Writing Guantanamo

[Plaid Adder]

Well, I just finished the part of my dystopian novel that deals with an internment camp for uncharged, untried 'enemy combatant' types. Because one of the characters involved in this part of the plot has the ability to read place memories (when she goes to a place she can see things that have already happened there, mostly the bad ones) she practically loses her mind when she walks into the "interview room" and starts seeing visions all the people who have been tortured there, overlapping with each other.

I was surprised by how driven I was while writing that section of the book (those 3 chapters went much faster than most of the rest of the novel in terms of writing) and by how emotionally involved I got in it. Usually there is this kind of weird thing with writing where I can put the emotions into the writing but that means that I'm not aware of feeling them myself. In a way I think that's why I do it: the writing becomes a way of remaining sensitive to these things without having to be constantly depressed and angry all the time. Anyway, this time, having finally rescued the poor character who was being tortured in this place and brought him back out, I was surprised to find myself crying. That hardly ever happens.

We know these things are being done by our government and we remain intellectually aware that they are crimes, but I think we take our intuitive understanding of the human cost of all this and just shove that down into the depths of our souls as far as it will go. Trying to imagine what it's like to be torture, or to witness torture, was a lot harder for me than I had expected (in any genre involving action and battles a lot of bad shit happens to people, so I've written pain and suffering before) and it has also proven very hard for the people reading the story to take. We all know already that stuff like this is going on, and we even know, thanks to Abu Ghraib, what some of it looks like. But I do think fiction can make you *feel* the wrongness in a way that the news and the pictures don't.

But of course the deceptive thing about writing is that it is always about yourself even though you try hard to also make it be about other people. So why did I need to do that sequence? What is it doing to me and to everyone else in this country to have to go on with our normal lives knowing that very close by, in a place where we both know and don't know what's going on, what we consider reality has been suspended along with anything anyone would consider freedom, justice, and the rule of law?

I keep waiting for us to come out the other side of this tunnel. But even when we do, we will all have been scarred by Guantanamo. It will become part of us, even though we have never been sent there. And it will not have done us any good.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder