*
Remembering back to that Suffolk shingle in winter. Everything moving so slowly. And now, as the days quicken towards spring, this second book begins. A different energy. A publisher on board. The difference between writing into a vacuum, hoping these words would be read, and now knowing they will be. These days I’m moving continually between east and west. A friend is letting me use this house by the sea in Wales. Her mother got too frail to climb the stairs last year and had to move out, so, in the limbo of indecision about what to do with the place, I can be here to write.
When I’m down here I walk every day, regardless of the weather – this movement an indispensable part of my daily rhythm. Most of the time I sit at my table in the downstairs window overlooking the bay. But in those two or three hours of walking – even when I try to fool myself I’m not thinking about the chapter I’m working on – my feet and mind will conspire to subtly process what I’ve written – to digest, to spark new ideas. And so, on a windswept headland, or down a mossy lane, I’ll sometimes find myself scrabbling around for paper and pen to capture these fugitive pieces of thought before they blow away. But often the landscape here absorbs me almost entirely, taking over my senses. Finding a new path through oak woods, or following a lane down to an estuary inlet at dusk, with the tide racing in across mudflats. Watching the behaviour of oystercatchers and gannets and seals. The sight of the dark purplish earth, the scent of wild garlic, the sound of the marker buoys in the Haven, calling through the night.
*
Spring is beginning now. Tiny shoots of bracken are starting to unfurl like babies’ fingers opening. On both sides of the deep lanes the grass is that burstingly fresh green you only see in early spring. Soon to be speckled with yellows and blues and pinks of buttercups and bluebells and campion. The birds are going wild with activity, waking from their winter sulks, skulking in hedges and bushes, now they’re on the tops of branches singing to the skies and to each other. Each day I stop work a little bit later, to walk somewhere new. Depending on the weather – on the cliffs or inland, on footpaths or little lanes. I always try to be walking half an hour before dusk; and I usually end up returning in the dark. This means my writing days are partly determined by the seasons: in the height of summer I can work till nine, even half past nine, and still do my walk. But now, in early spring, I finish at three or four, walk till sixish, then come back to the house, make a fire, have a short rest, watching the flames reflect on the beams and the ceiling, and then return to my window to work for another two or three hours or more, often late into the night. The house is at the very edge of the village, so as I look out over to the other side of the bay, I can see the single road that threads all the cottages together. At night a dozen street lights here keep me company with their soft yellow glow, long after the last light in the village houses has been switched off. And then the only sound is the dark water, lapping fifteen feet away, on the other side of the sea wall. Into the early hours, tapping away, sometimes so absorbed that the tide comes up stealthily, in the time it’s taken to write half a page, and now the street lights dance in blurred zigzags of light, reflected in the water.
*
The journeys in this book, are, with two exceptions, not physical journeys but explorations into history, psychology and morality. Questions I’ve been perplexed by for more than twenty years. What is the precise relationship between perpetrators, victims and bystanders?1 What are the different aspects of responsibility that flow from these words – the responsibility on us to understand the actions of perpetrators, the responsibility of witnesses to speak, and, perhaps the hardest to grasp, the responsibility of societies to hear?
How can we explain the voices that are heard, and the voices we cannot hear? The experience of human suffering, and then the sometimes extraordinarily difficult attempts to transmit the meaning of that suffering through language? Or, at times, the way that suffering defies language altogether. In these pages we will encounter women and men who have gone through some of the most traumatic experiences it is possible to imagine. Some did not survive, some survived but could not speak, some attempted to find words for what they had lived through. Jan Karski at Izbica and in the Warsaw Ghetto. Primo Levi at Monowitz. Jorge Semprún at Buchenwald. Some we have only names for, fragments of their last hours. Koita Yaguine, Tounkara Fade, Aisha Duhulow. The French philosopher Simone Weil, living in London in 1943, in wartime exile, tried to look at the meaning of human suffering in a way that had never been attempted before. In one of the last essays she wrote, ‘La Personnalité Humaine, le juste et l’injuste’, she says this:
At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience and crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this, above all, that is scarred in every human being … Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry which Christ himself could not restrain, ‘Why am I being hurt?’, then there is certainly injustice.
But who is listening? And what are the conditions in which we can really hear the suffering of others – as Weil puts it, the ‘attentive silence in which this faint and inept cry can make itself heard’, ‘the tender and sensitive attention which is needed to understand its meaning’?
Connected to this question of suffering is a question about the nature of silences. Silences not just of traumatised individuals, but of whole societies. Silences of survivors, as well as silences of perpetrators. I grew up with such silences. The silence of my father about what he had experienced in the Korean War in the early 1950s. A silence even more shocking because of his love of language and philosophy and life. Even as a child, I realised instinctively that something was wrong. And as I became a young man, the same age my father was when drafted to Korea, I found his silence even more baffling. I met a blank wall when I tried to talk to him about it. Today I’ve come to think that much of my enquiring, over the course of my adult life, into genocide and war and suffering, must stem from this original and implacable silence. I also wonder at the way love deepens after death, and how dialogues with my father continue to grow. He died many years ago – half a lifetime away now – yet he is entirely alive to me still, a completely vivid presence.
There were other silences too growing up in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s – whole societal silences in a country which I was told prized freedom of speech, and which had pioneered the concept of the free press. Some of these silences are now being broken, for instance the silence surrounding the systematic physical and sexual abuse of many children, within all kinds of institutions, and outside of them too. But some of the silences we haven’t begun to come to terms with yet as a society – particularly that which concerns the violence inflicted on multitudes of human beings across the world, over many centuries, through the practices of British colonialism. Again, a systematic, supposedly legitimised violence – often using ‘free trade’ as a smokescreen – which claimed millions upon millions of victims. The selectivity of British historical memory is staggering. At the same time, the Second World War has become our defining national event of the last century – the ‘Good War’ – taking on almost mythic proportions, seemingly growing with every year of commemorations and memorials. I wonder how it is possible that children still grow up in our society with only the most cursory knowledge of Britain’s central role in the slave trade, and even less understanding of genocides and atrocities carried out by our ancestors in Tasmania, Kenya, India and China. How do different societies come to terms (or not) with their pasts, and how does this then contribute to national psyches, and ongoing patterns of behaviour today?