Saturday, March 11, 2006

Note: All names have been changed to protect privacy

Night Report

It is around 10:30pm and I have just come upstairs to my hotel room in Amman. The city spreads out over hills beyond my window, with light twinkling, but still one can tell that this city is not a rich one, the lights are dimmer than in the west, with fewer placed at greater distances. The sound of traffic is constant on the boulevard 11 floors down, and the white noise seems like the white noise of any city’s traffic. It neither comforts nor disturbs. I burp, and the after taste of lamb, garlic and hummus remind me of dinner. The i-tunes is playing Rigoletto -- it is not the comfort of a good trashy book, which is what I would really like, but it is something familiar and full of beauty. I consider my exhaustion tonight well earned, and the voices lift me for just a bit out of right here, right now.

Today was the second day of interviews with former detainees from Iraq, and like any new endeavor, every moment seemed to contain a whole world of fresh awareness, each moment overflowing with a million things to think about. The stories I heard were atrocious, cruel, dehumanizing, and to hear them told from the mouths of these well dressed dignified simple people made me cringe. Yesterday was awful; today’s horrors were worse. I cannot retell them here as I did yesterday. I tried several times today to write something palatable, but it just doesn’t seem to work, the stories are too hard, this news column is not the place. My writing will just relate bare facts that will be awful to read, nothing more. The face of the teller will be missing. Maybe tomorrow I will find a way, but not tonight.

When Verdi wrote Rigoletto, with all its terrible tragedy, he gave it a swollen beauty that made the tragedy bearable. I made four drypoint portraits today, each covered in text – faces and words. That makes six in two days. In the end, making these pictures is not really about getting the word out. If it was, it would be a vast expense of effort to inform an insignificant number of people. A.D., one of the lawyers here, said that making the pictures must be an attempt to liberate, both myself and my audience, and the victims. The victims, through the long telling of their stories, become free of the solitariness of their burden. A.’s thought was a sincere one, and it gives me comfort. Maybe here is what the tragic is in art – its sincerely listening to private pain in a public space.

Verdi’s notes float out, full of bittersweet melancholy.

-Daniel