Active vs. Reactive

In the first part, I want to express how delighted I am to be reading this book. I love this book and it’s a very welcome change of pace from the often soul-crushingly depressing things we’ve dealt with in this course. I think it’s a breathtakingly beautiful book that manages to do the dance of dealing with the terrible parts of humanity without becoming a part of that terribleness itself.

But more to the point I want to look at the way that the children in the book, Scout Jem and Dill, go about policing each other and forming their bonds. The three of them interact in all sorts of interesting ways. Jem seems to be the leader, and Scout and Dill sort of do this interesting back and forth where at first Scout seems to be the superior but is later kind of slowly supplanted for complex reasons.

Jem falls into the leader position perhaps initially because he is the eldest of the three, but simple age doesn’t seem like much of it. He is the one who comes up with their “plays” and their games and leads them on their merry adventures of prodding the Radley house, rolling in tires, playing Tarzan, and what have you.

Scout for a long while maintains her status over Dill largely by right of seniority, and also perhaps by force. She’s a quarrelsome little girl and it’s well known that she can beat up Dill and probably does so on several occasions, however in spite of this, she winds up falling behind Dill. I think the main reason for this is that Dill comes up with games. It’s his idea to make Boo Radley come out and he begins instigating their plans and their schemes.

Scout is a rather passive character in fact. She is kind of swept up in and carried along by the plans of Jem and Dill, wrapped up in their actions, and at the mercy of Atticus’s decrees. She is very reactive, not often pro-active, and while her position as a girl seems to contribute to her distancing from Jem and Dill in some small way, I think her reactiveness has her falling behind both of them in their small little hierarchy far before that becomes an issue.

This issue is reflected often in the book. The law, the power, the status in the book, generally side with those who are the active participant, rather than the reactive ones. Tom Robinson is reactive against a situation instigated by someone else, Atticus similarly reacts against the situation and loses. Atticus is a very strong character, but often a reactive one, reacting to the town, to his sister, to Scout’s situation at school, and things generally seem to not work out in his favor.

Atticus and Scout are generally reactive characters, and they tend to lose out in their own separate worlds. How exactly this relates to justice, and who the law sides with, I’m not sure, but it seemed an interesting observation.

To Kill a Mockingbird – Reflection

When reflecting on To Kill a Mockingbird, I have mixed feelings. I previously read the novel in eighth grade; however, after reading it again, I realize that I did not remember most of the storyline. When returning to this text, I feel slightly lost because I do not remember talking about any of the important themes or even the actual storyline in class when I read it the first time around. We did not discuss the significance of the trial, race relations, or falsely reported sexual assault. After reading it again, I feel like reading it at thirteen in a classroom setting is difficult because of the different places people are in their maturity, knowledge, and experiences. To Kill a Mockingbird was taught in a way where the difficult parts were glossed over and we spend a majority of our time talking about Boo Radley and his mysteriousness. We also spent a lot of time talking about the hidden gifts inside of the tree. I remember being told that this book was a classic and that it was very important, but we were never told what about it made it important. I do not have many fond memories regarding To Kill a Mockingbird solely because when someone had a question about a more mature part of the novel, the student was shut down and was told to ask a parent or the subject was changed. I do not understand why we would read a novel in school where teachers did not feel comfortable teaching the true occurrences and meanings of a novel and students could not ask questions when needed. What is different now when reading To Kill a Mockingbird is that I actually understand what is happening. I see the importance of the novel when it comes to the theme of race and the importance of a fair trial. Reading this novel in the context of a Literature and Law course, where we will actually discuss the major themes, makes far more sense than reading it in an eighth grade English class.    

Discussion Questions for 3/24: To Kill a Mockingbird through Ch. 8

I will post questions about the reading at least 24 hours before our scheduled class time, and each time I will use the tag “Discussion Questions” so that you can easily find them using the sidebar.

  1. Many of you have read this novel before, likely in high school. I invite you to spend some time reflecting on what it’s like to return to this text after so much time. What do you remember about reading it the first time around? How was it taught? If you have fond memories of it, why? If you have less than fond memories, where do they come from? What’s different now – because you are older and/or because you’re reading it in the context of a Literature and Law course?
  2. Take a look at the book’s epigraph. The central plot event, Atticus’s trial, hasn’t gotten going yet in these first chapters. But in what ways are Atticus’s vocation and the law already important to this story about childhood in a Depression-era southern Alabama town? How is Atticus’s identity as a lawyer tied in with his role as a father to Scout and Jem? What laws – of custom or nature, for instance – govern life in the Finch household, the neighborhood, Maycomb? What are the operative ideas about justice, right and wrong, that govern Scout and Jem’s lives as children? Where do those ideas come from?
  3. Less a question than a piece of advice on reading historically: Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in the late 1950s. It is set about two decades earlier. As Sara Schwebel puts it, To Kill a Mockingbird is “doubly historical”: it is ostensibly about Alabama in the 1930s, but it also has much to tell us about the preoccupations and anxieties of the moment of its composition and publication, which was the inaugural moment of the Civil Rights Movement. How might we read with that double historical frame in mind?

Collective Guilt

Between the last several readings, I’m seeing a common issue running all through the legal and philosophical issues raised in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Death and the Maiden, Long Night’s Journey into Day, and now coming to a head in Country of My Skull. How do we legally deal with situations where we aren’t sure where to put the guilt and blame?

Obviously this issue existed in the case of the Nazi Holocaust, and so the Eichmann trial butted up against it to some degree. His defense rested on the idea that he acted with no malice and was essentially following orders. This implies a shifting of the blame for his crimes from himself to the collective Nazi party, or at the very least his superiors. But the idea wasn’t fully developed as in fact there was one man on trial and one man punished.

Moving to Death and the Maiden, We again saw a single man on trial (if we may call it that) for his crimes, but it is set against the backdrop of a country that has instituted a truth commission and is unsure how to apply legal blame and punishment for crimes. It is argued by Gerardo that they cannot punish Roberto because the only way the country is able to keep from descending into chaos is by granting general amnesty. There are just too many people implicated in the old regime. Lurking under that whole play is the idea that the entire old Chilean regime is guilty and thus cannot be punished. It’s neither practical nor possible.

Moving to South Africa, this idea finally comes fully out. The entire Apartheid regime has essentially collapsed and lost power, but it’s legacy lives on. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is granting amnesty for crimes in exchange for truthful testimony of them, but for Krog, it is apparent that the real problem South Africa has is that it is so hard to draw the lines of guilt. while there may be relatively few literal perpetrators of the crimes of Apartheid, there are many thousands of beneficiaries of those crimes.

“In a sense, it is not these men but a culture that is asking for amnesty” (Krog, pg 121)

Krog goes on in the same chapter to talk about how people reacted to her presenting her ideas of collective guilt. She tells of several people who called into her radio show, outraged that she was saying that they were guilty of the horrible crimes of apartheid. Their claims were some version of “I am not guilty of the crimes of murder/torture/rape/etc. because I did not commit them. my benefiting indirectly does not make me complicit or guilty.”

Krog seems deeply conflicted about this idea but I think she ultimately decides that there is some level of guilt held by the beneficiaries of those crimes. Personally I am far from convinced that this is true, but leaving that aside for the moment, I don’t think it’s practical or helpful. How can you punish a whole culture? How can you punish people who didn’t actually DO anything? And if you start going down that road, where does it end? If you look hard enough, and carry that idea all the way, aren’t we all then somehow guilty of everything? Don’t we all as people carry the guilt of every terrible thing that has ever happened, simply because we exist in the same broken world as everyone else? If you start with collective guilt, where can you stop? I don’t think you can. And so wether collective guilt is real or not, it seems impossible and impractical for the law to punish. This is a limit to the law. Right or wrong, law doesn’t have the power to walk down that road.

Pain and the Breakdown of Language

In chapter 3 of Krog’s Country of My Skull, she explores the breakdown of language when confronted with indescribable pain. As she listens to the TRC testimony of Nomande, she reflects on her own pain and, like Nomonde, what it means to convey her own story despite it.

“The starting point of the human rights hearing was the indefinable wail that burst from Nomonde Calata’s lips in East London” (Krog 75). When retelling her experience of learning of her husband’s death, Nomonde Calata, overcome with grief she wails. Her cries expressed a pain that went beyond words and Krog, seeing this failure of language, realized that to adequately remember the crimes of Apartheid one must be taken to this prelinguistic state. She claims that being able to reclaim this pain and express it through words is to witness the rebirth of language and with it peace. To Krog, rediscovering and conquering this insurmountable pain by retelling their stories is how the people of South Africa will heal. She realizes that the hearings themselves may not exclusively be about amnesty, but also to give the victims ownership of their narratives and the opportunity to surmount the trauma that they faced at the hands of an oppressive regime and recover.

We see her do this herself at the end of the chapter as she confronts the immense pain she is in from reporting on the hearings. She finds herself sitting around “naturally and unnaturally, without words.”Despite her own traumatic experiences, she feels as though the work she is doing is exploitative but she recognizes that the stories must be told for the healing of the country as well as herself. She takes a break and realizes that she must also harness this pain and give birth to language that can heal a nation. Her job as a journalist is to provide a platform for the stories of the victims to be told and the reversion to this wordless state of pain is an integral part of the victims’ narratives.

Distinction between a story and the truth

One thing that makes the TRC testimonies so emotionally effective is the uniqueness of each story and what version of the truth they tell. Antjie Krog examines the personalization of individual’s stories especially when recounting the murder of Richard Mutase and his wife. What was particularly interesting about this story is that there are four different narratives of the events that happened on the night of the murders. The discrepancies between these stories seem to undermine the truth: the truth of the dead, the truth of the survivor, and the mission of the TRC. Through the analysis of these stories, Krog seems to be critical of the TRC and how the stories told, especially by those who committed violent crimes and advanced apartheid, alter their truth to cater towards the audience present at the hearings, as well as the “imagined audience”, who are those that these narrators think will appreciate the personalized story the most.

What was interesting to me was that in chapter 8 there seemed to be a distinction between the concept of a “story” and the “truth”. The stories told in regard to the Mutase murders are the best example of this because while the four stories have overlapping components, it is clear that the truth is missing when the stories start to differ from one another. The stories become more about proving which perpetrator is lying, versus what is the truth of the situation, which results in a lack of justice for the victims and their families.

Force or Choice?

I was confused at first as to why Krog would include a story from her personal life in her accounts of the amnesty cases in Country of My Skull. The story of her brothers and the cattle thieves in Chapter 1 seemed unrelated to the topic of the book for me. That is, until her brother used the word ‘force’ and it reminded me of something in Long Night’s Journey into Day. When the film reviews the case of the Gugulethu 7, one of the perpetrators, Thapelo Mbelo, who was a part of the Vlakplass police force, says “I was forced to do it.”.  Mbelo is being confronted by the mothers and wives of the men who were killed. One of the women accuses him of selling his blood, giving up his black brothers and sisters in exchange for money. And he agrees, but he says he had to take orders and he is asking for forgiveness because he was the one being told, not the one doing the telling. One of the mothers says that he did not have to go against his own community but he still implies it was the government that ultimately ruled him to do the killings. Same with Robert Mcbride who was a policeman who bombed a restaurant and killed three women. He, too, says that he was pressured to do it and that he only wanted to assist in ending apartheid; he thought that the government was trustworthy. Both allude to the authority of the government as reason for their actions. But some, like the mothers of the Gugulethu 7, would argue however that in the end these men still had a choice, even if the government made it their only choice. 

Similarly, in Country of My Skull, Krog tells of how her brother was ‘forced’ to kill the cattle thief. He says, “He who is trespassing and breaking the law – by running away, forcing me to shoot him – he is forcing me to point a gun at another human being and pull the trigger… and I hate him for that,” (16). He claims that the thief is forcing him to do it. But again, it is technically his choice. He could have taken another course of action, but Krog suggests that this is the only choice that will make the thieves learn, because in their society there would be no repercussions for the thieves unless the brothers had taken action themselves. 

In all of these situations, the men claim to have been forced to kill another person. Though, some would argue that they had a choice. It may not have been an easy choice, but it was still a choice. The government provided them with the option of taking another person’s life, or risking the lives of their families. So is this still considered force?

The TRC – Just or Unjust?

While reading Krog’s “Country of My Skull” and watching the documentary “Long Night’s Journey into Day” I was very focused on the portrayal of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in both. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, prior to watching and reading about South Africa and the violence within its apartheid society, I was completely unaware of it. The TRC especially interested me, because it is very different from the justice system here in the United States. The United States is primarily focused on incarceration (although many say it is also focused on rehabilitation) – while in South Africa it is shown that the TRC’s main focus is reconciliation as a form of justice.

One thing I think is a positive about the TRC is that the victims often get some form of closure. In the documentary, the perpetrators were brought forth in front of the TRC and confessed their crimes to the families and friends of the victims. There were also scenes where the the families got to meet face to face with the perpetrators and gain some sort of explanation and apology for the crimes committed against their loved one. Similarly, in “Country of My Skull” the TRC was in place to offer some sort of reconciliation and to try and move forward from South Africa’s dark and disturbing past.

Krog tells a narrative of her experience reporting on the TRC, and although the purpose of the TRC is supposed to be positive, there are many upsetting and unjust scenes told within her novel. In fact, in the introduction Krog states “And while some victims and survivors of the apartheid government say their agony won’t end so long as perpetrators get amnesty and victims get next to nothing (reparation, for those who qualify, comes to less than $200 per victim), others say that learning how and where their loved ones met their end has provided a certain closure, a measure of peace” (pg 10). This brings up the question if the TRC really does provide justice or if it is inherently unjust. 

Reconciliation vs Violence

While reading Country of My Skull, one of the lines that jumped off of the page for me was on page 77; the line reads, “South Africa’s shameful apartheid past has made people lose their humanity. It dehumanized people to such an extent that they treated fellow human beings worse than animals. And this must change for ever.” After reading the many stories of the ways in which victims were tortured and killed, this line held a strong weight regarding the pervasiveness of dehumanization that occurred in South Africa. 

Similarly, this line also brought to mind the same concept of the cycle of violence that was illustrated in Death and the Maiden. This made me wonder what would have happened to Paulina if she was allowed a similar opportunity to “reconcile;” from my perspective, Paulina’s radical behavior was as a result of there being no opportunity for her to obtain closure of any kind. For this reason, she took the situation in her own hands and acted in a way that was significantly more violent than what likely would have occurred at the hands of the government or a higher authority. The weight of what happened to Paulina was, to me, a result of the fact that the atrocities committed against her were dismissed because they did not end in death and she had no option for reconciliation, revenge, or closure. In the TRC, on the other hand, victims who were both dead and alive were given the chance to obtain “reconciliation.” I wonder, if this had occurred for Paulina, would her appetite for revenge have been curbed?

From my perspective, the greatest strength of the TRC was the opportunity to offer acknowledgement to the victims of violence. The system was undeniably imperfect, but it is my opinion that, if this same opportunity has been offered to Paulina, much of the violence that ensued would have been avoided. Instead, she was repeatedly accused of being mentally ill and told to move on from the incident while simultaneously being denied any opportunity for closure; in this situation, it is no wonder that she reacted in a violent and irrational way. The only way to exit the cycle of violence is to provide acknowledgement of past wrongdoings and agree to move away from them – though imperfectly, I think the TRC did this well.

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