Tuesday, June 27, 2006

I recently traveled to Amman, Jordan at the invitation of lawyer Susan Burke of Burke-Pyle, LLC in Philadelphia.  The Burke-Pyle lawyers and I were joined by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Akeel & Valentine PLC in Detroit, as well as journalist Tara McKelvey from The American Prospect and a portrait photographer.  We were in Amman to conduct interviews of Iraqis who had been tortured at Abu Ghraib Prison.  These former detainees had traveled by van from Baghdad to Amman to speak with us.  Each Iraqi had been imprisoned, humiliated and tortured by their captors, and each had been released without ever being charged with a crime.  One of the men that I talked to was shot and killed not three weeks after returning to Iraq.  They were all very much afraid of talking with us, and very brave for doing so.  The stories that they related were dignified and sad -- very, very sad.  Many of them had lost close family members -- often their children -- from stray bombs or gunshots, and had returned home to their families after their imprisonment as broken, depressed people.
 
Burke Pyle LLC is preparing a lawsuit on behalf of these former prisoners, and the lawyers were there to conduct preliminary fact-finding interviews.  Tara McKelvey, the journalist, was investigating the story for a book and an article she is writing.  I was there as an artist, to witness the interviews and somehow bring these truly human stories out via my art.  I made 8 drypoint etchings on the spot, drawing portraits and text (written backwards) of each Iraqi former detainee during the interviews.  I wrote backwards on the plates because the printing process reverses the images.  I wrote as fast as possible so as to give my viewers a real sense of the testimony given.  I did not edit, other than to decide when to start writing and when to stop.  I did not want to add text after the interviews, as I wanted the words to be their words, not my words, to give the eventual viewers as much as possible the sense of being right there in the room listening. When I ran out of copper plates for drypoints, I painted the portraits and text in watercolor, and I am now using these watercolors to create woodblock prints that will displayed as prints and bound as a hand printed book.  The drypoints will be printed both as individual prints and as a book, combining the original prints with silkscreens of the same text retranslated into Arabic. My goal is give a voice to these victims in a way that is more direct and more human than what is available through newspaper or TV articles.

Why am I telling you this? I think that this work concerns a wider public then just myself and those few people I know interested in my work. I feel a responsibility to the people that gave me their testimony under pretty frightening conditions (many received death threats just for talking with Americans, and as I mentioned before one has been killed by an unidentified gunman) to get their first person stories out to as wide a public as possible.  I am writing you because I know you can help me find a way to exhibit this work to a broader public.  Perhaps you know where I could exhibit these images, or perhaps you know someone else who can help me.  If you do, please send me an email to daheyman@aol.com, and put something in the subject line so that I will know why you are writing me.