On Tom Sawyer Abroad and the Accidental Imperialists

Everyone knows about that time Tom Sawyer tricked the neighborhood kids into painting his aunt’s fence for him. Everyone knows about his time hiding out on Jackson Island with his friend Huck Finn and when he made his way out of McDougal’s Cave with his sweetheart Becky. Heck, those who have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could even tell you that Tom Sawyer was there when Huck Finn freed the slave Jim after he is recaptured. Tom Sawyer’s story has been a part of not only the literary canon, but a part of the American tale we tell ourselves. But few know about that one time Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim hopped on a flying machine with a deranged inventor and made their way over to Northern Africa.

It turns out that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not the end of the Tom and Huck saga. Mark Twain completed two other novels focused on his two most famous characters, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective. Twain even attempted to write other adventure tales featuring Tom and Huck, including Huck and Tom Among the Indians, Schoolhouse Hill, and Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy, but none of these were published or even completed in Twain’s lifetime.

There’s a reason why Tom Sawyer Abroad failed to lodge in America’s consciousness: it’s not great. I suppose you could see it as the Solo: A Star Wars Story of the Tom Sawyer series, or Twain’s Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, if you’re being unkind. While the previous Tom and Huck stories weren’t exactly concerned with narrative realism, it does seem odd to see Twain inject some Jules Verne steampunk into the bucolic world of St. Petersburg, Missouri.

Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Abroad is narrated by Huck, and though published about a decade after Huck Finn, it begins almost immediately after the events of the previous novel. The first chapter, “Tom Seeks New Adventures,” which begins with Tom Sawyer deciding that the events of Huck Finn wouldn’t be enough to satiate his curiosity and wanderlust, seems to perfectly describe what was likely Twain’s brainstorming process. As M. Thomas Inge notes in my edition’s afterward, Twain, who got himself into financial trouble towards the end of the nineteenth century, wrote Abroad for “crass commercial purposes.” In other words Twain writing a third novel featuring these characters is kind of like when a movie studio decides that they have some IP that they can squeeze a few bucks from. So I guess this makes Tom Sawyer Abroad the Live Free or Die Hard or the Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or Godfather III of Twain’s oeuvre.

And just like many movie studios of late, Twain had been bitten by the franchise bug. He apparently had plans to ship Huck, Tom, and Jim to other parts of the world in a series of sequels, which never came to be. Judging by the quality of Abroad, this is probably for the better. The main problem is that although Abroad promises lots of hijinks by Tom, Huck, and Jim in Northern Africa, the trio doesn’t really spend much time actually on the ground. Instead, they spend much of the early chapters terrorized by the manic mad inventor of the airship who both seems to have absolute faith in his invention and a streak of misanthropy, and when he plunges to his grizzly death, the three of them are left to figure out what to do now that they’ve somehow wandered across the Atlantic Ocean. But once they reach Africa, they mostly just hang out in the stupid air balloon. There’s no awkward mix up with local customs or getting caught up in the tension between the Berbers and colonizing European powers. No, it’s mostly just Tom, Huck, and Jim observing things from a far and shooting the shit.

On the bright side, the conversation and arguments that the three get into are without a doubt the highlights of the novel. As the most learned of the three, Tom repeatedly tries to represent himself and worldly and authoritative, but he’s almost always rhetorically outmaneuvered by Jim. At one point they consider the implication that fleas are proportionally much stronger than humans, leading them to the horrifying conclusion that if a flea were human-size, then that “flea would be President of the United States, and you couldn’t any more prevent it than you can prevent lightning.”  In these moments, you can feel Twain’s warmth towards his creations, and the book starts to take the shape of an anti-adventure novel, where the characters go halfway around the world just to get into philosophical arguments with one another. Maybe Richard Linklater can do the film adaptation.

It’s worth highlighting the boisterous illustrations, which are admittedly a lot of fun, and interestingly enough they were created by Dan Beard, an early founder of the Boy Scouts of America. 

Tom Sawyer Abroad is uneven at best, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not some interesting work going on here. The novel showcases Twain’s burgeoning anti-imperialist attitudes. Early on, Tom tries to convince his companions to embark on a crusade, but Jim is unsure about the ethics behind this new idea, arguing that if he had a farm and someone wanted it, it wouldn’t be right for them to just take it like the so called crusaders. Apoplectic, Tom rejects Jim’s metaphor outright:

“It ain’t a farm, it’s entirely different. You see, it’s like this. They own the land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”

Tom’s response surely strikes the reader as an inefficient defense of crusades, but it also inaugurates themes of epistemological uncertainty and imperialism. He rejects Jim’s metaphor as a means of knowing how Middle Easterners must have felt about invading Europeans. Throughout the novel the notion of metaphors as a means of knowing comes into play, which in turn affects how the trio see themselves as an invasive force.

Later, after the three have been riding the balloon across America, Huck uses his knowledge of of maps to try and pinpoint exactly where they are. Although they have been riding the balloon for quite some time, Huck’s surprised that they haven’t passed into Indiana yet. When asked why he thinks they haven’t passed Indiana yet, Huck logically observes that while the state of Illinois is green, Indiana is clearly pink. After all, that’s how it’s portrayed on maps he’s seen. Like the metaphor of the farm, Huck is relying on the map as a form of metaphor. It synecdochically stands in for the nation as a whole, but where Jim’s farm metaphor attempts the bridge the distance between Christians and Muslims, the map demonstrates ways in which metaphor can distance us from the reality of the object itself. Color coded states are a helpful shorthand, but they are clearly a fiction.

There’s a running theme of how distance, both figurative and literal, between us and the other becomes difficult to bridge through traditional modes of knowledge production. While reading Tom Sawyer Abroad, I eventually became frustrated by the fact that Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the damn balloon. One of the joys of these globetrotting nineteenth century adventure stories is how our western heroes get to visit new places and cultures. Of course, these cultures are always interpreted through the understanding of the white authors, often in wildly inaccurate and racist ways. But if we’re to look at Abroad as an anti-adventure novel, perhaps this is the point. There’s no uncovering of ancient artifacts from lost civilizations or opportunities to use superior wit to escape capture by the natives. Instead, the three of them much prefer to sit around and jaw with one another just as if the front porches of St. Petersburg, Missouri were transported to the Sahara Desert.

Because Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the balloon, they have a skewed perspective understanding of Africa and its people. It’s telling that Twain borrows the word “aeronaut” from Jules Verne, who he is clearly satirizing, but here he spells it “errornaut” (italics mine).

 To me, this seems to suggest ways in which this new technology allows individuals to more quickly and easily cast about the world while also maintaining a distance from the actual people who live in these “far flung” regions, keeping us just as ignorant as before we left our provincial town. I can’t help but compare the balloon in Abroad with drones sent by the military to places like Northern Africa and the Middle East.

We see both of these issues, the use of metaphor as knowledge-creation and the errornautical view of the world, collide in the chapter, “The Sand-Storm,” where the trio witnesses the destruction of a caravan of nomads violently tossed by a sandstorm. Tom and company were devastated by these deaths and felt like they had lost friends although they never actually met any members of the caravan.

For some time, the trio had followed the caravan with their air balloon, and as Tom says, “The longer we traveled with them, and the more we got used to their ways, the better and better we liked them.” Of course, they didn’t actually know any of the Africans below, so they granted them names, like “Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson” or “Miss Harryet McDougal.” Over time, the group became so familiar with these nomads that they decided it was okay to drop the misters and misses and other titles. Once again, Abroad is trapped between the remote and the nearby. Tom and the rest are capable of extending empathy towards outsiders from a culture and place foreign to them, but in order to do so, they must Anglicize these people. The Africans become Robinsons and McDougals.

Over the course of the novel, Tom, Huck, and Jim become accidental imperialists. At one point, Tom looks at all the sand that’s been gathering in their balloon and decides that it must be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Quickly, he sets upon a money-making scheme:

“[W]e can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we’ve carted this whole desert over there and sold it out; and there ain’t ever going to be any opposition, either because we’ll take out a patent.”

The only thing that preventing Tom from embarking on literally stealing the desert sands of North Africa are tariffs, which he reasons would completely eat away at their profits.

But just as it’s easy to not only forgive Tom’s fence-painting scheme, but actually laud him for his ingenuity, Tom, Huck, and Jim are so genial, it’s easy to forgive or miss altogether the fact that they seem to be inadvertently colonizing countries they likely didn’t even know existed at the beginning of the novel. Needless to say, Tom Sawyer Abroad is a strange novel. I don’t think anyone expected Mark Twain to pump out a steampunk sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and after reading the novel, I’m not surprised that it’s fallen into obscurity. Despite the fact that the novel spans oceans and deserts, it seems strangely stagnant and claustrophobic. The novel is filled with contradictions like this, but in many ways Tom Sawyer Abroad is the kind of novel you enjoy the more you think and write about it. 

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I do think that there’s a lot of potential to adapt Tom Sawyer Abroad as a film. Hear me out. There’s no definitive film version of either Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, perhaps the closest being the 1938 technicolor adaptation. For whatever reason, both novels seem to resist adaptation, perhaps because of their episodic structure. But what’s the use in letting these instantly recognizable IPs lying around? People have heard of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and they’re in the public domain. Do I have to draw you a map?

But in all seriousness, I would be down for a steampunk, globe-trotting Tom Sawyer movie. And since the novel isn’t as precious as the first two, a screenwriter doesn’t really have any obligation to follow the book to the letter. It’s an invitation to let your imagination go wild. If Hollywood wanted to play it safe, they could just let Guy Ritchie do to Tom Sawyer what he already did to Sherlock Holmes. But I also think both Kings of Summer and Kong make Jordan Vogt-Roberts uniquely qualified for steampunk Tom Sawyer. This one’s for free, Hollywood.

On Robert W. Chambers’s King in Yellow Panic

Robert W. Chambers has become an apparition in American literature. He’s barely read anymore, but we can feel his ghostly presence across dimensions, mostly through his influence on writers like H.P. Lovecraft whose popularity has only increased in recent years thanks to the memeification of Cthulhu. Lovecraft was most certainly influenced by Chambers and his vision of forbidden knowledge and its ability to drive men mad. Chambers developed the idea of a book called The King in Yellow, a play that at first seems normal to the reader but eventually becomes twisted and macabre. Although the contents of the play are deliberately obscured by Chambers’s writing, those who do in fact read the play become mentally shaken.

The King in Yellow clearly serves as an antecedent to Lovecraft’s own Necronomicon written by the “Mad Arab.” Chambers himself was influenced heavily by Ambrose Bierce who in addition to writing his popular stories of the Civil War also dabbled heavily on ghost stories. In his 1886 story, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” Bierce first develops the idea of the ancient and unknown city, which may or may not be of our world, which Chambers inserted into his own weird tales. There’s an appeal to how these narratives are borrowed and passed down like a particularly spine-tingling ghost story. Likewise, many other authors, such as Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch, who freely took from Lovecraft. And it’s likely because of this chain of influence that Chambers is likely still around today, even influencing such works of popular fiction as the first season of True Detective.

This is a pretty cozy narrative of creation as collaboration, but Lovecraft and Chambers also shared some good old fashioned white, American racism. In particular, Chambers appears concerned with the influx of Chinese immigrants towards the end of the nineteenth century, and his stories are replete with suggestions of the “Yellow Peril.” Chambers’s short story, “The Maker of Moons” in particular provides us with a glimpse into the fin de siecle anxieties about the East invading the West.

Like much of Chambers’s speculative fiction, “The Maker of Moons” belongs to the genre of “weird fiction,” a dreamlike blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Early in the story, the narrator visits his friend’s gold shop where his friend, Godfrey, shows him an eyeless hybrid creature that looks similar to a sea urchin and a spider. The narrator is so disgusted by the creature, which he claims is worse than a “Japanese grotesque,” that he tells Godfrey to kill it immediately (95). Godfrey discovered the creature in the Canadian wilderness in a place called The Cardinal Woods where he also found an orb of gold that appears to have been synthesized. Hearing this, the narrator, Godfrey and their friend Barris head to the woods on a hunting expedition, hoping to also discover whoever’s making the bootleg gold.

While hunting by himself at night, the narrator stumbles on a fountain and a mysterious woman who goes by the name of Ysonde and tells him she comes from a mysterious place called Yian. She disappears as quickly as she appeared, and the following day the narrator returns to where he found the fountain but nothing is there. Ysonde clearly fulfills the stereotype of the Asian female who is delicate, loving, enticing, and perplexing.

The narrator discovers that his companions have also seen “Chinamen” in these woods. Barris had previously discovered a gold globe with the “Chinese hieroglyphics” of Kuen-Yuin, a sort of Chinese cult (113). As Barris, who makes his living as some sort of secret agent, says,

[T]he Kuen-Yuin have absolute control of a hundred millions of people, mind and body, body and soul. Do you know what goes on in the interior of China? Does Europe know,–could any human being conceive of the condition of that gigantic hell-pit? You read the papers, you hear diplomatic twaddle about Li Hung Chang and the Emperor, you see accounts of battles on sea and land, and you know that Japan has raised a toy tempest along the jagged edge of the great unknown. But you never heard before of the Kuen-Yuin; no, nor has any European except a stray missionary or two, and yet I tell you that when the fires from the pit of hell have eaten through the continent to the coast, the explosion will inundate half a world,–and God help the other half (113).

It’s easy to spot the hallmarks of Orientalism in this passage. China is the province of the mystical and unknown and poses an existential danger to the West. The paradox of yellow peril is present in how easily Barris dismisses knowledge of China the general public might gather from your daily newspaper in order to highlight the hidden threat buried within the nation, inaccessible to those without the proper esoteric knowledge. In order to represent China of the late nineteenth century as a true threat to the West, you had to contend with the contradictory image of China as the “sick man of Asia.”

Throughout the nineteenth century, China faced foreign invasion, colonization, and civil war, but there was still something threatening about the nation to Westerners. This was partly because of America’s nativist and anti-Chinese racism. But, as others have pointed out, China’s longstanding history as an international power that rivaled and often eclipsed Europe surely engendered a feeling of anxiety about Western imperialism and the fear that America and Europe’s foreign adventures would someday lead to a precipitous fall. Western authors, then, simultaneously claimed that China was weak and backwards as well as an incredible threat to our very way of life.

In the story, the West’s fear of China is also embodied in a monster known as a Xin, which is a larger version of those eyeless creatures shown to the narrator at the beginning of the narrative and look like a combination of a spider and a sea urchin. These smaller versions of the Xin follow his every command: “‘This monster is horrible, for it not only lives in its own body, but it has thousands of loathsome satellites,–living creatures without mouths, blind, that move when the Xin moves, like a mandarin and his escort’” (133). The image of this creature and his mindless followers plays into the idea that China was composed of a monolithic mass of people who readily gave up their own individuality for the good of the emperor. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. China is ethnically and religiously diverse, which made establishing a governing authority over China’s intimidating landmass extremely difficult. The Qing Dynasty still ruled in the late nineteenth century, and for many Chinese they were seen as illegitimate because the royal family was ethnically Manchurian.

When it comes to fear of the Other, reality is often less important to people than perception. Like much of Chambers’s fiction, the ending of “The Maker of Moons” is inconclusive. The narrator suggests that more people learn of Kuen-Yuin and his cultish followers but that many may not believe these fantastic stories. Only the chosen truly understand the threat America faces from the other side of the globe. The imprecise nature of the threat only makes it that much more frightening. There are some easy parallels between Chambers’s story and the language used about Syria, a country that’s experiencing a devastating civil war and yet whose refugees are likened to a fifth column ready to undermine our very nation. The clear repetitive nature of these overblown concerns should clue us into how detached they are from reality.

On The Brexit and Two Forms of Sovereignty

Like most Americans last Thursday night, I went to sleep with the comfort of knowing that Great Britain would inevitably vote to remain within the European Union, to choose unity over chaos, globalization over sovereignty. And then, when I woke up, I was completely flabbergasted. The unification of Europe has been an ongoing project since the end of World War II, and globalization, as they tell, us is basically inevitable. The entire planet will soon be a wonderful playground for the free movement of capital and labor, which will in turn release all the best that innovation, technology, and disruption have to offer (except for 99% of the population who can’t hide their funds in offshore accounts, but nevermind).

Of course, globalization is more than just neoliberalism personified. There’s wonderful potential to be found in living in a smaller world. Ultranationalism gave us World War II, after all, so it’s not like strong sovereignty has a great track record. Furthermore, large global problems, like global warming and refugees and, perhaps, even inequality, can best be tackled through transnational channels. And I think that’s why people are stunned by the Brexit (a neologism that becomes more infuriatingly awful each time you hear it, kind of like “natch”).

As I said, like most Americans, I was blindsided by the decision of the British people to flee the EU, but as an American I shouldn’t have been. We have been living in our own revolt against current trends in globalization in the form of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. While Sanders offers a more thoughtful response to the ills of globalization and inequality, Trump has fashioned his political career out of locating and exploiting the id of the American public.

And much of the discussion over Great Britain’s vote to leave has positioned nationalism against globalization. While this is an oversimplification, there is some truth here. If we view recent events through these twin poles, then I think it leads us to a paradox in how the political establishment deploys these dual notions. It’s necessary for politicians to espouse the virtues of globalization in order to achieve the economic goal of unleashing the power of the free market planetwide, but at the same time they must froth up nationalism in order to fight an unending war against terror across borders. With the Brexit and Trump’s rise to power, you can see how these two ideas are often at cross purposes. For globalized neoliberalism, you need to allow people to freely cross borders, even when those people are brown. To fight the forever war against terror, you need to reinforce ultranationalism in order to kill the Other, which happen to be brown people.

My PhD dissertation actually looked at sovereignty in nineteenth-century American literature, and one of the guiding theorists in my research and thinking was political philosopher Wendy Brown and her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, which she published back in 2010. Brown argues that the increased effort to build walls (in particular she looks at Israel) signals an anxiety about our globalized world. Again, this was five years before Trump ran for president using the idea of a border wall as central to his platform. (It would probably behoove politicians to pay a little more attention to what the humanities are saying or at the very least to academics in general).

One of the ideas I worked on with the help of Brown’s study is the dual meanings of sovereignty. The more common usage of the term refers to inviolable control over a nation’s borders. The United States determines who enter the country and what rules are enacted within. The nation is an island. The second meaning of sovereignty is the location of authority within a nation. The sovereign within an absolute monarchy is the king, but authority within a democracy is supposed to be held by “the people.” The notion that a nation is ruled by its people undergirds how we have conceived of political power for the last couple of centuries.

I argue in my dissertation that the view of sovereign authority as emanating from the people does not necessarily result in a liberal democracy. It could just as easily result in authoritarian rule. However, liberalism generally takes rule by the people as one of its starting points. By contrast, Brown points out, global capital “mocks efforts by national and subnational communities to contour their ways of life or to direct their own fates” (65). In other words, one of the pillars of liberalism is also at odds with global capital. This is why it’s a mistake to claim that we’re seeing a conflict between ultranationalism and traditional liberal democracy. Both nationalism and liberal democracy erode under the threat of global capitalism.

The results of this blowback can be frightening and can take the form of racism and xenophobia. But I also think that rejection of globalization is a reaction to a general feeling that individual citizens have lost control of their status as the ultimate authority within the nation-state. And these people aren’t wrong. A Princeton University study found that laws passed by the Congress in no way line up with public opinion. Moneyed interest of the top ten percent of earners have an outsized impact on the laws of our nation. These are the same people who have benefited from unfettered global capitalism. This form of globalization is also an assault on the liberal order and sovereign authority of the people. Of course, people don’t need a Princeton study to tell them what they already know. Democracy has been losing sway for some time. Although many people might be frightened into blaming scapegoats, the basic assumption that the demos has lost power within the nation is founded on truth, and it is no wonder that the citizens of Great Britain and The United States are lashing out any way they can.

On Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

Despite continued use over the past fifty years, the phrase “banality of evil” has retained much of its power. For whatever reason, its edge has not yet been worn down by overhandling. One reason why “banality of evil” still resonates is because our conception of moral values is still very much embedded in our culture. Our understanding of right and wrong are very much determined by our ideological enclosure, and to inflict evil on the world, we need to do little more than become a cog within a larger bureaucratic or corporate regime.

I’ve found myself returning to Hannah Arendt’s phrase a lot recently in my teaching, but I realize that I’ve never actually sat down to read Eichmann in Jerusalem, a situation I’ve now remedied. The actual book was different than I expected, and it touched upon much broader subject matter than just Adolf Eichmann’s trial. And despite the fact that Arendt wrote originally wrote and published the book as a series of articles in The New Yorker for a more general audience, the writing still maintains her usual wry tone and know-it-all style.

If you scour Eichmann in Jerusalem, you won’t find a definition for “banality of evil,” which may have gotten her in trouble since so many people took the phrase as some sort of defense for Eichmann’s actions. In fact, the phrase only appears twice by my count–once as the subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil” and a second time at the conclusion of the original series, before the chapters were collected in book form and Arendt added an addendum. If I were to attempt a definition of the banality of evil, it would have to do with ways in which individuals willingly fit themselves into larger systems and institutions even when those systems and institutions carry out immoral actions, which in this case includes the attempted extermination of the Jewish people.

The Eichmann of Arendt’s book strikes a pathetic figure. She repeatedly insults his intellect and highlights the fact that he isn’t particularly well read and performed poorly in school. But she also does not present him as particularly dogmatic. Eichmann is less a true believer than he is a company man. His first success within the SS occurred when he was put in charge of “forced emigration,” which Arendt notes is normally thought of as “expulsion” by its victims (43). From here on out Eichmann becomes an expert in the logistics of moving the Jewish people from state to state as well as into the extermination camps.

If we were to ignore the hard to ignore fact that Eichmann worked for Adolf Hitler, his life story could have been a narrative of corporate success, the Third Reich’s version of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. Arendt diagnoses Eichmann with a case of aphasia, and while it’s easy to doubt her ability to reach a medical diagnosis by attending the man’s trial, there’s truth to what she claims on a metaphorical level. As she points out, Eichmann claims that “‘Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language’” (48). She goes on to write that “he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche” and that “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (48, 49). Language becomes a virus. All of Eichmann’s sins may originate from his malleability.

In Arendt’s “Postscript,” she makes the claim that her book does not attempt to grapple with the Holocaust, nor the question of totalitarianism, nor even with the nature of “evil.” All she’s attempting to do is focus on a single defendant in a court case. The reader will be forgiven if he or she does not accept Arendt’s claims. For a book that doesn’t attempt to grapple with the Holocaust, it sure has a lot of discussion about the Holocaust. At times, the question of Eichmann’s involvement in the SS becomes a distant second to Arendt’s explanation of how the Third Reich went about attempting to solve the “Jewish question,” which varied according to the year and territory Germany had acquired. At times, this context is helpful to see how Eichmann fits within the regime, but often this information appears to slowly veer away from her supposed focus on a single defendant in a court case. It seems clear that Arendt is interested in how seemingly boring bureaucracies could in the twentieth century become methods for carrying out the century’s greatest atrocity, or what she calls “administrative massacres” (288).

At other times, Arendt seems too close to what she perceives as Eichmann’s internal state. She repeatedly suggests what he was thinking and how he was reacting when it comes to events that were decades old. Even when describing events in the courtroom, she claims some special insight into Eichmann’s mindset that everyone else lacks. For instance, when hearing testimony regarding the cruelty of the SS, Eichmann supposedly demonstrated anger at the injustices, but according to Arendt, “the court and much of the audience failed to see these signs, because his single-minded effort to keep his self-control had misled them into believing that he was “unmovable’ and indifferent” (109). It’s not clear exactly what tipped Arendt off and why others weren’t able to pierce through the facade of Eichmann’s calm demeanor.

But the biggest surprise to come out of Eichmann in Jerusalem is how much of the book is concerned with questions of sovereignty in an increasingly globalized world. Arendt refers to Eichmann’s case as a “show trial,” and at least part of her complaint stems from the abduction of Eichmann from Argentina to Israel. Not only does Israel have no jurisdiction over the sovereign space of Argentina, but Eichmann’s crimes were not actually committed in Israel. In fact, Germany, in an attempt to shun its dark past, refused to extradite Eichmann in order to make him stand trial in the nation-state where his crimes were committed.

There’s a certain timelessness to Arendt’s brilliant phrase, “the banality of evil,” but by questioning what governing body should prosecute crimes against humanity, Arendt’s focus on the tricky question of state sovereignty in a shrinking world seem especially pertinent to the era after WWII, and these questions have only become knottier with time. At one point, Arendt suggests that instead of abducting Eichmann, Israel could have simply assassinated him. It seems like we’ve come a long way, because the United States took this approach when it came to Osama Bin Laden. In a world of eroding borders, drones, and terrorism, Eichmann in Jerusalem may have taken on renewed relevance.

On Guantanamo Diary, Part 2

As someone who works with the slave narrative, I couldn’t help but make connections between Guantanamo Diary and the genre. What I didn’t expect when I first picked up the book was to have this connection made explicit by the author, Mohemedou Ould Slahi. On at least two occasions, Slahi compares his plight with that of slaves in the nineteenth century. In the first instance, he makes this analogy to his interrogator who quickly dismisses it by stating that Africans sold slaves to whites, a time honored technique by white supremacists to absolve America of slavery’s sin. The second time, Slahi draws out the analogy more clearly:

I often compared myself with a slave. Slaves were taken forcibly from Africa, and so was I. Slaves were sold a couple of times on their way to their final destination, and so was I. Slaves suddenly were assigned to somebody they didn’t choose, and so was I. And when I looked at the history of slaves, I noticed that slaves sometimes ended up an integral part of the master’s house. (314)

Slahi employs epiphora to signal the repetition of history embodied by his imprisonment. But the most interesting part of the paragraph comes towards the end when Slahi claims that his imprisonment functions as an integral part of “the master’s house,” which here might be read as America’s international military force and the War on Terror.

In what capacity, however, is Slahi’s torture and imprisonment integral to America’s War on Terror? Judith Butler potentially provides an answer in her book, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Butler argues that the process of grieving and sense of vulnerability that happened following 9/11 was transferred into a desire to inflict harm on the body of the Other (29-30). Thus, violence against Slahi’s body becomes necessary as a symbol for America’s actions against those who did us harm, regardless of the fact that he has no connection to 9/11.

Slahi’s indefinite detention and Guantanamo in general functions as a space of exception, Giorgio Agamben’s theory of sovereign power that I briefly mentioned in my previous post. Butler builds on Agamben, noting that this space of exception reawakens the power of sovereignty, once thought lost to monarchs of the past. The executive has now unburdened itself of judicial restraint (62). What’s more, government institutions apparently see that it is within their best interest to make these signs of power and violence visible to the world.  As Butler notes, early images of shackled Guantanamo detainees were released by the Department of Defense, not smuggled out by some human rights organization (78). Despite the fact that the America’s policies toward and treatment of Guantanamo detainees opened the nation to worldwide criticism, apparently, the DOD saw the symbolic power of these images worth the risk of a potential international backlash.

But back to Slahi’s slavery metaphor. Reading Guantanamo Diary, I couldn’t help but think about Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, a peculiar eighteenth-century slave narrative because it obliquely criticizes slavery in America by depicting a white man enslaved by Africans. The protagonist, Updike Underhill, is captured partway through the novel by North Africans who at had been notorious for enslaving European sailors starting in the sixteenth century. At least part of the novel’s message appears to be, if you don’t like Africans enslaving whites, then white shouldn’t enslave Africans. One of the most remarkable moments in the book is a dialogue between Underhill and an Islamic holy man. While Underhill demonstrates clear disrespect towards Islam at the opening of the dialogue, the two eventually come to an understanding, even if they do not come to a clear theological agreement. Tyler even allows the Muslim to get the better of the narrator during the discussion:

Author. Our religion was disseminated in peace; yours was promulgated by the sword.

Mollah. My friend, you surely have not read the writings of your own historians. The history of the Christian church is a detail of bloody massacre’ from the institution of the Christian thundering legion under Constantine the Great, to the expulsion of the Moors out of Spain by the ferocious inquisition, or the dragooing of the Hugonots from France under Louis the Great. The Massulmans never yet forced a man to adopt their faith. When Abubeker the caliph took a Christian city, he forebore to enter a principal church, because he would be led to pray in any temple dedicated to God; and wherever he prayed, the building would be established as a mosque by the piety of the faithful. The companions and successors of the apostle conquered the cities and kingdoms, like other nations. They gave civil laws to the conquered, according to the laws of nations; but they never forced the conscience of any man. It is true, they then, and we know, when a slave pronounces the ineffable creed, immediately knock off his fetters and receive him as a brother; because we read in the book of Zuni that the souls of true believers are bound up in one fragrant bundle o eternal love. We leave it to the Christians of the West Indies, and the Christians o your southern plantations, to baptise the unfortunate African into your faith, and then use your brother Christians as brutes of the desert.

Here I was ashamed for my country, I could not answer him. (139-149)

By the end of the discourse, the “Mollah” admits his respect for the Christian Scriptures and states that they “contain many excellent rules of life” (141). The vast majority of the dialogue is taken up by the Mollah, and he gets the better of Underhill at every turn, but the narrator still states at the end of the chapter that he was “disgusted” with the priests “fables” and confounded by his “sophistry” (142). This conclusion might point to a strain of Candide-like cynicism that runs through the novel. Even when presented with an enlightened Muslim, the main character can only achieve a brief flittering sense of intercultural understanding.

This dialogue appears incredibly similar to one that occurs towards the end of Guantanamo Diary between Slahi and a new female lead interrogator who’s interested in discussing religious and theological matters. Amusingly, the interrogator has a terrible time attempting to explain the Holy Trinity, eventually admitting, “Look, I really don’t understand the Trinity. I have to research and ask an expert” (358). Slahi responds by asking, “But how can you believe in something you don’t understand?” (358). Slahi also truthfully and humorously “sends her to Hell” because of her religion, which she does in turn. The phrase “sent to Hell” is both playful and personal. Large theological questions are played out between two individuals. The interrogator later jokes, “[Redacted] was relieved because I also sent [Redacted] to hell. ‘So, let’s both of us go to Hell and meet over there!” [Redacted] said” (356).

As in The Algerine Captive, there is no synthesis reached in either dialogue, no conclusion to the ongoing conversation that ties dissimilarity and disagreement together. Both appear to be looking towards discourse not for its ability to necessarily move forward but as a means to achieve a comfortable stasis. Slahi and his interrogator will never see eye to eye, but humor makes it possible to coexist even when the religion of both damns the other. Perhaps this is more agreeable or at least more feasible than complete and total understanding.

On Guantanamo Diary, Part 1

In August of 2002, Mohamedou Ould Slahi was transferred to America’s detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Prior to his transfer, Slahi had been shuffled across borders to one jail cell after another, from his home country, Mauritania, to Jordan to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Paradoxically, it was only when Slahi entered Guantanamo, a space purposefully outside of U.S. borders and international legal protections, that he, like Guantanamo itself, became conspicuous in his invisibility.

The United States has black sites throughout the world, and we routinely rendition prisoners into the hands of countries we perceive as allies in the War on Terror, but Guantanamo, perhaps because of its relative proximity, has actually served to open up a political discussion about how we treat those suspected of aiding terrorism and whether or not the United States truly believes in issues of human rights. In other words, Guantanamo allowed Jacques Ranciere’s titular question, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man,” to enter America’s stale political discourse, albeit in a clipped and incomplete form.

By shuffling Slahi and other detainees into Guantanamo Bay, the United States was playing a shell game on an international stage and with human beings. Detainees were interred into a space of exception safely tucked away from national and international law. But Guantanamo Bay also happens to be the worst kept secret in the War on Terror. By now only the most ignorant have avoided seeing the orange jumpsuits surrounded by wire fences.

This brings us back to Slahi who has improbably written a book on his experience of living in the maw of the United States Government and is currently still held in Guantanamo Bay’s detention camp. (You can’t even call Guantanamo Bay a jail, since the word “jail” implies some sort of legal process that just isn’t happening). Slahi’s book, Guantanamo Diary, is an extraordinary document of a nearly absent voice in America: that of the victims of our seemingly interminable War on Terror. It’s Slahi’s voice that allows him to enter into the world as a political being and speak out against his captors. Without the ability to speak, he would remain just another one of those nameless figures in the orange jumpsuits.

And Slahi’s voice is what’s most striking about Guantanamo Diary. Writing in English, which he picked up while in U.S. custody, Slahi is at turns angry, despondent, sardonic, and often quite funny. Even though English is his fourth language, Slahi manages to develop a whole host of sarcastic tones, from dry wit to strident anger. Incredible moments populate much of the book, including the Mauritanian folktale that opens the second part of the book:

A Mauritanian folktale tells us about a rooster-phobe who would almost lose his mind whenever he encountered a rooster.
“Why are you so afraid of the rooster?” the psychiatrist asks him.
“The rooster thinks I’m corn.”
“You’re not corn. You are a very big man. Nobody can mistake you for a tiny ear of corn,” the psychiatrist said.
“I know that, Doctor. But the rooster doesn’t. Your job is to go to him and convince him that I am not corn.”
The man was never healed, since talking with a rooster is impossible. End of story.
For years I’ve been trying to convince the U.S. government that I am not corn.

I’m not certain of Slahi’s reading habits, but this parable is worthy of Kafka. The psychological, not physical, threat is stressed in the narrative, and despite the torture Slahi goes through–including sleep deprivation, beatings, sexual molestation, and exposure to deafening music–the psychological scars always seem more damaging than any physical damage. There’s also the convoluted relationship between the rooster, the man, and the psychiatrist. The man cannot convince the rooster directly; he must do so through the psychiatrist, who in this instance seems like a stand in for his interrogators and torturers. Throughout the book, it becomes clear that even if Slahi were able to convince the U.S. interrogators of his innocence, this would have no impact on his situation. They too are a part of the larger power structures that make it clear that accusations of terrorism are just as good as evidence of terrorism.

Throughout his experiences, Slahi manages to empathize with his captors. While being detained in his home country of Mauritania, Slahi has a conversation with a guard who’s venting about his inability to afford a home for his wife and him on his meagre government salary, which is a problem since his wife and his mother do not get along. Slahi lends a sympathetic ear and tries to convince the man that a divorce is not the answer. The guard/prisoner diadic is momentarily upended as the prisoner becomes the sage man with answers and the guard the one who desperately seeks his help.

As the U.S. increases Slahi’s torture regimen, he becomes more determined to admit to a crime, any crime they want. You would think this would be easy, but the problem, as Slahi observes, is that you can’t just admit to something you didn’t do. You also have to admit to what you didn’t do consistently. You have to create details out of thin air and then repeat those details over and over again. If you don’t, it’s not like the interrogators will think that maybe their prisoner is lying in order to stop the quickly escalating torture. No, they’ll assume that he’s hiding an even bigger secret. Slahi eventually gets his interrogators to believe he has committed certain crimes, but he makes a mistake when they ask if his admission is true. When Slahi asks if they really want the truth, they say yes, of course. But that’s of course not true. They want Slahi to confirm what they think they already know. Mistakingly, Slahi tells them he made everything up, and the torture regimen starts all over again.

But the most immediately intriguing formal and aesthetic element happens to be the sheer number of redactions that pockmark the text. As you read Slahi’s story, you get a sense that you’re not reading alone. We see the hand of the U.S. government in the black boxes that periodically obscure our reading as well as editor Larry Siems in his numerous footnotes that attempt to provide context and explain what might be underneath those black boxes. It’s an epistemological battle laid out on the page.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the redactions happens to be the often random decision making that occurred when deciding whether or not information should be viewed by the American public and the world at large. At least three times during the text, the censors blot out multiple pages, including the results of Slahi’s lie detector test and, weirdly enough, a poem of Slahi’s. A cynical reading of these redactions might view the former instance as the result of fears of Slahi’s exculpation at the hands of the polygraph and the latter the the fear of the language of affect.

But the redactions also provide circumstantial evidence to Slahi’s claim that following 9/11 the U.S. government didn’t really know what they were doing. He was pulled in because authorities were blindly grasping at straws trying to get to those responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. He recounts interrogators who confuse him with other prisoners and others who clearly forget details of his capture and the crimes he is supposed to have committed. Likewise, the redactions seem at best sloppy and at worst completely random. In an attempt to hide the identity of Slahi’s torturers and other personnel, officials have attempted to block out identifying markers, including nicknames Slahi developed for these individuals. The problem is, at one moment these nicknames will be blacked out and other times they will be clearly visible. They also redact all female pronouns, but because we know they have blocked out female and not male pronouns, this serves no real function. We know when Slahi is speaking to a female guard. At other times, the redactions seem nearly random, such as when the censors improbably block out the words “tears,” once again leading credence to the idea that censor fear the language of affect.

If anything, Guantanamo Diary shatters the idea of the military and CIA as professional, well-oiled machines, an image nearly always enforced by American popular culture. “Sure,” our films and TV shows say, “they break the laws, but they get results, damnit!” Instead, Guantanamo Diary paints a picture of our military and government that’s filled with people who are scared and worried in uncertain times, unable to figure out what to do, who to strike out against.