The writer Paul Auster and the photographer Spencer Ostrander present a hybrid work on the history of violence in the United States which is also a collection of photos on the sites of massacres which have bereaved our neighbors to the South.
In his latest book, country of blood, the writer Paul Auster wonders. What makes the United States the most violent country in the world? Without really managing to answer this delicate and painful question, the New York novelist returns to the roots of American violence, illustrated by some forty shots taken by his son-in-law Spencer Ostrander. A parking lot, a church, a building, schools or the side of a road, Spencer Ostrander’s neutral and colorless photographs immortalize the sites, now deserted, where mass killings took place.
“Americans are twenty-five times more likely to be shot than their counterparts in other wealthy, supposedly advanced countries,” writes Paul Auster. And the statistics prove him right: there are 393 million guns in circulation in the United States, 40,000 gunshot deaths every year, more than 100 deaths in the country every day. A million and a half American lives have been “destroyed” by bullets since 1968, recalls the writer, “more deaths than the total sum of deaths caused by the wars that the country has known since the first shot of the Revolution. American”.
If the author of the New York Trilogy adds up through a historical-political discourse the macabre statistics, it is to better reveal their continuity. As the writer notes, the United States has had an ambivalent, unique and deep relationship with arms since the signing of the American Constitution, in 1787, and its irremovable Second Amendment, reinforced over time by the Supreme Court. The author bases his arguments on the work of many experts, such as jurists and constitutional specialists Michael Waldman and Adam Winkler.
Chapter after chapter, the superb monochrome images of the photographer and the shocking plea of the writer give strength to this short essay in which scroll the names and profiles of mass killers who have acted in the four corners of a country haunted (or trapped ) by firearms since the earliest days of its founding. Paul Auster, whose doctors have just diagnosed him with cancer, also confides in this highly pessimistic work, despite some glimmers of hope. He also reveals a terrible family secret, the shooting murder in Wisconsin in 1919 of his paternal grandfather, by his grandmother.
Like a documentary Bowling for Columbine, by Michael Moore, the 76-year-old writer digs into the colonial roots of a country inhabited very early on by the psychosis of violence and fear. He cites two original sins, sources of American-style violence. The conquest of the West, marked by extremely aggressive battles, in particular against the First Nations, and the second, slavery, which was followed by apartheid and racist violence by southerners with the application of Jim Crow segregationist laws. To this, the author adds the era of prohibition, the Vietnam War and the rise of the powerful NRA lobby and white nationalist groups, a whole maelstrom which, put end to end, is the autopsy of a battered nation. and divided as ever.