Whilst writing about literature I have steered away from non-fiction. Non-fiction has a different agenda to fiction, requiring divergent skills. With non-fiction, the way in which the piece is written is less important than what is being written about; whereas with fiction, this is the other way round. This is not to say that there are works of non-fiction which will be far more carefully composed than works of fiction; just that the reasons for reading the two may not be the same, meaning that, in the interests of clarity, I have resisted reviewing the non-fiction I've read this year.
However, I've just finished two books which demand to be made an exception of. The Flight, also known as Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, is a book of acknowledged significance. It's author, Horacio Verbitsky, conducted a series of interviews with a navy officer, Adolfo Scilingo, wherein Scilingo came clean about his part in what the navy had been doing during the dirty war. He spoke to the journalist about the way in which the military regime would drug prisoners and then fly them above the South Atlantic, before throwing them, drugged but alive, into the ocean. Over the course of several years there were weekly flights, which members of the Argentine navy were obliged to participate in. Scilingo said he had been on two of them.
Scilingo's confession was not, in fact, the first time news of these crimes had been officially acknowledged. They had been mentioned in a judicial review conducted in the wake of the end of the dictatorship, and if anyone had wanted to know, the information was out there. However, it was the first time a member of the navy had confessed and broken the code of silence concerning events that had happened almost twenty years previously. The book caused a storm when originally published in Argentina, as for the first time, the nation really began to take stock of the crimes that had been committed in its name by the armed forces during the dictatorship.
Verbitsky's story deals with issues from the recent past. As noted elsewhere, there's a fine line to be trod between moving on from what happened and taking account of what happened. However, the story's potency is heightened by the human role within it of Scilingo himself, who Verbitsky does not give an easy ride. Scilingo's motivations for talking turn from annoyance with his superiors and a hypocritical code of silence, to a genuine realisation of the horror of what he has participated in, to a desperate quest for personal survival. His story is the tragedy, which has a redemptive edge to it, of a man caught up in the wider scheme of political history, unable to sever himself at any point from the circumstances he finds himself trapped in, yet who nevertheless at least has the courage to confront his demons, which is more than could be said for anyone else who emerged from the dehumanised culture he belonged to.
Murat Kurnaz's book tells the other side of the story. Kurnaz was arrested in Pakistan, spent several months being tortured by the Americans in Kandahar, and was then transferred to Guantanamo. A Turkish citizen who'd lived all his life in Germany, who had worked as a bouncer at discos before he discovered Islam, Kurnaz describes with a dispassionate candour the torture he underwent whilst in American custody. We have watched our TV screens over the past six years and glimpsed images of something we know is unethical but about which details have remained sparse. Kurnaz strips clear the TV veneer, offering detail after detail about a shockingly inhumane system which was, and presumably still is, far worse than anything we have been lead to believe.
It is hard to know why Kurnaz's book has not been on the bestseller lists, has not received more attention here. It reads like a thriller, in so far as it's almost impossible to put down. Murnaz writes without embitterment, in spite of everything. The book also gives as telling an insight into the positive properties of Islam as anything I've read. In the face of all that he is forced to suffer, his faith keeps him alive, as well as those around him. At one point a guard who has a modicum of humanity comments on the way that he would have gone mad if couped up in the kind of living conditions the prisoners have to suffer, and notes that only their faith has kept the prisoners sane.
On the other side of the chain link fence are the guards. The damnation of the US system comes about as much through the empty headed savagery of the men and women who run the prison as the prison itself. When Kurnaz comments on those few guards who act with some kind of decency, something the prisoners always note, there is relief that not everyone in this place is corrupt. An inhumane system relies for its efficiency on the inhumanity of its operators. Kurnaz finds greater fellowship with the iguanas, spiders and hummingbirds who visit him in his cell than with the humans who patrol on the outside.
Verbitsky's account of Scilingo's self-confessed crimes is shocking. Yet that shockingness is dulled, no matter what, by time, which dulls all things. Kurnaz's account of events in Kandahar and Cuba is also shocking. Yet that describes a prison which is still active, and many of the men mentioned in his account will still be living in conditions whose barbarity has nothing to do with a world we would like to believe is civilised, even as I write.
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