FictionThatMatters.org

The past five years have seen an explosion in interest in the interplay between creativity and human rights. Kerry Bystrom is on the forefront of this swiftly evolving field. An Assistant Professor in the Foundations of Humanitarianism Program at the University of Connecticut, she also teaches at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s rare to find someone so well versed in human rights and creativity.

I talked with Bystrom about how she got involved in the field, asked her for emerging trends, and picked her brain for some good reads.

FTM: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to study literature and human rights.

Bystrom: When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, I was a double major in creative writing and government. I studied comparative politics and I had a particular interest in truth commissions, with a focus on public perceptions of democracy in the southern cone of Latin American and South Africa. After I graduated, I decided that it would be fun to try to bring the two together instead of following the different tracks of creative writing on one side and politics on the other. I wrote my doctoral thesis on the cultural production surrounding the truth commissions in Argentina and South Africa. I compared different literary, film, and theatrical representations of human rights abuses during apartheid and during the Dirty War in Argentina. I also looked at the representations of the trials of the truth commissions that followed these periods. I became more and more interested in the cultural aspects of human rights in general, rather than focusing on these specific cases. After I graduated I joined Bard College and then the University of Connecticut.

FTM: There were a lot of narratives involved in the truth commission process. South Africa had the challenge that a human rights abuser could still be prosecuted if he didn’t confess. What were some of the major distinctions from Argentina?

Bystrom: The Argentina commission focused on disappeared persons and was established in 1983. It was pretty much the first internationally known truth commission. It was very different from the South African case. In Argentina, closed interviews were held with survivors and family members of the disappeared. The commission was headed by a prominent novelist, Ernesto Sábato.

FTM: Did his background as a novelist shape the process there?

Bystrom: Good question! That would make for an excellent research topic. [laughing] In the Argentine case, the panel released a report called Nunca Más, meaning “Never Again.” That phrase has become very important in truth commissions and human rights work more generally. A number of prosecutions followed the truth commission, which was a very different setup than South Africa. Problematically, towards the end of the 1980s the newly elected democratic president, Rául Alfonsín and Carlos Menem started passing a number of laws that overturned all of the convictions of the generals. It took another 12 years — until 2003 — that efforts were renewed again in Argentina to overturn this amnesty.

FTM: Did literature or popular creative expression of the Dirty War or the truth commission help renew interest in prosecuting the generals?

Bystrom: I’m interested in how we draw these lines between fiction and art and popular protest. There’s a woman at New York University, Diana Taylor, who created the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. One of the things they’re doing is trying to blur the line between what we see as art and popular mobilization. In Argentina, a famous theatrical cycle called Open Theatre was one of the first major protests against the military dictatorship between 1981 and 1982. A number of playwrights created pieces that were performed around Buenos Aires, recreating a public sphere that had been shut down during the dictatorship.

FTM: Did those plays relate to the Dirty War or was the holding of the plays the act of defiance?

Bystrom: Some of them related more or less directly, but there was still an issue of censorship. But they could also be coded. For example, there was a play about a woman pianist by Diana Raznovich that was about being forced to take on a certain persona in public that did not represent who you really are, while addressing themes of torture in a coded way. They used these performances as a way to press the boundaries of what could be said in public. It brought people together and helped mobilize people. At the same time, the mothers of the disappeared began their protests. One could see overlaps between those kinds of protests and performances. These were spectacles of resistance to the Dirty War.

FTM: You’re one of the few people who has had the time, interest, and passion to explore the interplay between human rights and storytelling. Where does the discussion stand today about the value of effecting change through stories?

Bystrom: A beginning point and focus for scholars of human rights is to stress the role that narration and representation in general play in human rights campaigns. These could be autobiographies, testimonies at truth commissions or tribunals, or excerpts of stories that get put into human rights reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. There is this idea that personal stories in particular have played a really important protagonistic role in human rights campaigns. That’s one approach that’s been very influential.

FTM: In my own human rights work, I’ve noticed the value of a press release. It’s almost its own genre that marches to its own rhythm. It’s something that Larry Siems, director of the PEN American Center Freedom to Write Project, singled out as important during my interview with him.

Bystrom: Absolutely. That brings us to a second approach. Your two interviews with playwright Lynn Nottage and Larry Siems bring up an interesting dilemma, which is that we have journalism and nonfiction work — the press releases that you’re talking about, which are clearly about shaping language and stories in a non-fictional way. And Siems seemed to be saying in his interview that he thought that nonfiction was ultimately more effective in terms of human rights campaigning than fictional work or poetry. Lynn Nottage took up exactly the same issue but put it the other way around. She said that plays or poetry or fiction can actually be more influential than articles because they allow people to form empathetic attachment to characters over a longer space of time and that that attachment can lead to action.

FTM: My interpretation of her statement was that press releases and fiction complement each other. The press release gives the facts but you need the interaction with the audience or the story to actually make you do something.

Bystrom: I think it’s a mistake to think of it in an either-or way. All forms of representation of human rights abuse can be important. Siems cited [W.H.] Auden and how poetry doesn’t make anything happen. Poetry doesn’t necessarily make anything happen, but neither does a press release. What’s great about a story or a press release is that they always CAN make something happen.

FTM: They have the potential.

Bystrom: Exactly. But whether or not they will depends on the context. My second point is that we think of these nonfictional stories and fictional narratives. The second way — and we can talk about literature, drama, or poetry — allows people to empathize with particular characters that may lead them to action. Or you can take the approach that Slaughter lays out, that we can also think about the way popular novels or novels in schools can enlarge our sense of communities of belonging. If you have a novel from somebody in Zimbabwe, for instance, a person can start to think about the experiences of someone in Zimbabwe and incorporate that into their understanding. I think that novels circulate through different readership than press releases do.

FTM: I like this thought about potentiality. I have a legal background. With criminal evidence, there’s a doctrine that it is impossible to predict the propensity of someone to commit a crime. That’s why crimes of conspiracy tend to require a substantial step towards committing the crime. So the law is also skeptical about what moves you from just talking about something to actually doing it. It’s almost impossible to predict based on a person’s character or the context. This is something that affects society in general. What you’re saying suggests that the broader the spectrum of messages that you send to reach someone about human rights, the more likely they are to act. But even that’s unpredictable. Personally, I don’t like the exclusivity of saying that one thing can or can’t motivate a person around human rights.

Bystrom: There’s also a third element when thinking about literature and human rights. This was explored by a scholar named Tom Keenan. There’s a way in which we think about literature as the act of reading. Because it is unpredictable how any book or press release will affect any person, as a teacher I try to teach that the way we read can also affect how we interact with the world. We need to think about what was said as well as how things were said. Learning how to read things closely through the examples of novels helps us all become more ethical, concerned citizens. I try to help my students make connections with the characters but also to help them approach texts as critical readers, in a positive sense.

FTM: Any books that you recommend?

Bystrom: Edwidge Danticat is a wonderful Haitian-American writer. Her book the Dew Breaker came out a few years ago — obviously predating the earthquake. It’s a collection of short stories that works very well to draw together various perspectives on the human rights abuses committed during the reigns of Papa Doc and Little Doc Duvalier in Haiti. To reconnect with Larry Siems again in which he states that great literature is multidimensional and avoids us-versus-them scenarios: Danticat’s collection of stories depicts the point of view of victims of human rights abuses and perpetrators.

I also recommend the book Links by Nuruddin Farah, a Somali author. People in the United States often think that anything that is done with a good intention is actually helpful. People who work in the field know this is not the case. Sometimes good intentions don’t work out well. Sometimes there are more effective ways to be helpful. Links is really interesting because it portrays the U.S. and United Nations’ Operation Restore Hope from the point of view of Somalis.

FTM: There’s a great critique of the film Blackhawk Down by Adekye Adebajo at the Centre for Conflict Resolution and how the botched operation in Somalia indirectly led to the genocide in Rwanda.

Bystrom: The last book I’d recommend is Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. A lot of people have heard of the book but haven’t read the book. I think this is a good time to go back to it and think about how the book worked within U.S. history.

–Deji Olukotun

Would you like to know more about the academic field of creativity and human rights?

Kerry Bystrom recommends:

Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights, by Anne Cubulie (Fordham University Press, 2007).
Human Rights and Narrated Lives, by Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).
Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law by Joseph R. Slaughter (Fordham University Press, 2007).