Step Across This Line (38 page)

MARCH 2000: AMADOU DIALLO

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Amadou Diallo, a black immigrant from Guinea, was shot dead in the Bronx by four NYPD police officers—no fewer than forty-one shots being fired by the quartet—and all four shootists have just been acquitted of all wrongdoing, in a verdict that has stunned and divided New Yorkers.
]

English being the most elastic of languages, the word “mistake” is capable of a pretty big stretch, meaning anything from “innocent little gaffe” to “unforgivable, catastrophic error.” This week in Albany, New York, the jury in the Amadou Diallo case stretched it a bit further still.

The jury decided Diallo’s death was the result of a tragic mistake or, one might more accurately say, forty-one tragic mistakes, lethal, high-velocity mistakes, fired in quick succession by the four members of the Street Crime Unit, two of whom—Officers Carroll and McMellon—discharged their full sixteen-bullet (no, make that sixteen-
mistake
) clips into Diallo’s body. After a pause, their colleagues, Officers Boss and Murphy, added, respectively, five and four tragic mistakes each.

These mistakes were themselves the consequences of earlier mistakes. The policemen saw a black man on his own doorstep and made the mistake of thinking he was a criminal. They thought he reminded them of a sketch they’d seen of a rapist but, er, they were mistaken. They thought he was reaching for a gun when in fact he was reaching for his wallet: um,
bad
mistake. They claimed to have seen a “muzzle flash,” as if a bullet had been fired. (Wallets rarely emit such flashes.) Then Officer McMellon stumbled and fell; his colleagues erroneously concluded he’d been hit, presumably by Diallo’s deadly wallet, and shot to kill. And they went on and on shooting because, bizarrely, they thought Diallo, who didn’t fall down for a time, was wearing a bullet-proof vest. He wasn’t. He was being shot so often and so hard that it was, almost certainly, the force of the bullets that was keeping him on his feet. In his dead body there were nineteen entry wounds and sixteen exit wounds.

When the police officers discovered their mistakes—“where’s the fucking gun?”—they begged Amadou Diallo not to die. Later, in court, they wept for him. However, they plainly believe they have wept and suffered enough. They hope, according to press reports, to “ease back” into normal life. Through their lawyers, they express displeasure at suggestions that they should resign. They hint, however, that because of all the criticism they may not wish to remain police officers. Amazingly, it seems they have begun to see themselves as the injured parties. (Those courtroom tears are beginning to look even more crocodile-ish than they did at the time.)

And their senior officers, facing wrathful accusations of police racism, say that the NYPD feels “disheartened” by the flood of criticisms. There is much that should dishearten it. The Diallo killing has shown that the automatic assumptions within police culture—when coupled with the stop-and-frisk powers given to the police by Mayor Giuliani, and given the greater power of life and death by the omnipresence in America of the gun—are such that American minority groups now feel that their lives are seriously at risk. To put it bluntly: if you happen to be black, and a police officer stumbles while you are reaching for your wallet, his partners may shoot you dead.

But this is not, unfortunately, why the NYPD feels disheartened. The criticism is what depresses them, not their own mistakes. Because everybody makes mistakes, right? Right. But accusations of racism? Boy, those hurt.

One or two voices have begun to demand that the officers be dismissed from the NYPD, but at the moment of writing, the idea that men should be held accountable for their errors hasn’t caught on. Mayor Giuliani, whose baby the much-enlarged Street Crime Unit is, has unsurprisingly defended the police. His political rival, Hillary Clinton, has issued her customary bland, having-it-both-ways nostrums. And the dead man’s impressive mother, Kadiatou Diallo, is too brokenheartedly dignified to say anything that might be interpreted as a call for revenge.

But:
of course
the four officers should be fired at once. The idea that they might get their guns back and return to patrolling the streets of New York, with their poor judgment and macho slogans (“we own the night”), is unimaginably awful. No, worse: it’s imaginably awful. In the aftermath of the beating of Rodney King in L.A., the sodomizing by baton of Abner Louima, and now the death of Amadou Diallo, people are beginning to be able to imagine the previously unimaginable.

Tragedy happens—“tragic mistakes” happen—when men act according to their flawed natures, in fulfillment of their preordained destinies. The tragedy of the four killers of Amadou Diallo is that their deeds were made possible by their general preconceptions about black people and poor neighborhoods; by a theory of policing that encouraged them to be rigid and punitive toward petty offenders; and by a social context in which the possession and use of firearms is so normative as to be almost beyond discussion. The tragedy of the street vendor Amadou Diallo is that he came as an innocent to the slaughter, made vulnerable by poverty and by the color of his skin. And the tragedy of America is that a nation which sees itself as leading the world toward a global future in which the American values of freedom and justice will be available for everyone fails so frequently and so badly to guarantee that freedom and that justice for so many people within its own frontiers.

APRIL 2000: ELIÁN GONZÁLEZ

When the world’s imagination engages with a human tragedy as poignant as that of Elián González, the six-year-old refugee boy who survived a shipwreck only to sink deep into the political mire of Cuban-American Miami, it instinctively seeks to enter into the hearts and minds of each of the characters in the drama.

Any parent can grasp something of what Elián’s father, Juan Miguel González, has been going through back in Elián’s hometown of Cárdenas—the pain of losing his firstborn son, a child who arrived only after seven miscarriages; next the joy of learning that Elián had improbably survived, floating toward Florida on a rubber ring; and then the seismic shock of being told by a gang of estranged relatives and total strangers that they were resolved to stand between him and his child.

Perhaps we can understand Elián’s inside-out state of mind a little, too. After all, this is a boy who saw his mother slip into the dark ocean and die, whose father hasn’t been there. So if Elián now clutches at the hands of those who have been with him in Miami, if he holds on to them for dear life the way he clung to that rubber ring, who can blame him? If he has constructed a kind of provisional happiness in his new Florida backyard, we should understand that as a psychological survival mechanism, not as a permanent replacement for his father’s love.

And if politicians play politics with a small boy’s life, nobody likes it much, but nobody’s very surprised, either. Al Gore weighs in with a poorly thought through scheme to turn Elián and his father into U.S. residents (a scheme that Juan Miguel González instantly rejects), and we know that he’s trying—and almost certainly failing—to win a few Cuban Republican votes. The mayor of Miami–Dade County, Alex Penelas, irresponsibly declares that his police force will not execute any order to hand Elián back to his father, and we know that he’s playing to his particular gallery, too. Fidel Castro comes up with a succession of grandstand plays, turning Elián simultaneously into a symbol of national pride and of the folly of emigration to the USA, and this, too, comes as no surprise.

Elián González has become a political football. The first consequence of becoming a football is that you cease to be thought of as a living, feeling human being. A football is inanimate, and its purpose is to be kicked around. So you become what Elián has become in the mouths of most of those arguing over him—useful, but essentially a thing. You become the proof of the addiction of the United States to litigation, or of the pride and political muscle of a locally powerful immigrant community. You become the location of a battle between mob rule and the rule of law, between rabid anti-Communism and Third World anti-imperialism. You are described and redescribed, sloganized and falsified, until, for the howling combatants, you almost cease to exist. You become a sort of myth, an empty vessel into which the world can pour its prejudices, its poison, and its hate.

All of the foregoing is more or less comprehensible. But what’s going on in the minds of Elián’s Miami relatives—that’s a tough one. This poor boy’s flesh-and-blood family has elected to place its own ideological considerations over his obvious and urgent need for his father, which looks, to most of us on the outside, like an ugly, unnatural choice. There is strong evidence—for example, in a powerful
New York Times
article written by Gabriel García Márquez—that Juan Miguel González is a loving father; so when the Miami relatives’ lawyers assault his good character, it sounds like a cheap shot. And while there is also evidence that Juan Miguel is being used by Castro for political ends, most of us would say, so what? Even if Señor González is a fully-fledged Red of the sort most hated by the Florida Cuban community, this does not override the rightness of returning his son to his care, and to argue that it does is, well, inhuman. When the Miami relatives hint that Elián will be “brainwashed” if he goes home, it only makes us think that they are even more blinkered than the ideologues they seek to condemn.

García Márquez concludes his article by deploring “the harm being done to Elián González’s mental health by the cultural uprooting to which he is being subjected.” This routinely anti-U.S. gibe is surely wide of the mark. President Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno, and the U.S. federal courts have taken a sensible line throughout the protracted crisis, and American public opinion has generally backed their view that Elián’s place is with his dad. This compares very favorably with, say, the actions of the German authorities, who have in a number of notorious recent cases refused to return children to non-German parents living abroad.

Plainly, the Elián story is not an American but a Cuban tragedy; and, yes, “cultural uprooting” is at its heart, but not in the sense that García Márquez meant. It is the Miami Cuban community that has evidently been harmed by being uprooted from its island in the sun. Their flight from tyranny has ended, or so it presently seems, in a flight not only from reason but from simple humanity, too.

MAY 2000: J. M. COETZEE

Just occasionally, a work of literature offers its readers a clearer, deeper understanding of the opaque events being reported in the press and on TV, whose shadowed truths the half-light of journalism fails to illumine. E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
taught us that the great public quarrels of history can make it impossible for individuals to construct a private peace. History forbids the friendship between the Englishman Fielding and the Indian doctor Aziz. “Not yet, not yet,” Aziz demurs. Not while imperialism’s great injustice stands between us. Not until India is free.

After World War II, many German poets and novelists felt that their language had been reduced to rubble by Nazism, as thoroughly as the bomb-devastated cities. The “rubble literature” they created sought to rebuild German writing brick by brick.

Now, as the aftermath of Empire is acted out on the white-owned farmland of Zimbabwe while Kenya and South Africa watch with trepidation, J. M. Coetzee’s acclaimed fiction
Disgrace
is proposed as another such age-defining work, a lens through which we can see more clearly much that was murky before.
Disgrace
is the story of David Lurie, a white professor who loses his job after sexual-harassment charges are laid against him by a female student with whom he has had a joyless series of sexual encounters. Lurie goes to stay with his daughter Lucy on her remote smallholding, where they are violently attacked by a group of black men. The consequences of this attack profoundly shake Lurie, darkening his view of the world.

There is something in
Disgrace
that harks back both to the Forsterian vision of the Indian struggle for independence and to the Germans’ rubble literature. In Lucy’s apparent readiness to accept her rape as her assailants’ way of working out on her body the necessary revenges of history, we hear a much harsher, more discordant echo of Dr. Aziz’s “not yet.” And Lurie believes (like, one must conclude, his creator) that the English language is no longer capable of expressing the Southern African reality.

The bone-hard language Coetzee has found for his book has been much admired, as has the unflinchingness of his vision. The book unquestionably fulfills the first requirement for a great novel: it powerfully creates a dystopia that adds to the sum total of the imagined worlds at our disposal and, by doing so, increases what it is possible for us to think. Reading about Lurie and Lucy on their dangerous, isolated patch of land, we can more readily grasp the condition of those white farmers in Zimbabwe, as history comes calling for its revenge. Like the Byronic Lucifer—in whose name both “Lurie” and “Lucy” can be found—Coetzee’s protagonist “acts on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him.” He has, perhaps, a “mad heart,” and believes in something he calls “the rights of desire.” This makes him sound passionate, but in fact he’s cold and abstracted to an almost somnambulist degree.

This cold detachment, which also permeates the novel’s prose, is the problem. “Rubble literature” didn’t just strip language to its bones. It put new flesh on those bones, perhaps because its practitioners retained a belief in, even a love for, that language, and for the culture in which their renewed language was to flower. Lacking that loving belief, the discourse of
Disgrace
sounds heartless, and all its intelligence cannot fill up the hole.

To act on impulses whose source one claims not to understand, to justify one’s plunges at women by one’s “rights of desire,” is to make a virtue of one’s psychological and moral lacunae. For a character to justify himself by claiming not to understand his motives is one thing; for the novelist to collude in that justification is quite another.

Nobody in
Disgrace
understands anyone else. Lurie does not understand Melanie, the student he seduces, nor she him. He doesn’t understand Lucy, his own daughter, and she finds his deeds and his “case” for his actions beyond her. He doesn’t understand himself at the beginning, nor does he get any wisdom by the novel’s end.

Inter-racial relations are conducted at the same level of ignorance. The whites don’t understand the blacks and the blacks aren’t interested in understanding the whites. Not one of the novel’s black characters—not Petrus the “gardener and dog-man” who works with Lucy, and certainly not the gang of assailants—is developed into a living, breathing character. Petrus comes closest, but his motives remain enigmatic and his presence grows more menacing as the novel proceeds. To the novel’s whites, its black inhabitants are essentially a threat—a threat justified by history. Because whites have historically oppressed blacks, it’s being suggested, we must now accept that blacks will oppress whites. An eye for an eye, and so the whole world goes blind.

This, then, is the novel’s acclaimed revelatory vision: one of a society of conflicting incomprehensions, driven by the absolutes of history. Certainly it’s coherent enough—coherent in its privileging of incoherence, striving to make of its blindness a sort of metaphorical insight.

When a writer’s created beings lack understanding, it becomes the writer’s task to provide the reader with the insight lacked by the characters. If he does not, his work will not shine a light upon darkness but merely become a part of the darkness it describes. This, alas, is the weakness of
Disgrace.
It doesn’t, finally, shed enough new light on the news. But the news does add a bit to our understanding of the book.