imagination
David Beresford
Another Country
As the smoke and flames of factional hatred rise over East Timor I feel a surge of envy tinged with pity for my former colleagues in the rat-pack scrambling once again, post-Kosovo, for airline bookings and their visas.
Envy, for the rush of adrenalin and the camaraderie of the foreign correspondents. Pity for the profession’s obsession with dead bodies. They dominate the news agenda, dead bodies.
For all the funereal sombreness which the network news announcer affects as he or she warns of “disturbing” images that lie ahead, the rehearsed tones of shocked disclosure fail to cover up the organisational excitement which mounts with the body-count of disaster. Dead bodies, or bodies in the act of dying, are the gold standard of world news. Rubber-neckers are, by implication, the audience.
I used to be terrified, as a cub reporter, that I would be sent to cover a car accident in case I was confronted by a headless torso, or torso-less head and shame myself by puking.
Now I’m the hardened newsman, having seen more corpses than most people outside the funeral business and emergency services, I guess, from the days of the Irish hunger strike to South Africa and on. Hunting the dead in pursuit of some obscure truth about ourselves, about society, about humanity, about life and death.
In pursuit of that “truth” I once spent more than two hours staring fixedly at the deepening bottom of a grave being exhumed in Pretoria’s Atteridgeville township.
Solomon Mahlangu, an African National Congress guerrilla who had been hanged at Pretoria central prison during apartheid, was to have been buried in Mamelodi township where he had lived, but when the prison authorities saw how big a crowd of mourners was awaiting their broken-necked hero they hurriedly buried him in Atteridgeville, on the other side of Pretoria.
Now apartheid was over and Mamelodi wanted him back.
I knew the opening sentence; the “intro” I was looking for; something along the lines of: “At 9.17am yesterday metal struck bone signalling it was time for the ANC guerrilla Solomon Mahlangu to start the last stage of his long journey home .”
Somehow I felt that I owed it to the dead man and my profession not to make the moment up. So I got up with the grave- diggers before dawn and found my perch on an adjoining mound of earth to confirm it.
Anticipation, inevitably, betrayed me. It was the remains of the coffin they struck first with cries of disgust at the cheapness of the wood used by the prison authorities as if this compounded the sins of the hangman.
They gathered his remains by hand “with the tenderness of a mother for her baby”, as I wrote at the time. But they required no tenderness: a skull with dislocated jaw, earth-stained ribs and pieces of leg. It was all put in a plastic shroud which, by the time it reached the surface, looked like what it was: a bag of bones.
The Holocaust having been the defining moment of the 20th century it is the accumulation of bodies represented by genocide, or its variant of ethnic cleansing, which has become the correspondent’s grail. I had long wanted to confront it, to “uncover” it and claim it with images and words. I had the opportunity in a remote church, about 60km south of Kigali in Rwanda, just as the African genocide was ripening into memory.
When I read the piece I wrote at the time, a triumph of incoherent indignation, I cannot help but think that someone mocked me, lured me with clich into an ambush. A set-designer of great, if perverse talent, sporting bones for necklaces and skulls pendant from pierced ears, cackling her way around the stage and then retiring into the wings wiping spittle from her chin hairs in happy anticipation of my arrival.
She was Mademoiselle Death – the Great Jester in drag. I was Pilgrim fitted out in the safari kit of the modern foreign correspondent, camera jacket de rigeur from Banana Republic, binoculars by Zeiss, anxious to enter the valley of death in order to meet an early page deadline.
A trail of clues had been laid out by Mademoiselle, degenerating from the familiar to obscenity. A small, checked shirt lay innocently by the rutted and dusty road to puzzle the passing traveller. A herd of cattle grazed contentedly over there.
A silver asbestos roof shone a welcome over a rise, covering a beige brick building partly shaded in turn by a grove of wattle trees.
The deliberation of it was almost insulting. On the path a single leather sandal. Nearby a weather-beaten identity card lay open on the ground. All that was legible on the card was an entry recording ethnicity: “Hutu” and “Twa” crossed out, leaving the word “Tutsi” standing reproachfully alone.
Over the rise they waited for me.
On the threshold of the door through which worshippers used to file to glorify their almighty God, a blackened head plays the welcoming deacon, its mouth gaping in a never-ending scream. Inside the congregation abide in silence, lit only by the gentle light filtering through stained- glass windows and a few more punched out by rocket-propelled grenades. It is a pandemonium of quietude.
A jumble of blankets and bags, lonely limbs and decapitated heads piled between the pews and around the altar. Only one sits, a small boy with his head on the bench in front who seems to have fallen asleep, as if lulled by the rituals of Rome into the dreamland of childhood fantasy.
The door to the sanctum is burst open. Through it tumbles a river of meat and bones, charting a stampede of desperation into the open air. A young man grimaces through melting flesh.
In the sunshine where the devout used to gather in their Sunday best, exchanging the solemn pleasantries of those lately cleansed of sin, lies an obscene playground of battered white balls, skulls whose fractures testify to a harvest by machete blades.
Scattered through the surrounding underbrush was the remembrance of those who nearly got away; legs and arms and heads and clothes, abandoned in the flight to mortality. A rib cage lies in a clearing like an over-size chicken picked clean and abandoned by thoughtless picnickers.
In the recollection of it I seem to hear the knowing cackles of the crone, limping away from the worshipful dead in the Church of Ntarama.
Rubber-neckers think they are looking at death, but in fact it is only at the dead. Death and its secrets lie in another dimension altogether. Bones need to be dressed in the clothes of imagination.