 Thanks very much for coming out to the earlier sessions today. We really appreciate it It's really wonderful to to have you all here. My name is Steven Klingman I'm a professor in the English department and also director of the interdisciplinary studies Institute and on behalf of the Institute And the Department of Journalism with whom we've collaborated and the MFA program for poets and writers I'd like to extend the most warm and cordial welcome to all of you Thanks for coming out and joining us for what I know will be a most meaningful and significant day I'll be saying a few words about this symposium today. I which started off last night with us a Showing of the most extraordinary movie Jim The James Foley story and those of you who were there will know what a moving experience it was and today We'll continue our considerations. I think inspired by that movie But to begin with it's my honor as well as my pleasure to call on the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Kumbhle Arsupaswamy to say a few words of welcome Chancellor Good morning Did I do that? Good morning on behalf of the entire University community, I thank all of you for being a part of this exploration of the ups and downs and and the importance and as well as the pitfalls of The task of being witness to human deprivation and human atrocities I'd like to extend an especially warm welcome to James Foley's parents Diane and John Foley Thank you for being here. Your presence here gives us comfort and strength I'd also like to offer a special welcome to all of James Foley's friends and colleagues who have joined us It is a testimony to the nobleness of his mission and to his gifts and strengths that so many talented writers, journalists, poets, photographers and friends are here today We live in a time when violence and anarchy seem to be gaining dominance We were reminded of this even as recently as just the past two days Increasingly for those of us who have the privilege of remaining a safe distance from the depths of the chaos We may be tempted to turn away Turn a blind eye Turn a deaf ear or we may choose to watch but keep our distance by Observing through a lens of detachment or even cynicism James Foley did neither he chose to walk through the chaos and act as a witness to the deprivation his insistence on telling the stories of the persecuted and the disadvantaged the innocent trapped and suffering from the anarchy surrounding them Speaks not only to his courage, but also to a fundamental belief in humanity He knew the risks to himself, but each time he filed a report on the atrocities he witnessed He was making a statement of hope Hope for the people he saw suffering and hope for his work Hope that his work would make a difference and hope for all of humanity It is in great part that spirit of hope that we honor today. I Did not have the privilege of knowing James Foley personally But I'm exceedingly proud to be joined with him in this extended UMass community Thank you all for being here and again. I hope we have a really productive exploration through this imposing. Thank you very much Thank you Chancellor for those words and before I go any further I want to say some other thank you's as well. First of all to my co-conspirator and collaborator in this Kathy Ford from the Department of Journalism Kathy my advice to anybody Who wants to organize an event is do it with with Kathy Ford in mind and also to Someone who works closely with her bet Wallace bet for you around somewhere Manager of communication events and alumni relations in the Department of Journalism Who put in an enormous amount of work also to know I holland in the MFA program. No, are you here? yes, who Who helped us envision this project in the early stages and Not least my own assistants Amanda like G and Bata from Fenerbah. Are they here? Yes, both of you. Yeah My other advice is if you need assistance get Amanda and Vata to do it They will they will do everything and more they read my mind. They do things before I even think of it So I'm very grateful to both of them I'm not going to list everyone to whom we are. Thanks. They are listed in the program So please read those names over there I do want to say however that we're very grateful to those who have funded us and who've cosponsored this event Including the Chancellor the provost Dean Julie Hayes, Julie are you you're here somewhere? Yes, Julie who helped inspire this event So thank you very much for that also Dean John heard from the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Dean of Commonwealth Honors College But others funded us as well and we're grateful to all of them And we're grateful first and foremost as Swami said to Diane and John Foley for their support for this event For their presence for their participation. That means more than we can say to have you here with us today Also to to Charles Senate a UMass alum who worked closely with James Foley and without whom this event would not have been possible We're grateful to all our Participants and presenters some of whom had to travel great distances or change their plans in order to be with us And a warm welcome to to our former students those friends and former colleagues of James Foley You have come home to UMass. We hope it feels like your home. I hope you know that you're always welcome here and So to the matters at hand How does one find words to respond to what happened to James right Foley? James Foley Jim What happened in August 2014 was his death, but it was not emphatically not the whole of his life Also note the phrasing to say what happened to James Foley is to use the passive voice It may help us a bit in that it allows us to skirt around the topic We don't have to confront things directly consider the details The passive voice however invokes what others did to Jim But what was it that Jim did what was it in his own life that gave it richness and fullness and significance? One can term what happened to him a tragedy Those of us who studies such things Will be familiar with Aristotle's definition Tragedy is the story of a great man brought down by a tragic flaw But having thought and read about Jim's life. I find in him no flaw at all Nor was he brought down in that sense as Those were him present Those who were imprisoned with him testified his presence brought light and hope to others and lifted them up It always did what happened to him was an outrage. It was an atrocity. That is a starting point But what happened to Jim did not define his life His life was something else what it was what its significance was is the topic that concerns us today When news came through in August 2014 of James Foley's death There was grief on this campus as elsewhere. He was one of our own our student Especially for those who knew him there was shock a sense of terrible loss The MFA program held a memorial fairly private for those who had known Jim Yet the thought persisted that we wanted to do something more things perhaps that one can only do with the passage of time We wanted to reflect on James Foley to think about his time here and in other places To reflect on the extraordinary individual that had been our good fortune to have among us We wanted to think about some of the larger resonances of his life What his life meant and means to us and what it means for many around the world And so we have two aims at the symposium One is to commemorate James right Foley to remember who he was the bright and shining person He was on this campus as elsewhere To recall our thoughts and feelings to make him live among us once again And then there is our second purpose to pay tribute to Jim by attending to the concerns and issues To which he dedicated his life to make those issues and concerns live among us as well Because surely that is one of the meanings of his life that the problems to which he attended have not come to an end But nor must the attention There these are things we need to think about with Jim's example in front of us That is what we intend to do Those who knew Jim personally will speak about him They will perhaps tell you more about some of the things we knew about him How when he was a student here, he volunteered at a local care center for unwed mothers Helping them to earn their GEDs How he worked for Teach for America in Arizona How he taught inmates in Chicago How his life was wholly dedicated to helping others less fortunate than he was Specifically by giving them a voice This underlay his work as a journalist in Afghanistan and Iraq and then as a freelancer in Libya and Syria His work lay in telling truths reporting the stories Capturing the images and the voices that would otherwise go unheard unseen His was the task and it is no easy task of witnessing the title of our symposium today And that is where Jim's life hands off to our own That is where the significance of his life becomes our task What is the task of witnessing today? How do we do it? How do we ask others to do it for us? How do we make sure they are safe in doing it? And if we ask them to report on atrocity for us, how do we as viewers, readers, citizens Witness and then act on what they have told us But that is surely our responsibility as well Witnessing does not occur only in the passive voice It must and has to be a form of active engagement And it must induce active engagement Otherwise we have tragedies of a different kind Tragedies of indifference of neglect of unconcern And let us face it This is a task we urgently need to do For this is a very troubling world that confronts us Both at home and abroad As we put it in our program notes For some time now, since 2001 if not before We've been caught up in various forms of declared and undeclared war Around the world we face a baffling array of developments Which are hard to contain in any coherent form of understanding We live in a context of shifting boundaries Large-scale movements of people Strange mixtures of enmity and belief The unnerving event and its instant reproduction What in these circumstances are the complex tasks of witnessing Of giving voice of attempting to tell the truth? How do we see? How do we write? How do we report? How and where do we operate in the borderlands Both lived and conceptual of encounter? What are the obligations of witnessing? What are the dangers? How do we give voice to the otherwise unreported To the unknown to those whose voices would go otherwise unheard How do we as readers and viewers witness atrocity? What in short are the tasks and perils of witnessing in our current world? Jim Foley was concerned From what I understand of him, Jim Foley also had joy Deep joy in his being and in his life He had depth He found what he wanted to do What gave him meaning in the world From my distance I would say he was a seeker Always looking for ways to give his life meaning For him it came through the task of witnessing This symposium is now our task of witnessing To take up the task that he has handed on To this end we have poets, writers, photographers, journalists And members of James Foley's families who have spoken and will speak We might think of this as a somber occasion But though one aspect of the story is certainly somber Let us discover life and Jim's life The life that he continues to have among us In our considerations and in our concerns today Thank you very much And now to start us off I'm going to call on my colleague The esteemed poet Martina Sparda To set us thinking about the person At the heart of our concerns and considerations today Martina Thank you very much I would like to I would like to thank Professor Klingman Professor Ford Chancellor I want to add my welcome to John and Diane Foley To Jim's friends and colleagues here this morning Jim Foley Was my student I was on his MFA thesis committee He took my classes And we had long talks in my office at Bartlett Hall I discovered quickly that he was a person of principle Who sought to live his life based on that principle To act on that principle Jim was very interested in the Latino community He spoke Spanish He had taught with the Teach for America program In the barrios of Phoenix And so I referred him to the care center Now the care center is a high school equivalency And alternative education program for adolescent Mothers mostly Puerto Rican In Holyoke not far from here And the care center hired him And from 2002 to 2004 Jim taught English to Spanish speakers there He also taught poetry And that is the background for the poem I'm about to read For a long time I didn't think I could write a poem about Jim Foley I just couldn't do it And then Yago Kura One of Jim's closest friends decided To edit and publish an anthology of poems About Jim called Guzzles for Foley So I want to extend my thanks to Yago also He's right over there Here's the poem now And indeed it's called Guzzle for a Tall Boy from New Hampshire For Jim Foley Journalist beheaded on video by ISIS August 19, 2014 The reporters called and asked me Did you know him? I was his teacher I said many times that day Yes, I knew him Once he was a teacher too Teaching in another mill town with the mills have disappeared There they knew him He taught the refugees from an island with a landlord left them nothing but their hands In Spanish they knew him They sounded out the English made the crippled letters walk across the page for him All because they knew him He ate their rice and beans held their infants posed with them for snapshots at the graduation Ask them how they knew him Belisa, Monica, Limari With him they wrote a poem of waterfalls and frogs that sing at night So he could know them as they knew him We know his words turned to rain in the rainforest of the poem We cannot say what words it is even though we knew him His face on the front page saw the newspapers in the checkout line His executioners and his president spoke of him as if they knew him The reporter with the camera asked me if I saw the video his killers wanted us to see I muttered through a cage of teeth No, I knew him Once he was a tall boy from New Hampshire standing in my doorway He spoke Spanish He wanted to teach I knew him I never knew him Thank you Thank you very much, Martin. Thank you, Chancellor Again, a welcome to all. We will now move into our first panel for the day Which will take a few minutes just to set up So bear with us get a breath take a sip of water and we will get this going as soon as we can Panel with Sabina Murray, Marza Mingista and Diana Matar So we should be up and running soon. I hope. Okay. Thank you