 Hello everyone. Thank you for coming. My name is Jeff Parker. I teach fiction in the in the MFA program Creative Writing here at UMass. It's an honor for me to be here to talk with these these important artists and pay tribute to someone James Foley an alum of our MFA program in fiction. He graduated before I arrived but I've been fortunate enough to get to know him through reading the stories and his thesis discussing some of his first-rate stories in our graduate fiction workshops and talking to those who knew him. Our program for for those of you who don't know is is a fiction writing program so you know our our memory of him or one side of our program is a fiction writing program the side he was in and so for those of us in the program the memory of him is is the memory of a fiction writer which is something I think we'll discuss a little bit after these presentations but by all accounts it seems that he was an incredible person someone who took the notions of bearing witness and outreach as essential facets of a lived life someone we can all really look up to and aspire to be something like. To speak on the topic of the topic at the heart of Jim's work the task of witnessing we have three distinguished guests. I'll briefly introduce them and then each will speak after which we should have plenty of time to invite you into the discussion. First up is UMass's own Sabina Murray the author of three novels and two story collections the recent tales of the New World and the Caprices which won the 2002 Penn Faulkner Award. She's been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute. She wrote the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country that was nominated for an independent spirit award. She teaches in this MFA program. Her latest novel Valiant Gentlemen traces the life of Irish revolutionary and humanitarian Roger Casement as he encounters injustices at home and abroad in the Belgian Congo of the 1890s. Next up we'll have photographer Diana Matar. Diana's in-depth bodies of work investigate issues of history memory and state-sponsored violence. One of her projects is the Photography of Absence and it asks the question how does one photograph that which is not there. She's been the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award for Fine Art the International Fund for Documentary Photography and an Arts Council of England individual artist grant. Matar's monograph evidence a response to the enforced disappearance of her father-in-law a Libyan dissident who was imprisoned by the Gaddafi regime and never seen by his family again was published in 2014 to critical acclaim and chosen by New York Times photography critic Teju Cole as the best book of the year. Her work is held in public and private collections internationally and has been exhibited in numerous institutions including the Tate Modern London in Paris and elsewhere she lives in London and New York and finally we have the writer Mazem and Gista both a novelist and essayist her debut novel The Stunning Beneath the Lion's Gaze examines the brutal 1970s Civil War in Ethiopia in unforgettable detail. It was selected by the Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by the Christian Science Monitor of Boston Globe and other publications. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker grant of the Guardian the New York Times and BBC Radio among others. She's a Fulbright scholar and runner-up for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her work often centers around conflict migration and the relationship between photography and violence. She's a writer on the documentary projects Girl Rising and the Invisible City and sits on the boards of Words Without Borders and Warscapes. Her second novel is forthcoming and UMass welcomes Mazem back after her lecture on witnessing that questions the role of the writer in the face of violence at last year's Achebe Symposium. So thank you all for coming and we'll start with Sabina Murray. It's a tremendous honor to be presenting today. In August of 2014 I learned of James Foley a young American journalist who had been kidnapped by the Islamic State, held for two years and then executed. The last moments of the journalist's life became not only news but also a pivotal event in history so sharp and stunning that its importance solidified instantly, not needing the usual buffer of time to determine its significance. I was initially unaware of James Foley's connection to the UMass Creative Writing Program. Our paths did not quite cross as when I showed up at the university in 2003, James Foley, Jim, had already graduated with his MFA. He had moved on to pursue a degree in journalism and chosen a life path that would be characterized by bravery, diligence, sacrifice and kindness which are possibilities for a fiction writer but certainly not probabilities. But then again, when viewing James Foley's life, there is little of the probable there. The man inspires awe. Many people, no doubt, are unaware that James Foley was a talented fiction writer. One of the benefits of this particular symposium is that we get to hear from people who knew him as a writer of short stories and we will also experience some of his fiction. And I wonder about the role of fiction in Foley's all too short life which teaches us, among other things, that sometimes what is first thought to be unbelievable can become a reality because the job of a fiction writer is to take that which did not happen and with a limited palette of words make a fully realized world. Foley's fiction is very, very good. His organization of material pulls together by accreting images. His approach to what is important in the fictional narrative follows Isherwood's dictum where he is a camera. Foley looks here and there, choosing and juxtaposing, creating a formal unity in much the same way as from a deck of cards, the selection of a hand creates a narrative all its own. Foley's short story Hacienda Mall presents the thousands of cars gleaming like insects in the sun. The narrator Riley observes that a bull of a watch has a lifetime insurance policy against theft and destruction. A girl, the narrator's student, reveals, Foley, I look into people's windows and I see people having sex. I see old ladies crying in front of their TVs. The narrator Foley is not only interested in what he sees but in what is witnessed by others. In this case, a disenfranchised, unloved teenage girl. In 2011, James Foley was captured by Prokodofy forces and detained in Libya for 44 days. His belief in frontline journalism had put him in the front lines and then on the back seat of a car and then in a series of locked rooms. One of the ways he passed a time in this captivity, a series of minutes marching between boredom and fear, was by praying the rosary. The rosary is composed of five decades of Hail Marys, each marked off by an Allerfather and a Glory Bee. A truncated version of a decade starts you off. A series of mysteries are observed depending on the days of the week. Glorious, sorrowful, joyful and luminous. There is always the option to start again. It is a prayer that needs no beads because fingers can mark a decade and as for mysteries, I hardly remember them and I doubt that James Foley did or maybe he remembered the same ones that I do. The wedding at Cana, finding Jesus in the temple. Glorious, joyful, who remembers and anyone can understand the rosary. One does not need to have a Catholic education. That thing that hits maximum wattage right around your first communion. That thing that can and should undermine its own trappings. Glorious mysteries, cardinal mercies with transcendent faith with a belief in itself that shakes free of the apologetics as it conceives of its own possibilities for redemption. Yet even without all of that, the wheel of prayer makes sense as soulless to just about anyone. That careful rotation exercising the minutes, the specific repetition that reminds in its off-repeated Glory Bee that it is and ever shall be world without end. It is a prayer with the beginning and an end that can be prayed indefinitely. A prayer that simultaneously meditates on time's passage and devalues its tenure. This is me, a fiction writer, looking with empathy at a fiction writer, wondering what he thought in a quiet moment, searching for the matter that would perform this feeling, urging the character to act so that others might see. One of my obsessions as a writer is to take the historically significant person and present to gently human view. Observations of a man in prayer, an accumulation of simple thought around the rosary. It is the instinct of the fiction writer to wonder about people, to look for the small actions that illuminate the character, to lift rocks and see what lives there rather than accept what is acknowledged as fact, to look for a deeper representation than what is commonly presented. My imaginings of Foley praying are not quite fiction, but perhaps in preparation for it. Had I included Foley observing a slice of light beneath his door as he waited in a dark room, or allowed him a memory or a thought of what he would have been doing if free, playing basketball, sharing a beer with friends, if I had fleshed out the reality, then it would have crossed into fiction. Fiction constructs itself out of these suppositions and possibilities, out of a belief and a character who will be constructed from words and vivified by a communion of empathies, the empathy of the writer and that of the reader with this word made person. And it is not quite fiction and not quite fact when I put together the motivations that took James Foley from the front of the classroom to the seminar table to the war zone. He cared about people. I may not be in a position to personally prove this, but there are many witnesses to his devotion to those in trouble. It is more Occam's razor than guesswork that leads me to believe that a profound sense of duty to those suffering is what influenced Foley's trajectory as the Isherwood camera achieved a literal translation. What did James Foley see? James Foley saw people. His concern was for people, and most often those who would otherwise go unnoticed. On location in Aleppo in 2012, his attention is drawn to the bombs falling on bread lines and hospitals. The most noteworthy victims are not soldiers, but children. Foley's camera pauses on the gaze of an injured child forcing us, as we view him on our computers, on our phones, to wonder what does this child see? We are safe, but Foley, as he moves about, selecting the images, forming the narrative, is among the people who can be struck by the bombs. But as the seasoned fiction writer vanishes in service to her writing, Foley too vanishes, his voice becoming an avatar for the voiceless children of Aleppo. What is the difference between fiction and journalism? Both reach for the truth, both traffic and a metanomical representation, where one small slice of event hopes to shed understanding on a larger reality. But of course journalism adheres to a narrower framework of reference. Journalists transport a reality as quickly and undigested as possible, whereas fiction writers like to sit on things, to parse out the greater significance of an encounter, to pass that along with the events. I think about this stuff. My latest novel focuses on an Irish revolutionary and humanitarian Roger Casement and I thought about how he reacted to the atrocities that he encountered in the Belgian Congo in the 1890s, the injustices he witnessed in Ireland. I thought about how Casement felt and there was dappled light on leaves, a music of water playing somewhere, a counter note to the horror of maimed villagers and starving children. This is an attempt to have the past seem alive, to hit the notes of time so that we who experience the relentless present might perhaps encounter Casement's witnessing of horror with the same fresh vision as we do each unrolling second. For this fiction writer it is all a matter of time. As I work in my study the past and the deep past are ravelled in together. Fiction desires that the reader be conscious of what the writer is conscious of, to achieve sight through consciousness, a witnessing both blunted and enlivened with imagination. It is not much of a stretch to see that James Foley was concerned with the present, a present that could be changed, children that could be saved, towns people who could live unmolested by war, buildings that could stand without being reduced to rubble, minds that could lend themselves to more glorious thoughts than day to day survival. By embracing the work of a journalist, Foley trafficked in stories that had no endings, in wars where the point of peace had not yet been determined, where he with his camera might manage to manipulate the resolution. This transition from fiction to journalism made him transform from a chronicler to a witness who not only directed his gaze but also the gaze of countless viewers, simple citizens, powerful politicians, world leaders. His contributions to a narrative are composed of a selection of images and characters but it is a constantly unspooling narrative, one without parameters, a story that dilates where the words don't run out, where the cover is never closed. Thank you. Thanks Sabina. Diana, the floor is yours. I'm Diana Matar and I'm really happy to be here and I just want to thank the interdisciplinary studies institute and particularly Stephen Klingman for bringing me here and everyone else that was involved in doing that and it's a real pleasure to be on the panel with Mazza, my old friend, and meet Sabina and Jeff. Like most Americans, I presume, I did not know much about James Foley as a man, only what I read in the newspapers about his capture and then his unfortunate death. After seeing this very moving film last night and meeting his parents, I feel honored to be speaking about something that I now know meant very much to him. To witness is an act. It is an act that is born out of privilege, the privilege of being able to see and to listen and to experience and then to share. It is the possibility of speaking truth to power. I want to do something very quickly. I know we usually turn off our phones in these events but if you have a phone with a camera, please take it out quickly and I want you to turn to the person to your right and if there's no one to your right, turn to the person to your left and very quickly just take one photograph of them. Just one. Okay, have you done that? Please put your phones away. Now I want everyone to close their eyes. Think about the person that's sitting next to you that you just took the photograph of and imagine they aren't there. Imagine you don't know where to find them. There isn't a way to find them. Imagine how you would take their photograph. How would you take a photograph of what happened to them and where they were? You can open your eyes now. I use this little example because that is what I do. I take pictures of things that are no longer there. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas tells us that to connect to another we need the face but what happens when the face has disappeared and when all traces of the disappearance have disappeared as well? How then do we connect? I believe that photography can capture the traces left by history. I believe that spaces hold memory and that by photographing the places where acts of state-sponsored violence have occurred, the land can speak, trees can bear witness and the dead can whisper. I'm going to show you excerpts from two bodies of work today. The first is evidence. The work was made over a period of several years. I was responding to the current political events through a very personal prism. In 1990, my father-in-law, Chabala Matar, a leading Libyan dissident, was forcibly disappeared. Egyptian Secret Service agents took him from his home in Cairo where he was living in exile. The following day he was handed over to the Gaddafi regime. In 1995, the family received a letter written in Chabala's handwriting that had been smuggled out of Abu Slim prison. There's been no news since. Evidence. Easter 2005, Cairo. This is a man's house even though your wife has lived here alone for the past 15 years. She has the custom of rearranging the living and dining areas each few months and every time I visit her configuration is decidedly different. Yet with each of these moves there's a place setting and a chair ready for you at the head of the table. I imagine you light and agile, always greeting the maid with respect. I imagine men pausing in conversation waiting for you to speak and your wife wanting to make things graceful for you. Your shirts ironed, your salads well seasoned, your papers dusted but left undisturbed. October 2005, Cairo. I think I see the form of your foot in the outline of my husband's feet. I know this slight detail of DNA must come from you because my husband and his brother have the same lean feet with the second toe longer than the first. Their mother's foot is wide with soft plump toes that descend each one shorter than the one before. March 2006, London. His sham has begun to write publicly about the Libyan regime. His novel doesn't come out for several months but at a little publicized reading he gave last night three men from the Libyan embassy sat in the front row. July 2006, Ischia, Italy. Hasham and I swam for hours this morning. By 10 30 it was too hot. We left the beach and walked into town to get lunch. Hasham heard two men talking from across the street. They're Libyan, he said. We turned around quickly and walked up the hill out of town. April 2007, Italy. We're in Florence, staying at a hotel. Hasham's article criticizing the regime was published yesterday in La Repubblica. Last night when Hasham went to brush his teeth he came out of the bathroom wide away. He was yelling, did you leave the toothpaste open? He's never spoken to me like that before. Later he said, I thought someone came into the room. They could have poisoned us. That is what they do. January 10, 2010, London. A friend of ours knows Lord Rothschild. She has arranged for Hasham to meet him. She told us that Rothschild's son Nat is a close friend of Saif al-Islam Ghidafi. January 25, 2010, London. Hasham is meeting with Saif al-Islam Ghidafi. We are told that Saif al-Islam knows what happened to Jbala, that he has access to the file. I'm waiting in a cafe across the street. I have a list of numbers to call if Hasham doesn't come out in an hour. June 2010, London. It has been months. Saif al-Islam Ghidafi has given us no news about Jbala. He says he will release the file only if Hasham agrees to be interviewed by an Egyptian newspaper. Hasham refuses. The journalist is on the payroll of the Libyan regime. June 26, 2010, London. Last night Saif al-Islam sent Hasham a text. It's my birthday it read. It was punctuated by one of those terrible little smiley faces. February 18, 2011, London. The streets are full of protesters in Benghazi. I can't quite believe what we are hearing. It seems impossible, but it's true. February 20, 2011, London. Saif al-Islam Ghidafi gave an address on Libyan TV tonight. He sounded just like his father. There will be rivers of blood, he said. August 24, 2011, San Francisco. I'm in California. Rebels have entered Tripoli. Hasham called early this morning. A group of men have broken down the doors at Abu Sleem prison. They have found an elderly man in a cell. They say he is from Shdavia. We are waiting. August 24, midnight, 2011. It is not Javala. October 20, 2011, Ghidafi has been killed. 15th of March, 2012. We flow to Benghazi today. March 19, 2012, Benghazi Libya. I could hear Hasham and Nafah speaking behind me. The wind was strong and I couldn't make out much of what they were saying. They were talking about literature, what faith means, and the glimpses of it that can come through poetry. I kept walking away from them through the darkness, stepping on the uneven earth. Something cold came rushing up through my body. I came upon a small cement wall, only a foot or so high. The way in which it was constructed hid what was beneath, unless you stood right next to it. Hasham and Nafah came looking for me and we stood at the edge. We could make out the entrance to the underground bunker. Later I spoke to human rights workers. In the days after Benghazi fell, they found prisoners who had been kept inside for years. Some were still alive. Scrapped into the wall of one of the cells of this prison someone had written, my eyes are melting like wax from a candle. Underneath this field, human rights workers found a labyrinth of tunnels and underground cells. They also found the remains of unburied bodies. March 25th, 2012, Benghazi. I've spent almost every night since we've been here photographing buildings where people have been imprisoned or disappeared. Yet I still haven't photographed the last place Jabala was seen. This is the revolutionary committee building in Benghazi. Under the direct command of Gaddafi, the revolutionary committees interrogated and imprisoned thousands of Libyans. The committees carried out corruption trials in which defendants had no legal counsel and no right to appeal. This video's footage was found in the Libyan Secret Circus Archive. It is of the 1984 trial of al-Sadegh Hamid al-Shwadi. The revolutionary committee in Benghazi carried out the trial which ended in a summary execution and al-Shwadi was sentenced to death by hanging. On the 17th of February, 2008, demonstrators gathered on this street to protest against the publication of Danish cartoons that they believed to face the Prophet Muhammad. Mayor of Benghazi Huda bin Amr ordered that the peaceful protesters be shot. March 28th, 2012, Benghazi. I met a family at the courthouse. They had driven more than 80 kilometers to see the photographs of men who had died in the Abu Sleem prison massacre in 1996. There were hundreds of pictures pasted on the wall. They told me that every town in Libya has something like this. I told them about Jabala and they wouldn't leave my side. The mother asked if she could take a photograph of me with her five daughters. Her husband took the picture on his phone. Ahmed Fuhad Fatala, an Egyptian living in Benghazi, was executed by public hanging here at the Benghazi port on the 6th of April 1977. He had been accused of defaming the regime. This is a cropped detail of an image found in the Libyan Secret Service Archive. Notes on the photograph describe a public hanging in Benghazi that took place on the 6th of April 1977. However, no name is given. On March 18th, 2011, against all international rules of warfare, Gaddafi regime tanks fired on civilian residencies in this Benghazi neighborhood. This property was used by the Hamis brigade. The brigade headed by Gaddafi's youngest son Hamis was Libya's strongest military unit. On the 23rd of August 2011, guards from the brigade opened fire on more than a hundred people that had been detained in a warehouse. Human rights watch investigators found the remains of 45 people inside. On the 7th of April 1977, Omar Dabub and Muhammad bin Saoud were executed by public hanging at this site near the cathedral in Benghazi. The two had been taking part in a peaceful protest at Benghazi University. Gaddafi issued an order that traffic be diverted so that conitors would have to witness the hanging bodies. April 5th, 2012, Benghazi, Nafa has come out with me most nights while I shoot. We've been to so many places used by the government to detain people. They are everywhere. Something remains in these places. I wasn't prepared for that. Last night, Nafa told me, you can't just show our oppression. You must also show our shame. He took me to an alley where a Gaddafi loyalist was beaten to death by protesters in the first days of the revolution. April 8th, 2012, Tripoli. His sham has asked me not to photograph Abu Sliem prison. I can't bear the thought of you being there, he said. I have agreed not to go. April 12th, 2012, Tripoli. The new government has released information regarding their investigation of the Abu Sliem massacre. They believe 1,270 men were killed on the 29th of June, 1996. Guards working at the prison at the time told investigators that the dead bodies were buried near the prison. Later, they were dug up. They said officials from the regime brought in cement mixers and pulverized the bones. The powder was put into shipping containers and thrown into the sea. Javala is still missing and we know nothing. I want to change course a bit and I'm going to take you on to a second body of work very briefly. One that is in progress and that I've been shooting up until just two days ago and will continue to shoot. It's the first time I show any of the work or speak about the work but I think it's really important because I want us to be conscious that state-sponsored violence is not something that just happens in other countries and that bearing witness is not just something to be done overseas but at least also be done here at home. I'm going to show you a series of photographs. They look like vernacular shots of landscapes and highways and suburban homes but what would you feel differently about them if you knew that each photograph marks the site where someone was killed by a police officer? 1,146 people were killed last year in the United States by law enforcement. Officers. In this work I'm mapping out where each of those killings took place. Thank you very much. It's really an honor to be here. Thank you to Stephen Klingman and the ISI. I'm a bit overcome and overwhelmed by being here on this panel. There is a saying in Ethiopia when the one who will be killed is in the presence of the killer there is freedom. In that moment there is nothing left to lose. It is possible even to do unheard of things. I am in London on a cold November morning when the last of the 900,000 red poppies will be placed around the Tower of London. One for every soldier from the UK and the Commonwealth who died during the First World War. It is a scorching August day and the world has fallen silent as a young man in an orange jumpsuit is paraded across a sandy hill and made to kneel. It is April and another group of young men Ethiopian like me are marched across both sea and sand and made to kneel. I turn my head. I close my eyes. I shut my ears unheard of things. The Nigerian writer Chinua Cebe says that all those men in Nazi Germany who put their talent in the service of racism have been rightfully condemned for their perversions. He seems to imply that in the end true talent cannot be twisted. A gift cannot be subverted and subsumed by evil. The talent is a virtue stalwart loyal as a well-trained soldier. Arthur Rambeau gave up the pretense of poetry as Cebe says when he opted for slavery. But I have been to Harad, the city where Rambeau lived and I have seen some of his belongings. I know that when he put down the pen he picked up the camera. I have borne witness to his vision of those with skin just like mine. There is beauty in the frame. There is poetry. Poetry surely can only be used on the side of man's deliverance and not his enslavement a Cebe contends. This I want to believe. Perhaps like some of you here, I come to this language of English second hand. I have fallen between its cracks trying to trudge my way towards comprehension. I have marveled at its flexibility but never so much as in recent years. What I have seen, what we have seen is language forced into the service of violence. A rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore though we have tried. It is a language strong enough to reside in troubling landscapes and malleable enough to be both poetic and cruel. It has the capacity to draw us in and push us back and send us spinning in speechless grief. While those red ceramic poppies want to remind us of the transcendent power of memory and imagination, the ISIS videos want to drive home that we are in the end no more than our bodies. That we are all interchangeable political symbols knotted around a stoppable heart. But the installation and the videos demand that we take note and look. In both instances our gaze is the first step in receiving a prescribed message yet to watch the ISIS videos involves a heart-rending complicity with the murderers. Our gaze would be an instrument in the oppression depicted a continuation of the vulgar narrative but it is a narrative. It is language. It communicates. It is poetry because it is a language of representation. All those men clad in orange dragged across sand and sea have been reduced to brightly colored metaphors. All those poppies blood red and stuck in ground around the tower of London moat were once full-bodied men strewn across battlefields. One reminds us cruelly of our fragility. The other tries valiantly to shield us from the ugly stink and rot that also makes up who we are. I am speaking of violence that is put on display. At its most aesthetic it strips back and erases a harsher reality. At its most garish it is a billboard for all our most human and most primal fears. A symbolic language that comes to us so fully and frightfully formed that we have not always found the words to confront it. When it comes to war when it comes to violence it seems that we have not always been able to keep up. We have not always been able to locate the vocabulary that will take us from shock and stunned silence toward a coherent visceral speech one as strong as the force that is charging at us. I've long believed in a concerned writer's need to look at photographs of violence. The power of our particular gaze has the ability to reshape a narrative and turn victim into human being. Then came the videos. Then came the requests by the families of the victims to remember them as they had been alive and active rather than as they were intended. Yet in the aftermath of the shock in the deliberate decision to look away where is there to settle a gaze when turning away feels like forgetting. To look is to be a pawn in the propaganda. To turn away is its own kind of acquiescence one that renders these victims as symbols. I know what Achebe is saying. I believe in what he says. I believe that art carries the potential for vast and dramatic change but it also carries discomfort and it is by its nature both a tool and a weapon both a self and a poison. It is not only the righteous woman who holds a gift it is not only the truth teller who can be heard. If language can withstand and support the heaviest most brutal of activities then it is also a testament to its inherent strength one that can allow us transcendence and peace but the stakes are high and though they may be no higher than they have been in other decades and centuries you and I are here now in this moment in history and somewhere in this swirl of unpredictability and ever-shifting alliances is the writer's place. For years I have been searching for that point that axis on which good seems to pivot too easily towards bad. I want to know where the ground begins to shift and how language both erodes and glues it back together and what there is to be done about it. I am talking about our responsibility our duty in the face of those unspeakable and unheard of things. How do we begin to construct a vocabulary if all we can do is stand in numb and silent grief? What is there to really see of those who one stood and then were forced to kneel if all we do is look away? It is Friday September 16th 2016 and it is close to 11 p.m. I walk into a dark and cavernous room lit only by the dimmest light. I am at an armory converted into a performance space and I am here to listen to professional mourners from all over the world Cambodia Burkina Faso China Ghana Albania India Bhutan Colombia Azerbaijan Armenia they are here to take part in artist Teran Simon's exhibit called an occupation of loss. Each group of mourners sits in a hollow silo shaped structure that opens at the top for their voices to escape. There is a doorway just large enough for me to bend down and step inside so I can stand in front of them as they sing and lament. I do this because I am curious. I do this because I find Teran Simon's work to be powerful. I do this because once before the revolution that began in Ethiopia in the 1970s I used to have three uncles. Now they are gone and my family and I still cannot find the proper way to mourn. The regime that disappeared them and countless others used fear to alter our grief. The former Ethiopian government used grotesque displays of violence to stun us into silence. We learned to stop looking at those they paraded in streets and in squares as examples. We turned away from those two awful signs of our own frailty. They never returned some of the bodies. We learned to pretend they were properly buried and today the loss still sits waiting for words to make it real. I am standing in front of two Izer Baijani mourners women dressed in black. The silo is tiny and their eyes are closed. Their faces are lifted to the ceiling. I cannot understand what they are saying but I understand what they mean. It is there in the way they pound their chests and their voices crack. Their first utterance is a cry. It is a long spiraling lament that climbs above my head and ricochets off the ceiling to fall back down on us. Soon it is suffocating in that cramped space and I want to leave but I force myself to stay and follow the path these women have laid in front of me. This I think is where grief finds its voice. In our first cries our first shouts into the unknown yet as the women continue to wail I begin to realize that it is easy to be trapped by sorrow that those early signs of mourning can get stuck in an endless cycle. We can spin in circles constantly coming back to our first uttered cries of anguish unless we shift away from what has been lost towards a way to express what must be reclaimed. Fear I begin to understand functions like this in abstraction hard to wrestle and contain unless we give it form unless we shine the light into that dark corner and step in to confirm it is ours to dominate. What I mean to say is this we must force language to carry the weight that we are slowly horrifyingly realizing it is capable of bearing but language cannot grow to its own potential to its full potential if we leave certain words unsaid if some things are deemed too hideous to understand if we must distance ourselves from all that does not hold sway to our own beliefs. Fear like grief I begin to see as I turn to leave the silo is a space that is outside of language it needs no words to flourish it roots itself in our most incoherent and primal emotions it gains strength by the nature of its shapelessness its ability to sit inside us and expand until it suffocates only language forces it into a form words add coherence and move it from abstract expression into an experience that has a beginning and an end like a sentence. Thank you. I kind of just want to to let these really powerful presentations just reverberate in the room for a while but our job here is to have a little discussion so I think we better do it. Thank you. Thank you so much. I thought that we might start with with a question related to fiction since we have two novelists on the on the panel and because a lot of the conversations about James Foley surrounding this symposium have been about him as a journalist but of course here here he was a fiction writer I think you put it so well in your piece Sabina when you said that that fiction is at least to a degree about looking at made-up beings with empathy and you know that that relates directly to the giant feedback loop of empathy that I always think fiction is you know that is the writer looks at a made-up being with empathy and the reader in experiencing her own empathy and reading about that made-up being finds you know her own capacity for empathy enlarged but obviously that quality in the artist the ability to do that comes I think from from bearing witness to the world to characters in the world whether that is in the way that that James Foley did it for those of you who may not know his fiction was very autobiographical the protagonist was often named James Foley or Jim and was doing the kinds of things that he did at the time teaching in Latino schools and in Phoenix whether it's exploring a personal connection to the Ethiopian civil war characters one knew there whether it's exploring a historical character who might otherwise be a entry in an encyclopedia you know not the owner of a novel-esque sort of story so the question that I wanted to put to you Maza and Sabina was would you speak a little bit about your own interest in fictionalizing reality in exploring you know characters and subjects that interest you and you know creating those kind of empathetic feedback loops that do so much more the last book that I wrote and this is this could be a very long answer so but I will keep it short it was about Roger Casement the Irish humanitarian who is a Irish revolutionary and a humanitarian and his friendship with these two people an English artist and the English artists American why and when I put it together I had a very hard time figuring out why for one I was going to be writing a book about someone who there's much written about that's non-fiction and it took me a while to figure out that the reason it was important for me to create a fictional account was because I was going to do it in the present tense and that may sound nutty but you know fiction writers were artists we think about things in very nutty ways for me the present tense was very important because I wanted to present these people as they marched through history in a state of unknowing when we pick up a book about the first world war we usually pick it up you know we know we never pick up a book about the first world war and wonder who won maybe some of us too anybody no good okay so what I wanted to do is I wanted to move my characters around their lives when they didn't know and in this I think that fiction achieves an honesty of experience that other forms can't achieve how these people march through the present of their lives not knowing how the chips will fall and so that's that's how I explore my particular empathy with these historical figures I think you one of the things you were you were asking parker was like maybe just the creating empathy with with fiction and maybe why I chose to write fiction about the Ethiopian revolution which was a historical event and I remember at some point really really early on in writing the novel I just didn't feel that I was equipped number one I wasn't sure that I was the one to write this story about what I called a national tragedy and I didn't know if fiction could could bear the the weight of of that it felt like something that was more in the territory of political science or historical you know non-fiction but I was really lucky early on in my MFA schooling to have as my mentor South African poet Brayton Brayton Bach and he had been imprisoned during the apartheid regime for years and had had been on death row and I came to talk to him about this novel and my struggles with with it and and feeling like I could I could do it and that fiction was the best way and he he said to me well you are capable of doing this and fiction is the way to do it because fiction can tell a truth that history cannot and I realized then kind of like what you were you're saying Sabina that you know history can tell us what happened but I think fiction can tell us how it felt as it was happening and it's always I think as a fiction writer that's the step that's the door that I'm constantly trying to step into and if I can help readers feel that then it feels in some way that some of our borders and differences have collapsed thank you to give a version of that question to you Diana I was wondering if maybe you could say a little bit about some of the techniques or maybe the considerations that you take into account for visualizing your very much real but nonetheless absent subjects well I I also just wanted to comment on your last question and I think my work fits into that in this way as well is that I think there is a kind of relationship between photography that is journalistic and photography that is more in the art realm and that is a similar link with fiction and nonfiction I think and I think the element of time is something that's really important and the passage of time and how being outside of time and allowing history to pass as you are making a body of work or as you are are working that that time gives us insight it gives us hopefully a kind of wisdom and it gives us the the ability to enter something very deeply emotionally which is impossible when something is happening because when something is happening your all your emotional awareness is used to just live it and and you don't really know what's happening I think so in the sense that and I I would think that fiction does that as well is because you are in a way you are distancing yourself and that allows you to get to a truth and and none of this I think denigrates the truth that is there in the moment of journalism in the present and that that these are just two very different ways of approaching reality and the the important things that we need to do as citizens I think um technical um like what do you mean exactly I'm really I'm really glad that you made that connection I didn't want to be presumptuous and ask you about that myself but but since you brought it up there was that that one image of the the eggs in the in the cake pan I think on the carpet and I thought that was such an evocative image I think it was doing if I'm sort of hearing the conversation right the kind of thing that Sabina and Mazur are saying when they're talking about the present tense about putting the the viewer sort of in the moment of of creation because you know you had told us about your father-in-law but all of a sudden I was from that image conjuring the other characters in his life you know perhaps his wife and who would she be making a cake for with him gone so I found it to be like really active in terms of generating experience you know kind of fictional experience with with which one can empathize I think I I tried to use color in that in that whole body of work to bring the present in and and the the black and white was used to refer to events that happened in the past and to refer to things that could not be grasped and could not be found but I also for one thing it was just too difficult for a viewer or to just look at the images as a one big block about the past and to punctuate with with the color of the present I felt was very important in the work the the technique that would would you know one might think you would you would use more but that I think one one could see in the first photograph of the chair and later in the second work the photograph of the you know the shopping cart in the parking lot where you sort of you have a object that's clearly designed to be utilized by humans so you you fill in the space in the photograph with your idea of a character you know I was I was having fun watching your watching your presentation and kind of seeing how you could use that technique in some of them but yet you know in others there would just be space with no indication of a human being for example the scaffolding of that billboard in that square where I believe if I remember correctly you said someone was once hung two people were hung what what kind of techniques do you do you think through when you're imagining conjuring absent characters in space well I I want the images I mean at least a lot of the images not to have those particular points in them that you can reference but that the whole theme if you will about the work is the is absence of not being able to grasp of not being able to find out and this work was created as a book so the book has a lot of white space and a lot of I mean I I condense things very much so there there are a lot of images that you can't quite tell what is happening but I mean I'm sure you both have this in your work that you need you need anchor points you need you can't just let the viewer just kind of wander around in space you need things to to ground the work and things like the chair or the eggs or what you were mentioning the that actually was before the revolution that was a poster of Gaddafi actually it was a poster of two Gaddafi's one Gaddafi looking at himself they were looking like this and it was one of the first things that was torn down during the revolution well well I want to leave plenty of time for questions from the audience but I did want to put just one other question to you all because I think that James Foley gives us a case study for how one in this case a white male can really use one's privilege to give voice to the stories of the underprivileged in I think a very honest way for those of you who may not know the Massachusetts Review published a wonderful story of Jim's from his thesis that is again very autobiographical and it's about him teaching in the schools in Phoenix and you know really reaching a point of kind of helplessness in reaching these kids but instead of going for like the dead poet society kind of victorious moment where he reaches the kids it's this magnificent meltdown everything just collapses around him it is a fantastic story I just wanted thinking about that idea I just wanted to to put to the three of you the question is to whether you have any thoughts either in your own work or just in general about how individuals of privilege you know can can act in that spirit of Jim's I see you two looking at me something I think I think one of the things to to realize is that we're all we all come from a place of privilege I think just the characters that that I write about or the world that that I inhabit through my fiction I I know those people but I have experienced and I have many more privileges than than than they ever do I don't think that you have to be only white and male to to come from that place of privilege and it's something that I'm very well aware of in whatever communities that I might be speaking to or going into to interact with yeah I think that that's just one of the it's it's easy for us to say well that's the privilege and and I I don't have it but I'm I'm well aware that that I do and it's we I feel like at this point the you know when we talk about the the police brutality in the US and and we're coming up now is it 49 days until the elections because yesterday it was 50 or today's 50 and we're moving up um we have to all be aware of where we stand in this country I mean we're being forced every single day with the type of rhetoric that that's that's coming out from the news we have I don't think it's going to be possible to be neutral anymore and I think we have to be aware we have to be very aware of who we are as this it seems like as this country and as the world continues to shift and it feels like that was something that Jim Foley was really well aware of very very early on like he knew his place and even when he went somewhere that was completely chaotic there just seemed to be a kind of grounding and awareness of his place in that world and I think for me that was that's very profound it makes me think about how we engage with these different stories and forms and of course we engage from all of our different personal points but one thing I was thinking about when Diana when you were talking about your work is that like looking at your work I sort of feel like I think my phone must feel when it's roaming and I keep looking for the signal but because I can't really engage directly I kind of exhaust myself in the process and that's what it was like you know and I think about that how forcing us to engage with certain images from whatever background we come from this is something I was thinking about I was thinking about James Foley this morning that it does it puts us it makes us think as moral beings which is not a place that we always think from I mean so many times we think is just you know our day to day survival and what we need to do but when we're looking at art and when we're looking at well presented journalism where the images are selected in a certain way it makes us respond as our higher and best selves and it forces us into a level of interaction that we don't have in the minute to minute and we're made better by it even if we don't effect change then our witnessing of these things forces us to be better people. Yeah I was going to say something along the same lines in the sense that to witness you must put yourself in the shoes of the other person and I think we've been living in a time where we've become very tribalized as a as a society not just here I think it's happening all over the world and we need to remember the kind of humanistic ideals that that maybe our parents generations or earlier generations had that we can try to understand others that is the whole point of literature of journalism of art is the desire and the the necessity to understand those other than ourselves. I knew y'all would have good answers for that question. Thank you. We have just under 10 minutes so I'd like to invite anyone who has questions to to raise your hand. Let's talk. Oh there is a there's a microphone right to your left if you'd like to stand up there. I'm interested in what you said a moment ago about witnessing in different environments because it's clear when you have the kind of polarization in a genocide or something like that or ISIS where one witnesses from the position that one takes when one witnesses from but what about in our current situation what about with police brutality what about with elections politics. Christine and mom said once recently actually that journalists first responsibilities to the truth. Do you see that truth operating today among journalists and if not what kind of pressures do you see on them whether they are political or whether they are a professional that is to say the both sides now narrative that we seem to be looking at among journalists and I'd like to hear you to talk a little bit about that. Thank you. One of the things that's so stunning about trying to find your news today is just the myriad of different sources that you get and this idea that you can pick and choose that what you look at. So a lot of it when you think about your position something that always resonates with me was a kind of journalism that James Foley did where he showed me civilians and that's also that's my background coming through my mother's life was torn apart by the Second World War she's Filipino you know I lost a grandfather I lost an uncle decimated and I grew up with somebody who had massive PTSD around that so when I look it's hard for me to get a pay attention to newsfeeds that are giving you know figures body counts that should be something that I respond to I don't I'm always looking for the the faces of civilians but I am aware also that I have to bear witness to you know what did Trump say last night I have a hard time looking at that I have a hard time looking at things you know my politics are showing now I have a hard time watching Fox News even though that would give me a tremendous understanding of what's going on in this country I don't look at it so I'm also very aware of my shortcomings as somebody who bears witness and my inability to inform myself better so I mean I don't know if that answers your question at all but it's just my response at this point Mazza and I were actually talking about the server breakfast and I think one of the huge pressures on not just journalists individually but news organizations is financial and the way that the system has been set up that is completely different than it was even five ten years ago and I think Heather mentioned it last night also in her presentation the clicks I think it was Heather I can't remember who it was but you know the clicks and and we are operating in a world where you know we used to talk about celebrity journalism ten years ago and it's just it's just gone to another level right now that whatever is gets people's interest the most will get clicked on and that we see that so much in the coverage of the election and so many other things but I think as as people that are communicators whether journalists artists you just you have to go back to the basics and the basics are people and and if that means you know working on the side working outside of your your job as a journalist if it means writing on the side whatever it is that's what we have to do because we were in a we were in a point societally or I think it's just critical it's critical that stories are are told in a way that is outside of the the paradigm that we're now working in I think you're seeing all of our politics unfortunately sorry let me see if I can hide mine I think it's been a I'll just kind of continuing on with with what's been said here one of the things that I have been trying to do I think it's really easy to get stuck in in the positions that we hold it we're we're living in this time where everything is volatile everything seems to be at stake everything seems to matter but particularly maybe here in this country in these elections one of the things that I have been trying to do on a on a consistent basis is to listen to those people who who are voting for a candidate that I I just can't understand how anybody could and these are people that I know and I care about and who care about me as well people that maybe if anyone saw this walking down the street would be shocked that we would even function in the same world and I have been trying to understand their perspective because I I'm aware that we're shouting across each other from this divide and there's going to come a point if we don't if both sides or three sides or four sides don't begin to take a step closer we won't know how we got to the place where we will end up I think as a as a someone who studies history you know who's done research I I'm I've seen these patterns and I write fiction about it but it feels like now we're actually living in it I'm not the only person my side is not the only person that holds a truth that the other side seems to have something that they call truth then might be true to some degree as well and I think the job that that we have is to try and there you know try to figure out what what do we do how do we get to a point where we can begin to talk and I think I don't know if we're ready but I think that we have to get there because there is there's just a lot at stake but in in terms of how do you find the truth I think it's beginning to understand that the truth is not only where we stand that there's also something on that other side that we have to try to parse out and try to figure out as uncomfortable as that is absolutely I've done a lot of work with and research about truth and reconciliation in post-conflict areas and one of the things that they consistently try to do after post-conflict is get people to tell their stories and if we look at our society right now which seems to be polarized if we can shortcut that fact of what may happen in the future depending on the the outcomes of the elections and how people have been so polarized if we can short that cut by implementing some of those things that people have been studying for years and years about conflict and and tell each other's stories I think we have a much better chance of going through this time with a much better outcome as a society thank you I think we have time for one one last question Jim Hicks wanted to follow up on what was just said I was thinking as Diana was talking about the there's it was an amazing interventionist project in the form of Yugoslavia where some videographers gave video cameras they call it video letters it was friends that had been separated by the war and it just seems like it's a fantastic idea it's it's what Pazzo was talking about too why not do it before the war I think thank you for that I think that Ethiopia is a very good example of what happens when people cannot cannot begin to speak of what has happened and cannot like you were saying this idea the the truth and reconciliation commit you know the the sharing of stories we have now a generation two generations that after this revolution that began in the 70s in Ethiopia and my grandparents generation just couldn't couldn't speak of it and my parents will not speak of this at all and so it's been left to my generation and and some that are that the other generation that has come up to begin to try to tell those stories and in the absence of sometimes even hard concrete facts all we have is the narratives that we can construct and like you're saying the the tools that we use whether it's a video camera or a photograph or the pen it's through writing we resurrect through art we can bring back what was taken and I think we constantly have to that's that fight is something that we can continue beyond anything and I think that gives us more power than anything anyone else can do thank you through through art we can bring back what was taken let's let's close it out there mazamangista diana mitar sabina marie thank you very much