The struggle is for the eyes and soul of the spectators, those who are bystanders.

The local authorities who are implicated in these crimes will only do what they are forced to do by immense majorities inside and outside their countries. So the empathy is crucial in order to create a space both for protest and for change at the level of the government. And the photographs are very much part of this strategy. By making the crime visible, you are indeed creating the need for--and perhaps the existence of--truth commissions in the future.

Question from Patrick Pierce, Human Rights Education Institute of Burma:
Greetings from the Thailand-Burma border. I am from the U.S., but I have been working here for five years on a Transitional Justice program with folks from Burma. We have used the "Death and the Maiden" movie extensively as a teaching tool. Also, your Heading South, Looking North has been an interesting book to share with exiles here, especially the idea that while something can get lost in a translation, something can also be gained. In short, I'm a fan.

The question posed asks about the situation from the U.S. perspective - does empathy there increase? I would like to add to the question by pointing out that Burmese people felt an incredible amount of empathy for people from the U.S. after September 11, and there was a strong sense here of solidarity. Perhaps there are stages that can be identified - folks here have suffered their whole lives, generations even, under military rule. Their empathy came quickly, the parallels were obvious. For those of us not used to living with daily fear, some guidance may be necessary to move from self-aborption to empathy.

My questions are, what role do (should) leaders have in addressing this issue. Is it possible for political leaders to maintain leadership and not pander to society's fears? What leaders from other parts of society can influence public opinion in this way?

Ariel Dorfman:
As someone who lives on the Spanish-English border, I say hello. I think your comment on the empathy from the Burmese toward the U.S. people is right on target and indicative of the imaginative compassion shown by so many toward the United States in its hour of grief, even by those who were themselves victims of American meddling, intervention, bombs. In fact, this is a model for what the United States should do: use its pain to understand the pain of others rather than to inflict more upon the world. And it seems very clear to me that leaders in the United States and elsewhere can do much to place compassion as something that is central to the moral and physical health of their peoples.

The problem is that leaders tend to think they get stronger the more societies have fear. And one of the things we must work towards is to allay those fears, both in the United States and elsewhere. I think that leaders from other parts of society have much to contribute, and specifically, artists and intellectuals.

Question from Liz McMillen:
A couple of photography questions: Since this technique of displaying the photos of the disappeared is so widely imitated, is it any less powerful, by our having seen it so often? And since photography is now commonly digitally altered, will this lessen the impact of the technique, since the very authenticity of the photograph might be questioned?

Ariel Dorfman:
We must never forget that the photos are never floating around in virtual reality, but are part of what I would call a tender and cruel, a tender and vicious reality: the photos get their meaning from their juxtaposition to the real suffering bodies and cries and memories of those who display them. That is what gives them their power, brings them to life.

Those with power can always alter a photo as the dissidents were airbrushed out of photos in Stalinist times. . . But finally, part of the story is kept alive until such a moment when some of it can be revealed. Though I am not denying that, overwhelmed as we are today by infotainment and the distance between subjects in the more affluent societies and others presumably far away, there is not a danger of losing the connection with what you call authenticity. My latest novel, Blakes Therapy, in fact, deals with precisely this issue and television (an outgrowth of instant photographic representation, after all) plays a major part in this hiding of the real.

Question from Anonymous:
You speak of the blank spaces representing people too poor or marginalized to have been captured by a camera, and of the need to bring "the lost souls of modernity, like the other missing of the world, back from death and oblivion." I get your meaning, and maybe I'm being too literal, but it doesn't seem to me that a lack of images of a person necessarily signals invisibility. Many people are "unseen"--by parents, spouses, children, culture--although they and others may possess albums full of photographs of themselves. In this new kind of mourning through photographs, might we not be fetishizing the dead, too, and losing the essential "thereness" of who they were, focusing only on what can be physically seen? Some people in some cultures used to feel that having their picture taken was to have their souls stolen. Just as being physically seen does not necessarily mean being psychically seen, being unseen doesn't necessarily imply a life has had no meaning. I worry that these photographs keep the living locked in false sentiment, or rage, rather than leading to true understanding of what it means to really live, seen or not. Can you comment on that?

Ariel Dorfman:
This is an absolutely legitimate concern and critique, and certainly, it would be careless of me to suppose that if someone is not seen, they do not have a story. The problem is that we live in a world of accelerated modernization where the invisibility, from the point of view of power and "screen time," often leads to physical violence and suppression of those people. I believe that a great part of our global dilemmas today have to do with the fact that those who supposedly control our economy and our technology and our military adventures are able to create a distance between themselves and those who are affected by their policies.

In that sense, very often to become visible is a way of surviving. This desire to influence the fate of the world should not mean that we devalue so many spiritual forms and attitudes that are precisely those that are missing in the large centers of power. If those who have economic and military authority were willing to leave to themselves those who simply wanted to lead a life of unseen wonder, then I would be the first to suggest that to be invisible is a blessing.

However, the theme you bring up is so important and crucial to the discussions of where we should go, and what are the true cultural challenges of the future, that I prefer, for the moment, to remain silent rather than continue exploring this theme. In my novel Blake's Therapy I espouse a theory of spritual renovation very similar to the one you are suggesting might be yours. Just one last comment: The danger of fetishizing the dead, like that of fetishizing atrocity and horror, is considerable. But the danger of forgetting and the danger of indifference seem to me, at this moment in history, to be even larger.

Question from Luis Fernando Restrepo, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville:
I am skeptical of how much empathy can the global display of violence generate given the consuming processes that mediate such images, I am thinking in particular how CNN and mainstream media only feed us a few minutes of those images . The individualization, the status of humans that the picture of the disappeared attempts to affirm is not given enough time by the global eye and it soon vanishes off our memories and living rooms. So in a way, global time, with its consuming practices and voracity for the new, is in the end turning those pictures of the disappeared into blank spaces, like the Salinas you mentioned.

Ariel Dorfman:
Though I agree with the way in which you characterize the relationship between media and violence, I think you may not take sufficiently into account the ways in which people, both those who watch and those who suffer, can use those tiny spaces to create consciousness.

There is a tendency, particularly in academia, to focus upon systemic and overwhelming domination without understanding that there is a dynamic relationship established by and with those who resist. Do we expect the women of the disappeared to not show the photos of their loved ones because, theoretically, this will then be consumed by global attrition? My politics always start by affirming the need to grab a hold of whatever piece of shipwrecked debris is around, and keep your head above water--because if you don't survive, you don't live to struggle for meaning, another day.

As Susan Sontag has indicated in her recent and brilliant book Regarding the Pain of Others, an image can be used and manipulated by anybody for any purpose, but we are not only the victims of manipulation and media dominance. We are also part and eyes and hands and desires and we can fight so that some form of truth shines through. It's very much like translation, which is a favorite theme of mine, given my adulterous bilingual existence. There is much that is lost in translation, but some core of truth always manages to filter through.

Let us not suppose that we are always helpless and that reality is only a construction of the powerful. Reality is always a dialogue.

Question from Liz McMillen:
At one point you speak about a booklet describing the lives of the disappeared, and for some of the men, not a single photograph exists to document their lives. They are missing because in reality, the modern world "acts as if they had never been there at all." What are some of the tensions you feel as a writer trying to take account of these lives?

Ariel Dorfman:
I'm torn by this predicament and very much aware of it every time I write, careful about not claiming to represent those who have been silenced. But to remain silent myself when confronted by suffering and its consequences would be, I think, a betrayal. These tensions can, naturally, be creative as I demonstrated, I hope, when I examined the first half of my life in my memoir Heading South, Looking North. But that book ends in 1973 when I am about to go into exile from Chile, and in the thirty years since the coup, this dilemma has become more perverse and intricate the more well-known I personally become, the farther my everyday life drifts from the sorrows that I write about.

Question from Liz McMillen:
Working off the same theme, you have spoken elsewhere of the need you feel to make amends to the dead. What are the dangers of writing about the dead? How does this theme inform your work?

Ariel Dorfman:
The main danger is if you betray the dead. I hesitate to state that I have not done so but I will find out once I myself journey to the other side. . . then the dead will tell me, their newest arrival, if I managed to be true to some sense of their presence/absence. Lately, as a reaction to the invasion of Iraq, I have been visited by voices from that other side: Picasso has words for Colin Powell, Columbus has words for the Captain who rebaptized Saddam International Airport, Hammurabi has words for Donald Rumsfeld, and a few nights ago Jane Austen began to murmur some words for Condi Rice. . . I am honored that they chose me to be their vehicle.

Question from Sara Lipka, Chronicle of Higher Education:
How would you describe the tension between the personal and the political in the exhibition of the photographs? On one level, it's a private mourning ritual, but it's also a collective performance that is intensely politically charged.

Ariel Dorfman:
I had not thought about this tension, perhaps because in the back of my head I was egocentrically worried about my own tension between the political and the personal as I gazed on this spectacle and ritual and also wondered how to best serve it. But I think you have, in fact, touched upon a very significant aspect of this dilemma, which I have not, at least in this essay, sufficiently addressed. In my poems, and in a novel such as Widows, I do, in fact, try to look at the ways in which the personal becomes collective. But in this case, I believe that I was so overwhelmed by the idea of the women as a collective, that I subsumed their personal grief into their performance. Perhaps that is why, when I recently delivered this lecture as the Amnesty lecture in Edinburgh, I interspersed a series of poems about the "desaparecidos," which brought home to the audience--at least, that is what I think happened, given their reaction--the full, individual nightmare, one by one by one, of what they have to live through.

Perhaps the conundrum is the following: Unless you come out of your personal grief and join others, you will not get the authorities to react. They could not care less for the tears and the anguish and the twisted lives. It is only when the victims dispute the public space, and do so with others, that there is a chance that the dead will be allowed to speak.

Question from Michael Lazzara, Princeton University:
I am very interested in this use of photography to which you refer, Ariel. But, at the same time, watching how the media often bombards us over and over again with the same images, I often wonder whether the repertiore of images we have for certain historical situations sometimes "hides" more than it "reveal." This is particularly apparent to me when I watch the Chilean news each evening, and find that virtually every segment on the dictatorship shows in the bacground the same two or three images of repression--images which don't even begin to approximate the violence that occurred under Pinochet. I was wondering about your thoughts on the relationship between photography and forgetting (as opposed to photography and memory)...

Ariel Dorfman:
This question is similar to the one about consumption, but it posits a different problem. This is the old question about poetry after Auschwitz, and a related question, whether one can ever represent the unspeakable and abject. Contemporary society creates forgetting and amnesia; it is almost as if the marketplace were demanding such obliteration. But we have no alternative, other than a dignified silence, to the quest for those spaces and images and words that will allow something to be understood, trusting that there is someone like yourself out there who can decodify the repetition and explore the truth that is being hidden. Of course those in power will seek to devalue and render trivial both repression and resistance. But some photos, like some poems or plays or films, are so fiercely determined to remain in our lives that we cannot--not even the dictators--deny them.

I think that one of the most interesting aspects of these photos of the disappeared, that I did not remark upon in my essay (I mean, this is not a book) is their very banality. They shock us, not as the terrors of war do, but in the use of the everyday to express the terror and the sorrow and the pity. Because the men behind those photos, the "desaparecidos," have in effect been forgotten by everybody but those who loved those men, displaying those photographs is a way of remembering, even if later on, the media will try to waste away the sub-version of that struggle for meaning. For many years, I have taught a class on "testimonio," and I firmly believe that no matter how much the original words of the eyewitness have been deviated from their origin, a great deal has managed to survive and reach us. Maybe that is because I am a tragic optimist. Finally, whether something is forgotten and hidden by being shown depends after all on you and me and every third person; it depends on our engagement with that image and with the images that do not find their way into the public space.

Question from Sophia McClennen, Pennsylvania State University:
In "The True Desaparecidos" you hope that the use of photos by mourners in New York after September 11, 2001 has the possibility of connecting those who lost loved ones with their counterparts across the globe, creating solidarity through shared lament. You also point to some of the ways that the use of photos in New York radically differs from the ways that they have been and are used elsewhere. I would like to ask you to discuss those differences further. To what extent do you think that the representational power of the photograph in the New York context should be read in terms of the way that photos have been used to shape and mark US identity? How does the photo, as a reflection of one's life and a construction of it, play a special role in U.S. identity? If so, to what extent does that difference distance the practice even further from its appearance in other parts of the world?

Ariel Dorfman:
Of course I don't have the time here to analyze at length the dilemmas of U.S. identity. But even if there are clearly different ways in which U.S. citizens understand photos compared to, say, women in Somalia (this should be analyzed very closely and carefully), nevertheless, when the citizens of New York are reduced to fear, trembling, loss, when they are naked in front of death, they draw closer, in spite of every cultural difference to others who live and die all across our globe. We need to look at cultural differences and we need to look at human resemblances.

Question from Liz McMillen:
Do you expect to see photographs of the disappeared in Iraq?

Ariel Dorfman:
If I do, it will be to the eternal shame of the American people. During Saddam Hussein's reign, the Iraqis did not dare to show the photos of their missing, precisely because the terror was so great. At this moment, the United States is dangerously close to creating many of its own disappeared victims. In fact, the Patriot Act could be construed as a step in that direction--so I am talking about possible North American "desaparecidos" rather than Iraqis. The fact that Saddam's notorious prisons have been reopened and even children are being taken away without their mothers knowing where they are or who has them, is an ominous sign indeed. Let us pray that the United States will not besmirch itself with yet more "desaparecidos." We've had enough of them already.

Question from Liz McMillen:
One final question for you: It's been almost 30 years to the day since the September 11 coup in Chile. How has that event affected your life, and the choices you've made as writer?

Ariel Dorfman:
I can safely say that the 11th of September of 1973 has been the most significant event of my life. It tore my life, and that of my country, in half, and fractured it forever. Whoever has read my memoir, Heading South, Looking North, will know the death that I avoided that day has haunted me ever since. It has not only been an event of pain and devastation, but also a challenge to me and so many others to find solace in the understanding of that event and how not to be destroyed by it, morally and physically. I would not be the writer that I am today if history had not hurled me into the maelstrom of terror and exile. The dilemma for me as a writer has been how to be true to that suffering while at the same time exploring a series of themes such as identity, memory, the relationship between sexes, the struggle for meaning and narration, that obsessed me before the coup and that were accentuated by the events of our September 11. I had spent most of my life up till then trying to deny my double and duplicated existence. And the death of Allende and the ruin of my country and our dreams forced me to become what I am now and that this essay in The Chronicle so clearly expresses, a bridge that I hope is not too far.

Liz McMillen (Moderator):
That wraps up today's chat. Thanks to all who submitted questions, and thank you, Ariel, for being with us today -- it's been a great discussion.

Ariel Dorfman:
This has been a hell of a trip. I really have enjoyed it, because I had never done this before. Writing is a lonely profession, even for those who are in connection with a vast humanity every time they start to put words on a page or on a screen. What I like about theater is the feedback from the audience. So this has been a cross between a performance and a solitary meditation, perhaps a fitting way to end a tribute to the photos and the women of the disappeared, whether in Chile, in Baghdad, or in New York.

If anyone wants to visit my web site, the address is http://www.adorfman.duke.edu.