Never two without three ? After its salutary Fragments from elsewhere and Fragments from here, Gary Lawrence returns to us with a collection of 50 new accounts of his wanderings around the world. To be released on November 23, still at Somme Tout, this Fragments from elsewhere II comes at the right time as the planet quietly begins to dream of elsewhere. In preview, the reporter, longtime accomplice of the To have to, shares this powerful anti-hate vaccine.
In this sad era in which hatred and fear of the other is spreading all over the world, and when an insidiously looming, not so long ago, a xenophobic democrature in a supposedly blameless country, the Honest States bitter snags, it is more than useful to remember that the discovery of the globe is conducive to the opening of the most obtuse of closed minds. Especially in certain places marked with a hot iron by tragedy.
Many years ago, well before the excesses of Bashar el-Maussade, I thus boarded a modest taxibus to go to Djéblé, on the Syrian coast. While all the passengers spoke only in the language of the Prophet, my seatmate spoke to me in English, curious to know where I was from, who I was, for what purpose I was wandering.
Once I arrived at my destination, when I was paying for my fare, the friendly stranger kindly made me understand that he had already settled everything for me. He was not fortunate, did not demand anything in return, and subsequently left without asking for his rest. All he wanted was to make a simple but meaningful gesture to welcome me to his country.
By itself, this anecdote symbolizes for me the need to travel, to expose oneself to others, to let play the mechanisms of the unforeseen, to discover how one lives in other latitudes, whether by lifting the thumb in Crete, meeting the Himba of Namibia or hiking in the Sultanate of Oman. It also proves that the journey remains the most pleasant way to educate oneself and to understand all the elsewhere of the Earth, and one of the best tools to forge the alloys of its thought and to plow the furrows of its tolerance, before bury the good seeds there.
Of course, cinema and literature can produce the same results. See The Killing Fields Where Schindler’s List inevitably shakes your emotional coconut tree, in the same way that reading The night, Elie Wiesel, or Portal, by François Bizot.
A few years ago, a US judge condemned young vandals to scholarly readings denouncing racism, after they covered a school with swastikas and other abject graffiti, without really knowing what they were doing. The narrated, filmed or scripted evocation of the worst human baseness and its infamous consequences is likely to make the most ill-fated of packaged asses think, no doubt said the magistrate.
In this case, rather than imprison the offenders because of their stupidity, the judge then considered that they were already prisoners of their ignorance and that they should rather be released from it by working on their lack of education – one of the greatest blemishes of our time, the one which leads to fear, to incomprehension and then to hatred, even in the most “advanced” societies.
There is another way to arouse such awareness: to be personally and physically confronted with the most vile consequences of hatred, whether at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Terror Museum in Budapest or in Auschwitz, Poland, to name just those places with a sordid past.
For my part, it was at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany that I was first confronted with evil in its worst form. No matter how much you read and hear about the Holocaust, you never understand the magnitude of this abomination until you see with your own eyes the photos of stacked corpses, the very real gas chambers and the ovens. crematoria which served as a model for those in other camps.
Several years later, in Cambodia, I left my visit to Tuol Sleng with a hemoglobin aftertaste in my mouth. In 1975, this former high school in Phnom Penh was transformed into a torture cage by the Khmer Rouge. For four years, 17,000 opponents of the regime fell here under the pincers of executioners who rivaled each other in imagination and refinement in the art of slowly killing. All orchestrated with a touch of creepy humor: “During the caning or electroshock, it is forbidden to shout loudly”, we still read on a panel.
But it was more recently, in Rwanda, that I was most disgusted by the sadistic ferment that can germinate in every human. It must be said that in the land of a thousand hills, there is no shortage of places of memory (and we are not in the lace) to recall how our species is capable of extreme cruelty, sadism and barbarism.
Thus, in the small church of Nyamata, the scene of an unspeakable slaughter, the pierced and bloody rags are piling up not far from the altar where studded clubs and rusty machetes are displayed, while in the basement are aligned. hundreds of smashed, smashed or trepanned human skulls.
No Rwandan site, however, reaches the degree of sordidity of the Murambi memorial, in this country forever associated with the term “genocide”. Laid out on top of a hill, this dismal site has several school buildings – definitely! – formerly under construction, which was transformed into a slaughterhouse for humans, in 1994.
In each room of the buildings today lie bodies steeped in pain, limed after having been mummified by their brief burial in mass graves, then placed on sad trellises. Men, women, teenagers, toddlers: 842 victims exposed in the open air recall that 40,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus have passed through the machete here in just a few days. It is the extreme personification from beyond the grave of the most filthy hatred that can spring from the depths of the psyche.
In this time when evil is becoming more and more banal, everyone should be informed of the existence of these places, their power of evocation, the abuses they denounce, the danger they announce and which is watching us, if we abandon ourselves to our lowest instincts.
Because if we still do not understand how the human being can come to hate his neighbor so much, any hateful brute who visits these places can only question the resentment he feels for the other. And if hatred attracts hatred, Dachau, Tuol Sleng, Murambi and so many other sites cut short the breath that stirs the embers.
This text was originally published in The duty of 11 March 2017.
Gary Lawrence will be at the signing session at the Montreal Book Fair on Sunday, November 28 at 2 p.m. Meet at booth 1713.