 So, welcome back to our final session of this symposium. If you're new to the room, my name is Stephen Klingman. I'm a professor in the English department, director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, and it's been our pleasure to host this symposium today in collaboration with the Journalism Department and the MFA Program for Poets and Writers. I think everybody will agree if you've been in the room through the day or even here just for part of it, it's been a most amazing day, most extraordinary day. We've heard such wonderfully moving speeches and talks by various people. We've heard from Jim Foley's friends. We've heard from writers, poets, photographers, journalists, everybody thinking about the things that inspired James Foley and the things that he handed on to others to be inspired by. So we feel an event like this continues a tradition of which James Foley is in a sense the founder, and we're very happy to do it. So what will happen in this final session is that in a minute I will call on my friend and colleague, Martina Spada, a wonderful poet who read earlier this morning a beautiful huzzle for James Foley, and he will read from James Foley's MFA thesis, and those of you who know Martina know he's a wonderful performer, so you're in for a treat when he does that. And when Martina is done he will be followed by Charles Sennett, who spoke a little earlier this afternoon. The director of Ground Truth, co-founder of Global Post, and a journalist of Great Standing and Great Eminence and Great Experience. And he will give us a remembrance of James Foley. Following that I will return one more time because I just want to say a few words in conclusion and we have a couple of gifts to hand out as well. So that's how things will go and so without any further ado, Martina. Thank you Stephen. Thank you again everyone. There's been some turnover in the audience since this morning, so forgive me if I repeat myself a bit. As I said this morning, I knew Jim Foley as my student. He took my classes. I served on his committee. Better still, I knew him as a principled human being who wanted to live a principled life. I helped him get a job at the care center in Holyoke teaching English to Puerto Rican adolescent mothers. Before coming here he took part in the Teach for America program at the Lowell Elementary School in Phoenix teaching in a Mexican-American community. Much has been said about Jim. Now I want Jim to speak for himself as a gifted writer and teacher. I'll read a short chapter from his MFA thesis, the Cowhead Revelations. Alba Núñez Cabeza de Baca was a conquistador whose name literally translates to Cowhead. Bust the title. A few more cultural footnotes. The chapter is called Zapata vive la lucha sigue or Zapata lives, the struggle goes on. Emiliano Zapata was, of course, the leader of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Aquí estamos y no nos vamos is a slogan that means here we are and here we stay. La migra, of course, refers to immigration law enforcement. To set the stage there is an act of police brutality in the community witnessed by the teacher, Jim Foley. People have been arrested. They will be deported. The classroom is in an uproar. Enter Anton and Francisco stoned, listen up y'all, Francisco said. His eyes half closed. What we need is a revolution. Revolution. Lock up all the white people and send them on the migra boss back to Canada. Everyone laughed. Let's do it. I said, yeah, send your ass back to Canada, Foley. Yeah, for first, put up. Let's do the revolution right here. You ain't leaving no revolution, Foley, you're on the migra side. Yeah, I saw you Foley just watching. I didn't try to come back at him. I let the word sink in like teeth. I let them stare at me and didn't say anything. At recess, I rifled through Francisco and Anton's desk and coat pockets. In the oversized jean jacket slumped over Anton's chair, I found a rolled baggie. In the baggie were some loose buds and what was left of a half-smoked joint. I took the baggie and put it in my desk drawer. I could hear Francisco and Anton coming. I turned off the lights. When they came in, I grabbed both of them by the biceps. They flinched. You two brought drugs into my class. You bring drugs in, you shitheads go in the closet. They put on stiff faces, but they were freaked out about what was going to happen next. I opened the closet door. They stepped in and I locked it. What the fuck, Foley, Francisco's voice said from behind the door. You're going to get fired for this shit. This is whack. This is prison shit. Listen up, I said, into the door. I'm talking now. We're going to do something and you two are going to lead it. You two are going to act like leaders or you're getting kicked out of school. You get it? They didn't say anything. After that, I ran to the art room and got three different shades of brown construction paper and two bottles of rubber cement. I ran back to my room and began cutting. Making a brown paper cone for my head, I cut out two horns and rubber cemented them to either side of the paper cone. I cut out some brown splotches and taped the paper skin to my body and went over to the portable CD player and put on the ghetto boys. I opened the door and got in the closet with them. Foley, what the fuck? We're gay, Foley. Shut up, I said. When I bust out of here, you two follow. Play along like I'm a crazy man, but I know what I'm doing. I'm going to be dressed like a cow. Make sure they all listen. Over the thump of bass, I could hear the class shuffling in. I put on my horns, threw open the door to the closet, and marched through desks, shouting from the no-carts, listen up, listen up. I am not alone. I am not alone. I am Nunes, cabeza de vaca, el conquistador from the old world, España. I am wrecked on your shores. I got rotten shoes. My armor is rusted. My gunpowder is wet. My sword is lost. My blue eyes can't stand the sun. My hair comes out in clumps. I slog through the thicket and wade swamps. The deer and small animals scatter from my path. Dark eyes peer at me through feathers. I see the distant fires crackling in the night. I run. I have lost my fire, and I have lost my gun. They looked at me like I'd gone whack, as padre l'unique though caught in a DT shake. I ran between the narrow rows of desks, flapping my arms with the brown splotches taped down the side to look like cow spots. I got up on my teacher's desk and shouted, I am cabeza de vaca. Who is with me? Susana raised her hand. Foley, what are you talking about? Not Foley, noones cabeza de vaca. Fuck yeah, Francisco said, the smell of weed rising from the closet door. Cavesa de vaca, big ass cow head. I jumped off my desk and grabbed Francisco. The class flinched like I was going to flip. Francisco was too stoned to react. I knelt down in front of him and raised my arms wide. Give me your women. I shouted. I sprinted across the room to Anton trying to exit and got in front of him shouting, shoot me with your arrows. I grabbed Patricia by her hands and begged, give me your fire. No one said a word. I jumped back on my desk and pointed to Francisco. Francisco strutted down the rows and started grabbing the desks, shaking them to the beat, the books rattling out between their pin knees. Patricia got on top of her cubicle and started chanting, aquí estamos y no nos vamos. Aquí estamos y no nos vamos. Anton started throwing pieces of chalk. We are on a tremendous journey, a journey from God. I yelled. On the back science table, you will find a blank piece of oak tag taped to a yard stick. One person from your group will take one of those with a pack of markers next to it. Bring it back to your group. On one side, right, aquí estamos y no nos vamos. And on the other side, right, in English, stop the violation, free the population. Mario raised his hand. Foli, that's not what it means in Spanish. Whatever, we need something that rhymes in both languages. Who's going to see this? First, we're going to march around the pond. Then, when all the classes and all the teachers have seen us, we're going to march to Devaca Park. Is it going to be illegal? Mario asked. Nonetheless, the First Amendment is illegal. So it's not even a little illegal, Patricia said. The other teachers won't like it. We have to march and be serious and keep our signs straight and decide what we're going to say before we get out there. And none of you better be precise, Francisco said. They scurried to the science table for supplies and back to their groups. Their backs hunched over squeaking markers while the two fried spirits of Cabeza de Vaca looked on. After 10 minutes, I called them up. Rise, rise to your feet, I said. Mario and Susana jumped out of their desks. Javier knocked over his and candy bars and went flying. They filed out quietly into the baked afternoon. Their signs were crudely written and poorly carried. Francisco ran to the front, knocking their backs straight and into single file. He stood on a rock in front of Guadalupe's fish pond and started pulling shoulders by him like he was operating a turnstile. Anton started pushing like a pudgy bulldozer from the back. Mario tripped over Benny. Patricia, I said, Patricia started shouting. Zapata, vive, vive. Manicela's clique, not to be outdone, shouted. La lucha sigue, sigue. Patricia's clique, then Manicela's back and forth. The girls' voices scratched at each other until they could be heard all the way to the cafeteria. With the girls' shouting and the gangsters pushing, the whole line began single filing around the gate of Guadalupe's fish pond. A class going out to music slowed. Another sweaty from recess stopped. Faces ran to classroom windows to see what the noise was all about. Teenage bullshit organized into chanting and steps. Teachers came outside, their wrinkled expressions blinking in the sun. Mrs. Wilson recognized me under the paper horns and I waved. Everything was under control. As they marched, sweat popped on their soft faces and the chant started to slow into a meditative deeper. Aquí estamos y no nos vamos. Aquí estamos y no nos vamos. Until the sun started to bleach their voices. I stood under the big creosote tree and watched the machine go. Francisco stepped over the fence and got up on the big rock next to the pond. He raised his arms and, before I could react, threw himself into a perfect cannonball landing dead center in the green water. Algae splattered over the rocks. The white and orange scales flew back and forth across their scummy pond in a panic. The march stopped. We stood, appalled as Francisco, his feet touching the slimy bottom, pretended to dog paddle. I ran quickly and pulled his arm out. Francisco tugged back for some reason. The magic left their bodies when Francisco plunged. Maricela whipped her sign into the pond. The yardstick made a boomerang into the water. Then they all started boomeranging their signs. The oak tag sails arching and crashing down on each other. The water became a floating armada of soaking oak tag and running ink. Mrs. Wilson pushed through the crowd, yelling, I pointed toward the far gate, toward the abaca park. Barados! I said, then the afternoon bell rang and they scattered in all directions. Thank you. That is a tough act to follow. Martine, that was awesome. I wanted to share with you a moment, just a vignette that I had with Jim. And I realized that all my time with Jim was on deadline, was on the phone, was welcoming him home when he got home from Libya, and it was always in motion. And it was always a bit chaotic. And when I really thought about it, there was just one journey that I took with Jim where I got to really just sort of freeze time for a minute. We were completely in motion, but we were trapped on a train. And I want to just share that vignette with you, because I think it really gets at some of the things that I think are the most important messages about bearing witness. It was May 24, 2011, and the early morning sun glinted off the tracks as the Acela from Boston to New York lurched forward out of South Station and began to roll, picking up momentum on its way. Jim and I just barely made it, bounding a board about 30 seconds before the sound of the conductor's whistle and then the doors slamming shut. A fitting start to a journey for two members of an unruly tribe of foreign correspondents who need deadlines to get things done and have a penchant to push just about everything to the edge to the last few seconds before whistles blow and doors slam shut. There was no way we were going to miss this train. This journey was sacred. Just six days earlier, Jim had been released after being held in Libya for 44 days. He was still shaken from the experience and the death of his friend, Anton Hamerl. Hamerl was killed and left for dead when they were overtaken by government troops near Braga. Despite the fatigue and the trauma, Jim was with me that early morning because he wanted to be there for the memorial service that would be held later that day in New York for the photographer Tim Hetherington. Hetherington was killed in Misrata, Libya on April 20 with another colleague, Chris Hondros, 41. Both suffered shrapnel wounds while covering some of the most intense days of the Civil War that erupted amid the Arab Spring and the pro-democracy wave of protests sweeping the Middle East in that fateful year of 2011. Hetherington and Hondros had been traveling with rebel fighters who came under a furious mortar attack launched by Gaddafi's brutal regime. They bled out before they could get to a hospital. Jim wanted to be there at that service to bear witness to their work, to their lives. Jim had worked alongside both men in Libya. He was a freelancer working for Global Post then. And he was one of the best field correspondence we had. His early work in Afghanistan stood out, particularly a report on an embed where he captured an ambush of an armored Humvee from the inside. The gunner in the turret suddenly collapsed. And the vehicle rumbled forward, still under fire. There was chaos and panic and blood as they realized the gunner had been shot in the head. Through it all, Jim kept his humanity and never trained his camera on the wounded soldier. That was the profane image, not the sacred storytelling that Jim was there to tell. Jim allowed the gaze of his lens to drift down to the soldier's helmet, which lay on the floor of the Humvee. Jim focused on the dent in the metal where the bullet entered and then focused in on the Kevlar Mesh, which provided the reveal of the more sacred story. The bullet was trapped in the Kevlar Mesh. He was focusing on the trapped bullet, just as the soldiers tending to their wounded comrade realized he was OK. The bullet was stopped by the helmet. Even though he was knocked out cold, he was going to live, and they were just realizing this. It was like filming a small miracle, and the joy on the unit's face as they realized their fellow soldier, their brother in arms, was going to be alive. There was a profanity-laced joy as the soldiers opened his eyes and came to. That moment was as real and profound a moment of war as I have ever seen a journalist capture. Jim was there bearing witness to a moment of life amid war, a sacred moment. And he wanted to go into the fighting in Libya with the same desire to be close to that action, to tell the stories that reveal the life of the people who are caught up in war. He wanted to bear witness. And he did that, reporting on the victims of the war and hospitals long after the network crews had moved on, reporting on children standing on the side of the bombed out roads, watching what was happening to their country, to their futures. But when he was bearing witness, he often got too close. We worried about him. On April 5, 2011, he took his reporting too close to the edge. He was with Hamerl and freelance reporter Claire Morgana-Gillis and Spanish photographer Manu Brebu while traveling with a rebel unit that was charging forward. The unit was crossing a chaotic and shifting front line and the group of freelance journalists and friends jumped out of the vehicle and tried to take cover on the side of the road. Hamerl was shot and killed by the advancing government troops. Jim, Claire, and Manu were seized and taken to a Libyan detention center and held for 44 days. We celebrated with the Foley family when they were released. And I had asked Jim to take the immediacy of that moment to write an essay for our field guide about lessons learned. It was just six days after his return from captivity. I thought it was a teaching moment for a former teacher. The idea was that he would use the train ride to do some editing. But Jim had a penchant for passing out when he was tired. He was an epic napper, as I would come to learn. Soon he was curled up and sound asleep with his face leaning against the window of the train and the sun bouncing off his sunglasses as Rhode Island flickered past us. While he slept, I read the essay he had stayed up all night writing. It needed some work, but it was all there. It was a spartan but riveting account of the moments before, during, and after the capture. It was a meditation on how he survived and held on to his faith and his dignity. And it was a reflection on mistakes he made in the field. Above all, it was honest. And if there was anything that really captured the signature of Jim's writing in the field, it was that, honesty. He always wrote honestly about people caught in conflict. This time, it just happened to be about him and how he got caught and watched a good friend killed and almost lost his own life. It was sobering. But I could feel in the writing that Jim was less comfortable bearing witness to his own life. He was less comfortable teaching a lesson where he was at the center. Telling his own story was not Jim's style as a journalist. Something I've observed here today is that it was his style in his fiction and it wasn't in his non-fiction. And I think there's something really important and powerful about that. Jim woke up somewhere in Connecticut and we did a few edits. He asked that I wait to publish the essay until he had a chance to return to the field and date-line it from there. I didn't promise that and we wanted him to stop and work with us in Boston for a while. We wanted him to deal with some of the trauma he had suffered. But we set aside all of that for now and we just fell into a conversation about his work, about his commitment to the craft and his desire to return to the field, particularly back to Libya, to bear witness to what was unfolding there. I wanted to ask him about one passage in the essay where he said that his faith played an important role during his ordeal. He told me about how he prayed in captivity and said the rosary on his knuckles and shared the simple rhythm of the Hail Mary of the Rosary with a fellow captive speaking it through an electrical socket in the wall. Jim was not overtly religious but I could feel he was definitely dialed into his faith and prayer. He told me it had become a way he stayed in touch with his mother and grandmother when he was held captive. The Jesuits at his alma mater Marquette had given him a path to connect his Christian faith to a penchant for the poor and the suffering and perhaps a spiritual grounding in the act of bearing witness. This is not the case for many journalists, particularly international correspondents. We tend to be a uniquely secular group and often irreligious. Irreverence is part of the culture of reporting. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe because too often we end up witnessing people doing terrible things in the name of religion. Maybe it's because we see too many phony believers covering up misdeeds with sanctimonious words. But Jim carried his faith with a casual strength and considerable grace. We made it to the memorial service ahead of time and Jim was surrounded by colleagues who were glad to see him. All of us had been pulling for his release and doing everything we could to pressure the government to let him go. He was part of the tribe and the tribe had circled around him to protect him and now to celebrate his homecoming. Jim talked with some of the photographers there about an auction he planned to do at Christie's to raise money to help Anton's widow. Every photographer there was ready to donate prints to the auction. That was Jim. His presence at Heatherington service was like a slice of light coming through the stained glass into the shadows of the first Presbyterian church on Fifth Avenue. When the service actually began, the journalist looked noticeably uncomfortable in the hard bench seats of the carved oak pews. But Jim looked somehow at home. He was in prayer and not afraid to be seen that way. It was something I admired about Jim, that true faith, not phony spirituality, genuine belief in Jesus's message to help the poor. It may have been formed by the social justice teaching of the Jesuits of Marquette, I'm not sure, but I do know it was clearly an inheritance from his parents whose faith shines through at every turn in their life. It was an agonizing time that spring of 2011 and in 2012, so many journalists were facing a rising peril in the field as Libya and then Syria began to erupt into civil war. Friends and colleagues, Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London and Anthony Shadeed of the New York Times were both killed in Syria in early 2012. We didn't know then that it was about to get much worse, that we were on our way to the most deadly year on record for journalists in the field. Eventually, Jim would return to the story in Libya and that was the date line of the essay he wrote for the field guide. He wrote, it's good to be back. This story matters and I wanted to be here telling it from the front lines to bear witness. The essay is available here and it's part of our field guide, Ground Truth, where we collect essays on lessons learned and Jim's now stands as one of the really powerful ones within that essay. I believe it's available for you here and you can read in his own words what he had to say about why he wanted to go back. From Libya, Jim went on to cover the war in Syria where he was freelancing for Global Post and other outlets. On Thanksgiving weekend, we received the devastating news that Jim was missing, once again missing and soon we learned that he was believed to have been taken by unknown gunmen. Ultimately, it would be revealed that Jim was held hostage by a faction of Islamic militants which would later become the Islamic State. In the agonizing months that he was held, I wondered if he was still communicating through prayer with his family as he did in Libya. In July 2014, we learned of Jim's murder at the hands of the Islamic State. For any of us who watched John and Diane Foley respond to this tragedy, it was clear that they hadn't given up on their religious faith or faith in the work that their son felt was his calling. More than a job, it was his calling. They spoke to the media from around the world and tried to shine a light on Jim's life and his work and how important it was to him. It was a light that pierced through the darkness of the moment and the cruelty of his captors. John and Diane were now bearing witness to Jim and as they did so, they and their family were the embodiment of amazing grace. So here is what Jim wrote in the essay about his capture in Libya, nine months before he would be captured again in Syria. I prayed as much as I could, kneeling with my fellow captors whether they were American Christians or Libyan Muslims. The act of collective prayer and building faith in a higher power to guide me through a situation I could not control was perhaps the critical piece of maintaining the right attitude to locked prison cells and kangaroo courts. My patience in my faith that I'd be released was all I could control. I used to be the one who went down the road. I took it as a challenge, but after almost losing my own life and spending 44 days in captivity, I now ask myself very carefully as one colleague put it, to what end? To what end? The end, Jim, as we now know, was the act of bearing witness. Thank you. Well, thanks to Martin for that fantastic reading, to Charlie for that very touching, moving remembrance. We heard Jim in his own words and we heard words about Jim from someone who is very, very close to him. So it's my task now to draw things to a close and it feels like an almost impossible task. I quite deliberately did not make notes for this. I wanted to hear what people would say. I wanted to speak from the heart and just respond to all the things we've heard. And even this morning feels like a long way away to me now. It feels like we've been through quite a lot here today. Last night seeing the movie seems even further away and it feels like we've traveled quite some distance. There are things that I've picked up along the way. I remember some of them here. I'll forget some of them. I'll remember them at three o'clock in the morning. That's the way that it goes. But from the movie, what people said about Jim, about his clarity, about his, something he said about himself. He said he was blessed with physical courage but moral courage was something else. And I think what we've heard about over this day and a half is Jim's moral courage. We've heard about the moral courage it takes to bear witness in certain ways. This symposium has been called the task of witnessing and we've learned that it is quite a task. It is not a simple thing. It is not an obvious thing. One of Jim's co-captees, if that's a word, people, one of the people who was captured with him said he had no evil in him. He was pure good. And I think we've seen that. We've understood just how far that is true. He didn't want to be a hero. But he was his own kind of hero, I think, something that we've learned over this past day and a half. This morning, we had a remarkable panel of writers and photographers thinking about the task of witnessing and it became clear that the task of witnessing is not something that you need to do over there, wherever there is. It's something that you can do in your own way. How do you do it? By paying attention, by absorbing deeply, we learned about silence, the silence that surrounds stories. How do you penetrate that silence? We learned about what it means to depict absence, things that are no longer there, people who are no longer here. How do we do that? We've learned about the price of witnessing and the price of turning away. Where do we fit into that picture? We learned about empathy, the presupposition of all writers, of all journalists, perhaps, but how difficult it is to fulfill that as well. The journalists this afternoon gave us an extraordinary picture of what it means to be that living working person out there on the front line trying to make stories which are not just the flesh in the pan headlines, right? The stories of families, of children, of schools, of young women, of what it means to run a project, the enormous burden that must be and the dedication that it takes. These are things that I, for one, can admire and do no more than admire. It's an extraordinary thing. We heard from Jim's friends, and I want to say to the extent that he shines through you, you shine through him. What a beautiful and moving thing it was to see. And I want to say from my own perspective, so I'm a professor in the English department. I do not teach in the MFA program, though I have had MFA students in my classes, believe it or not, and I always enjoy having them there. But what I want to say, and I think I speak for anybody who's a teacher in this room, is that we learn from our students. We learn a good deal from our students. And sometimes they don't even know what they're teaching us, and sometimes we don't even know what they're teaching us. We find that out later. But it feels to me that Jim was our student, and that today we have been learning from him through the words and the reflections of others. It's been our special privilege to have John and Diane Foley here with us. Your words have been extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily moving, and to the extent that people say of Jim that he had courage, that he had grace, that he had a personal charm, I can see where he gets it from. I really can. What do I want to say in conclusion? It feels to me what we've confronted here is the difficult space that lies in what it means to write about others, to write stories, whether they are fiction, whether it's photography, whether it's journalism. How do you navigate that space? How do you negotiate it? What are the politics? What are the ethics? What is the morality of that space? How do you find it out? And I think to the extent that we've reflected on that, this has been an extremely meaningful day. What I will say is this. Jim was a storyteller. There are many storytellers in this room. One thing that comes from the tradition to which I belong is the idea that the story does not end, right? The story continues. In one way, Jim lost his life in 2014, but his story continues. We've helped it continue today. My hope is that his story will continue for a long, long time. And that is a way of making him live a long, long time as well. So what I would like to do now is offer a pair of gifts, and I have to do a little gymnastics for this. So just excuse me, I'm not a great choreographer, bear with me. And the first goes to Jim Polly's parents, Diane and John. We have a framed copy of the poster for you for this event. And we also have a copy of a poster for someone who worked very closely with Jim, and who is a UNICEF alum, Charlie Senneth, this is for you. So that brings everything to conclusion. I want to thank everybody for the participation. We learned today that witnessing is not a passive experience. It's an active experience, and everybody in this room has been active, whether they've spoken or listened, paid attention in whatever form. It's been our privilege, our honor, our pleasure to host it. Thank you all for being here, and we can now bring this to a conclusion. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.