Human Cargo (37 page)

When he recovered, friends urged him to move on, to leave Spain, but to avoid France, with its large Algerian community. The UK agreed to take him, and a transfer of his refugee status was swiftly arranged; he was not even interviewed by the Home Office. Late in December 1996, Lamine arrived in London. “It was cold, so bitterly cold that I thought I would die,” he said to me, soon after we met. “Believe me, I didn’t see how I would ever be warm again.” Though fluent in five languages, he spoke not a word of English. He found a small room in a cheap hotel at King’s Cross and lay down on his bed, his bones aching from the prison torture, and the wounds from the recent stabbing raw and painful. Days passed. When he could, he slept. The rest of the time he lay still, staring at the wall, thinking. He was assailed by flashbacks—of being bullied as a small boy, of having his leg broken, of the electrodes—and now he could not keep the thoughts away. His life had been fractured, the word he uses again and again, and this time, he feared, he would not have the courage to start over. He was forty-two. “I had reached a black hole. I was lost. I had friends, a life, work in Spain. In England I had nothing. There I had been wanted, useful. Here, I did not exist. I could see no point in going on.”

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THE LITERATURE OF
exile is full of pain. “We, the exiled survivors,” Virgil has Aeneas lament, as he flees the burning city of Troy, carrying his father, Anchises, on his back, “were forced by divine command to search the world for a home in some uninhabited land.” In these journeys into loss and the unknown, the past, as Nabokov wrote in a long essay about memory, overshadows the present and dims the future “into something thicker than its usual pea soup.” Like the false prophets of Dante’s Inferno, Nabokov saw the exile’s head “forever turned backward, and his tears or saliva… running down his shoulder blades.” Edward Said is not the only
writer to have remarked on the ambiguities of the condition: exile, he wrote, “is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.”

Whether Greek or Roman, European or Arab, whether contemporary or ancient, all those who write of exile describe a world in which the past is safer territory than the present, even when the past was full of horror, for at least the past has already been experienced. One of the most frequent themes of exiles is that of recapturing and reliving their lost past, earlier images providing a solid counter to the fluidity and rootlessness of the present. The native shore, observed Milan Kundera, the Czech emigre writer, is after all the only known shore, but the exile, to survive, has no choice but to step off onto a precarious, rickety bridge, from the land where all is familiar and where he speaks a language known to him from childhood— from, that is, his real world—and grope his way across toward a new country, a world hitherto only of the imagination, in which nothing is understood or familiar. In the process, by some sleight of hand and hope, he must reverse these two worlds, the real and the imaginary, so that all that was once familiar becomes imaginary, and the imaginary becomes real. Both to remember too much and to forget too quickly is perilous; a “fetish of exile,” as Said described it, distances the refugee from “all connections and commitments.” Willing himself to forget his cultural background, he finds that he has nothing to put in its place. The bridge is fragile and terrifying. Yet this profound dislocation of the spirit has to be borne, because it cannot be avoided. When Eva Hoffman used the haunting phrase “lost in translation,” she was describing what it means to live not only linguistically but spiritually in a new language. “The words I hear now,” she wrote, “don’t stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue.” For all of us, the word “exile” resonates as an ultimate image of loneliness and need, touching an atavistic fear of losing all we most cherish, and all that we feel has shaped our identities and continues to define our tenuous image of ourselves. For Mandla Langa, one of the African writers who have put on paper the experience of exile that has dislocated their continent
for the last half century, exiles are branded and maimed creatures, condemned like animals who have left limbs in a snare to wander through life “crippled, their minds locked on that fateful moment of rupture.”

It was not until after World War II that systematic attempts were made to link the experience of exile with that of the traumatic events that so often led to it. As the stories of those who had survived the Holocaust became known, so a literature of trauma began to take shape, and with it a realization among doctors that terrifying and destructive events have the power to cripple and maim, even if they left their survivor apparently unscathed, and to reappear later as illness. None of this was new, of course: Freud had written extensively on childhood trauma, and John Bowlby about the lasting effects of loss and bereavement, but something about the intensity and similarity of the symptoms reported by many different patients began to attract attention beyond psychoanalytic circles. Exile, it became clear, particularly when accompanied by brutal experiences, overwhelming loss, and torture, was a potent and disabling event. When Primo Levi and Bruno Bettelheim, who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau, killed themselves at the end of long and productive lives, people were quick to say that the past had finally caught up with them. When the survivors of the concentration camps began to reach retirement, when the huge efforts to keep the past at bay through work and activity began to lessen, their minds were invaded by all that they had lost and endured. It became clear, too, that the aftereffects of the camps were being handed down to a second generation, the heirs of the Holocaust, who seemed to share an anguished collective memory in their dreams and fantasies, waking up at night with terrifying images of gas chambers, firing squads, and extermination camps. They live, as a psychiatrist put it to me, in the reality of their parents’ past, identifying with parental behavior and patterns of thought, caused by a history they feel they share but did not themselves experience.

Like the children of Holocaust survivors, the children of refugees grow up in a world circumscribed by fear, unrealistic expectations,
and overprotectiveness, with parents whose profound sense of powerlessness in the face of annihilation and loss expresses itself often as self-blame and guilt. Because they are in limbo, and because all their concentration and energy have to go into surviving and helping their children survive, they feel they have no permission to mourn and grieve. Seen this way, exile and the memory of trauma and loss produce an experience of bereavement many times over: loss of country, status, activity, social networks, reference points, and family, all compounded by a sense of lost time, the lost hopes and ambitions of youth and young adulthood. Yet delay in mourning, psychiatrists have long agreed, is known to increase the difficulties of adjustment. “That which cannot be spoken cannot be treated,” wrote Bruno Bettelheim not long before his suicide in 1990. “If they are not treated, these wounds will continue to ulcerate from generation to generation.”

Toward the end of the 1970s, there came a move to encapsulate this experience of breakdown, to give the condition a name and a label. As more and more clinicians saw patients who had suffered traumatic events, either recently or far in the past, whether of sudden unexpected horror or consciously self-inflicted harm, they began to document a number of specific emotions. Their patients told them of feeling depressed, fearful, sleepless, irritable, unable to concentrate; they said that they felt estranged from other people and that they kept forgetting the most obvious and important things. They reported flashbacks of great intensity, and terrifying dreams that woke them night after night. They returned, again and again, to their feelings of guilt about the people they had left behind, and those they had failed to save. A new diagnosis, posttraumatic stress disorder, was invented to cover all these symptoms, which seemed to occur, disappear, and then reoccur, sometimes with no apparent reason, sometimes triggered by a smell, a few notes of music, an unexpected encounter. Most people reported a feeling of profound worthlessness. Some spoke of suicide. Others came to their doctors complaining of headaches and constant pains in their arms, legs, necks. Others again described seeing shadows or
hearing screams. They spoke of “frozen memories,” obsessive and intrusive thoughts that came back, unchanged, again and again. Many had panic attacks. A few became hostile, and paranoid, and turned to alcohol or drugs. Some wanted to talk, and then could not stop talking. Some said little, preferring to retreat into silence, where the past was buried deep. “Some stories,” wrote Anne Michaels in her book,
Fugitive Pieces
, “are so heavy only silence helps you to carry them.” When physiological studies were made, changes were found to have taken place in neurotransmitters, hormones, and the immune system. And these various symptoms, twice as common in women as in men, and particularly present in women who had been raped, seemed to occur in people from every different ethnic and cultural background. Rape has its own particular horror, especially among people whose culture views it as extreme dishonor: to overcome the feelings of shame, to survive in a new world where there is no shame attached to rape, may mean rejecting the culture and faith of the past, and with them much that once lent comfort and support.

By the 1980s, post-traumatic stress disorder was attracting the attention of many researchers, drawn not least to the apparent existence of a disorder that seemed, uniquely among mental illnesses (though not, of course, unique to refugees), to be triggered by a trauma from a single specific event. Patients appeared to alternate between reexperiencing their traumatic memories and avoiding them. They were using different defense mechanisms to keep away what felt so acutely painful, to lock into the unconscious what they could not bear to experience. But then the moment would come when the conflicting need to integrate this information into their existing cognitive world became too powerful, and memory broke through these defenses and into the conscious again. These two tendencies, argued the psychiatrist M. J. Horowitz in the early 1980s—the tendency to complete what was missing and the tendency to repress—led traumatized people to oscillate. When they proved incapable of processing the traumatic material, so that it remained permanently in active memory, chronic post-traumatic reactions
followed. Criticized for failing to explain how it is that some people seem to survive traumatic events relatively unscarred, while others react to the same situations by becoming disturbed, Horowitz’s theory found interested supporters in a world in which terrifying and destructive events seemed to be such a feature of the times.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” more used than among those who work with refugees. They argue that the asylum seekers of modern days undergo some of the most extreme events that life can deliver: torture, killings, violence, loss. Lamine’s story is not unusual in its horror or despair, and this fact explains the difficulty people experience in believing the stories of asylum seekers, preferring to find them exaggerated or untruthful simply because they are too painful to absorb or comprehend. Exile, once the fate of individuals, is today the fate of millions—some 40 million people, perhaps, between those driven abroad and those displaced within their own countries.

In a field known to be short on reliable statistics, a few figures nonetheless stand out: depression has been observed in up to 90 percent of people who have been displaced, and post-traumatic stress disorder in about 50 percent; many people who have been tortured have also suffered injury to the brain from beatings to the head, suffocation, near drowning, and starvation. There is, it appears, something singularly traumatic about the combination of forced exile and extreme violence. At no moment is that combination of experiences more disabling than at the moment of arrival in a safe place, when the asylum seeker, frozen in a state of insecurity, not knowing whether he will be allowed to stay or be deported, denied access to work or study, assailed by memories of loss and brutality, oscillates on his bridge, unable to go back or to proceed. And it continues to be disabling, during the long limbo of the asylum process, when those who wait, condemned to passivity and uncertainty, experience feelings of being disliked and despised, which in turn feed existing feelings of failure and valuelessness.

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TORTURE IS
NOW
documented to take place in 124 countries. Two thirds of those are recognized by the United Nations, whose Convention Against Torture most have signed and ratified. Torture alone—physical pain and degradation inflicted as gratuitous punishment, in order to achieve social control through terror and coercion, to obtain information, or as an expression of loathing—is enough to produce consequences; but the severity of these consequences will be influenced by the duration and severity of the ill-treatment, by the age of the person being tortured, by his biological vulnerabilities and his personality, by his expectations and perception of torture, and by the models of the world that he brings to the experience. Victims of torture are individuals, but they are not alone. As with the survivors of the Holocaust, the effects of their torture will be felt on wives and husbands, parents, children, neighbors. As with the Holocaust, torture involves societies that appear on the surface to be civilized, societies in which people who could be expected to treat their fellows as human beings instead turn on them, brutally stripping them of all dignity, safety, and humanity while continuing to behave apparently normally in other ways. This duality and the way that seemingly mindless persecution destroys the deepest-rooted expectations about human behavior are understood to be among the cruelest aspects of torture. Helplessness and pointlessness, the inability to protect either oneself or others—these are what refugees who have been tortured talk about.

In May 1984, two doctors from the Chilean Medical Association traveled from Santiago to Washington to appear before the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. They had come to testify about the activities of some of their colleagues who were collaborating with the military dictatorship in the practice of torture. As the torturers beat their captives into unconsciousness, the two doctors explained, suspending them by the arms and shoulders from poles and hooks, clamping electrodes to their testicles, and stubbing out cigarettes on their bare arms, so these medical colleagues stood by to make certain that the prisoners did not die, but instead lived on to be tortured another day. Disgusted by what they
had heard, the committee issued a report. It called for a worldwide campaign to make these facts known, so that torturers everywhere would be shamed into abandoning the practice; and it urged doctors to study the long-term mental and physical effects of torture itself, and to set up centers where those effects could be documented and treated.