I DID NOT DREAM OF BEING TORTURED.
But I did dream of
being caged, of being bound and blindfolded, of being kept cold and naked in a small steel box. I
dreamed of terrible footsteps, always approaching, and the chilling sound of metal clanging
against metal. I dreamed of endless screams, and of shadows that stretched toward me, and of
hands holding instruments that I could never quite see.
The dreams ended,
always, before the pain could become real. But that is a small matter. The fear was real
enough.
I SPENT A LITTLE LESS THAN A YEAR researching
and writing my book American Methods -- or, a little more than a year if you count
the time spent on revisions. The book examines the U.S. government's use of torture -- in war, in
prison, and by proxy. My research led me to read scores of human rights reports, hundreds of
pages of government documents, countless newspaper articles, and numerous books on the
history and practice of torture, international law, global politics, and rape. I learned a whole new
vocabulary -- "hooding," "monstering," "stress positions," "falaka," "strip cells," "rendition,"
"waterboarding," "the Palestinian hanging." And I became acquainted with all variety of
imaginative new uses for radiators, pliers, sandbags, broom handles, wire brushes, and typewriter
covers. It was not easy work.
At the beginning,
my attitude was impossibly naive. Not that I believed our government's official line, that torture is
rarely practiced and never condoned -- but I thought I could immerse myself in the subject for
months and not suffer because of it.
I should have
known better. I had already written one book about state violence, and I clearly remembered
weeping at my keyboard, searching for words with which to describe the deep and abiding hate
that could produce the murders of the civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner,
and James Chaney. I remembered the chill I felt typing out "death squad" as I wrote about the
assassination of Fred Hampton. And still -- I thought I could confront our practices of torture
without also sharing in the spiritual wreckage that those practices have wrought. I assumed that
my anger would protect me from the worst facts that I could be made to face. I was wrong, in
part because anger cannot -- and should not -- diminish sorrow, or shame, or impotent loathing.
But I expected, somehow, to stare into the abyss without the abyss also staring into me.
PAIN NEVER FEATURED DIRECTLY IN MY dreams. I
did not see the torturers themselves, or their instruments. It was the fear -- the terror -- that
forced me awake, gasping and sweat-soaked, in the middle of the night. And when I woke the
fear stayed with me. The world felt uncomfortably small. The very idea of safety seemed brittle
and thin; order was an obscene joke.
I gradually learned
how to keep the nightmares at bay. They came in a cycle, and I labored to recognize it. So when I
noticed that I was having trouble sleeping, before the dreams became too intense, I would shift
my focus from research to writing. I would put away, for a time, whatever I was reading and try
instead to get my thoughts in order, to translate my dread into written language. I built a wall with
words, to keep out the fear. And as long as I kept writing, my anxiety would fade, my nightmares
would cease. If writing could not restore the feeling of safety, it could at least shore up my
confidence in my own quiet sanity. Such, I suspect, is a major reason why I write -- to confront,
understand, articulate, and in a very limited way, to control that which I fear.
But the horror
remains. And through my writing, I do my part to spread it. I focus it in the text. I funnel it to the
reader. I distribute it, measure upon measure, chapter after chapter. And in the process, I am
changed.
WRITING ABOUT TORTURE CHANGED ME, and not
always for the better. I am, I realize, less tough than I once thought -- but this is no loss. And I am
more wary of violence, and those who advocate or excuse it. This, too, is likely for the best. But I
have also lost something, which could not rightly be called innocence and may be rather closer to
faith. For I have come to see that the human spirit is not indomitable. It can be so thoroughly
crushed that freedom and dignity disappear. They can be blotted out, surviving not even as ideals
or aspirations. In one way, I have been faced with the fact of human mortality -- not only in the
physical or even spiritual sense -- but in a moral sense as well. It is possible, through the medium
of pain, not only to wipe out a person's existence, but also to erase her sense of self, to finally
break her grasp on reality -- to nullify and negate all values and all meaning. This knowledge, I see
now, has its price.
And yet we must
remember this: I am only thinking about torture, while elsewhere there are actual
human beings held in lightless cells, starving and frozen, undergoing electroshock, being beaten,
being raped. Their suffering is not in the least abstract. Their confrontation with horror is not in
any sense voluntary. Their nightmares, I would wager, are not so easily allayed.
