Tag Archives: Desmond Tutu

West Bank August 2001

A clipping I cut out of a newspaper shows a little boy about five or so, his face scowling, waving a toy rifle. He is dressed in a children’s set of army fatigues. The caption states:

“A Palestinian boy holds a plastic gun as he steps on an Israeli flag with ‘Death to Israel’ written on it in Arabic during a demonstration against the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank town of Ramallah Friday . . .”

The date of the newspaper is August, 2001. Almost a quarter of a century ago, as the picture evidences, places in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank showcased similar problems besetting those areas as today. I wonder what that young boy is like now, at about 28 years old, perhaps, if he’s still alive.

What kind of adults will the children of the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza have become twenty years from now? To pick one side or the other in this part of the world as either the guilty perpetrator or the innocent victim is a futile exercise. You can, if you want, place blame on Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, Europeans, and, no doubt, others. We could certainly go back to the Nazi’s, or the pogroms for centuries against Jews, or the European conquest of lands in the Near East in the past century or two. Add others, then take your pick. Finding villains is easy.

Should we despair? Listen to Desmond Tutu, leader of South Africa’s struggle to free itself from European control: “Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate.” (The Atlantic, 2009.)

A Different Kind of Struggle

An article in Writer’s Digest suggests that Americans now question long held beliefs: “American verities (e.g., equal opportunity, fairness, decency) have worn thin, revealing the naked aggression, vanity and greed underneath.” (David Corbett, “No More Mr. Nice Guy, September 2018)

Thus, we have novels with no heroes or heroines, like the characters in Gone Girl, or the unreliable narrator, behaving in disgusting ways, as in The Woman on the Train.

Then, in a surprisingly delightful book, A Man Called Ove, we are driven to sympathize with a man who, at first, is presented as someone obsessed with order, who doesn’t like animals or children. He even resents being asked to help a neighbor struggling to care for a husband suffering dementia. Then we are shown his prior griefs, and we sympathize.

Writers today do use more offensive characters. Yet, Corbett advises writers: “When using struggle and desire to create empathy for an otherwise offensive character, don’t neglect to explore just what risks the character faces.”

In other words, we can sympathize with someone pretty badly messed up if we understand their struggles.

For those of us who believe that evil can and should be redeemed, such characters can give us hope in a world turned overnight into Dante’s inferno.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, as he struggled to overcome the evil of apartheid in South Africa, “I am a prisoner of hope.”

Novels like Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Patton, with its imperfect characters, perhaps helped move the country out of apartheid.

For Americans, divided and anger-stricken, fiction and non-fiction can mirror the dysfunction while at least hinting that we still have choices.