I’ll probably never touch a mortar & pestle again thanks to a horrifying article I read once in Harper’s. The details–save for this one mortar & pestle-featuring scene–are mostly gone from my brain, but that picture is seared there (I’ll spare you) much like especially grisly scenes from the films American History X (you probably know the one) and Se7en (maybe you have one of your own in mind).
I was thinking about this–unfading pictures of unbearable cruelty–after reading a pair of editorials in the New York Times this weekend. I read Lisa Shannon’s “No, Sexual Violence is not ???Cultural’” first, pointed there by the indispensable Feministing, and it’s something you should go and read right now. No matter how much (or how little) reading you’ve done on rape as a tool of war in Congo, this editorial will stir you to question what you believe.
The second editorial, also about horror in Congo, was Nicholas D. Kristof’s “Death by Gadget,” and, as I’m writing this, it’s #8 on the most e-mailed list, so maybe you’ve already read it. Both editorials make a passing mention of forced cannibalism. Shannon writes:
A month into my first trip to eastern Congo, site of the deadliest conflict since World War II, I had heard plenty of horror stories – from forced cannibalism to the burning alive of the inhabitants of entire villages.
In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides.
This isn’t the first I’d heard about forced cannibalism in Congo, but still, it startled me how quickly my eyes glossed over the mention in Shannon’s article, oh, forced cannibalism, Congo, horror stories, right, right. And in Kristof’s, too, I was slowed only slightly because the language demanded it–the mention of the children, the parents–these aren’t blank brown bodies in the heart of the dark black jungle, but families being forced to commit unspeakable acts in front of and against the people they hold most dear.
What do we do with these things we read? How can we keep from just scanning like this? Tucking away?
At the funhouse there’s not enough time to stop and watch every last gag, but it seems people usually find the time to stare at their own distorted reflections for a stretch: stump legs, stick face, gourd nose. One thing I would like to do is something. In a review of Shannon’s book, also from Feministing, Courtney Martin writes:
[Shannon is] honest and determined, and by the end, even the most skeptical reader has to wonder if more good would be done if we didn’t push ourselves to overintellectualize “good” so damn much.
Take a run, sponsor a woman, think about it less. Let it move me more.
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