After hearing
about the release of Ingrid Betancourt’s memoir entitled Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian
Jungle during an interview on NPR, I was quite excited to read the book.
Betancourt’s 2002 kidnapping at the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC), along with her 2008 release nearly seven years later, had been
reported in the U.S.
and international news. Additionally, I knew a little about the drug trade in
the mountainous Amazon jungle region of Colombia and I had recently spent a
month in the Brazilian Amazon while on sabbatical. It was for these reasons
that I was eager to acquire my own copy of the text and study it. This
excitement quickly turned to dismay, however, once I began turning the pages.
Indeed, the further along I read, the more I came to dislike the book and the
woman who authored it. Her prose was self-absorbed and, at times, seemingly
aimless. Because of this, I had to force myself to finish the book. Overall, it
was not a pleasant read.
In
retrospect and largely as a result of composing this review, I realize that the
distasteful nature of the text is a reflection of Betancourt’s own distasteful experiences
in captivity. Rather than beginning in a linear fashion with her capture, she
begins telling the story at a moment in the middle of her captivity. While
initially I found this very disorienting for the reader, I now appreciate that
the disorientation the reader feels is quite small in comparison to Betancourt’s
own discomfort. Indeed, Betancourt acknowledges the medias res narrative when, toward the end of the book, she claims
that “Time spent in captivity is circular”
(461). When one is a prisoner, there is no beginning or end. The italics of
this passage are hers but the emphasis is mine. What is time when one is forced
to slog through mud, rain and the jungle morass of one’s own nightmarish
reality. This is not a rhetorical question. The jungle landscape is a symbol of
the twisted identity issues Betancourt encounters. The thick undergrowth, the
vicious ants, the inhuman humans are merely physical manifestations of
spiritual obstacles which she must overcome. Indeed, these serve as the basis
for the four overarching themes of the book: freedom in captivity, identity,
silence and physical manifestations juxtaposed against spiritual
transformations.
Thus, the first
chapter of the book opens with an escape scene. During the course of this
attempted escape, her emotions swing from high to low. This too is part of the
disorientation into which she initiates the reader. She insists that she “had
to walk, keep moving, get away . . . but with each step I kept repeating I am free, and my voice kept me company”
(10). The notions of freedom and of
voice – or the inverse of voice, silence – take on a prominence throughout the
text. Almost immediately after she rejoices in her freedom, her emotional state
swings to a paralyzing fear. She realizes she “had not suffered enough to find
the rage [she] needed in [her] guts to struggle to death for her freedom” (11).
Within moments of this awareness, she is caught by one of the female FARC
guards.
This, then, is the
journey, for Betancourt and for the reader, into a nightmare world of capture
and release, freedom and captivity. She muses that “the relief that comes from
recovering [her] freedom cannot in any way be compared to the intensity of the
suffering [she has] known” (27). While faintly reminiscent of a biblical
passage, it also calls to mind the enduring hope of freedom. Later, in chapter
52, Betancourt is teased by one of the guards with the idea of being released.
Even when she knows that the FARC guard is lying because “lying was considered
the sign of a good warrior” (333) she allows her mind to dream. “By pronouncing
the word ‘freedom,’ he’d opened a box that [she had] kept double locked. [She]
could no longer stop the flood of raving visions that submerged” her mind
(333). She thought about her children, her home, her mother’s perfume and a
pair of fashionable shoes. The thought of freedom represented comfort, luxury
and civilization. But freedom also represented a return to identity, another
important theme twisting through the narrative. In this case, the thought of
freedom leads her to realize that “she wanted so badly to become [her]self
again” (333). These intertwining themes of freedom and identity – like trees
growing up from the jungle floor -- are poignantly developed in chapter 77 when
Betancourt stalwartly resists a FARC leader’s efforts to obtain a proof of life
of his captive. In this instance, Enrique wants to produce a videotape of
Betancourt, proof that she is alive, to use as political leverage in
negotiations. Betancourt refused. She wanted “no part of their manipulative pretense”
(490). She felt “a sort of lull in [her] suffering, because [she had] accepted
what had happened to [her and she] hated Enrique” (490). But in her acceptance
of her fate, she acquired wisdom and strength. She realized the fundamental
truth of freedom and identify when she said:
I almost felt
sorry for him. Of course he would get [the proof of life video], but it didn’t
interest me anymore. There lay my victory. He no longer had a hold on me.
Because I had already accepted that I could die. My entire life I had believed
I was eternal. My eternity had stopped here, in this rotten hole, and the
presence of imminent death filled me with a peace of mind that I savored. I no
longer needed anything; there was nothing I desired. My soul was stripped bare.
I was no longer afraid of Enrique. Having lost all my freedom and, with it,
everything that mattered to me – my children, my mom, my life and my dreams –
with my neck chained to a tree – not able to move around, to talk, to eat and
to drink, to carry out my most basic bodily needs – subjected to constant
humiliation, I still had the most important freedom of all. No one could take
it away from me. That was the freedom to choose what kind of person I wanted to
be. (491)
What the reader realizes, along
with Betancourt’s own epiphany, is that the fear she experienced in the opening
pages has made way for a kind of release that transcends her captivity. She may
be in chains but she is free. And with this awareness comes another: “the
realization that [she] was no longer a victim. [She] was free to choose to hate
or not to hate. [She] was a survivor”(491). The jungle of the physical realm
may still hold her captive, but the jungle of her inner world – and arguably of
the reader’s too – has been conquered. Thus while the narrative begins with an
escape of the physical realm, the book ends with an escape of another kind,
into another realm. In one of the most unbearable places on earth, Betancourt
has conquered the jungle of her identity.
Perhaps the most appealing
aspect of Even Silence Has an End can
be found in the expressions of compassion Betancourt extends to others,
including her captors. Arriving at compassion and forgiveness challenges her,
yet it appears to be part of the process of understanding her identity too. For
instance in chapter 14, as the day of Betancourt’s daughter’s birthday
approaches, she decides to throw a party with some of the FARC guards who are
about the same age as her daughter. As the guards begin dancing she realizes
“these young people could have been [her] children. [She] had known them to be
cruel, despotic, humiliating” yet in that moment she “understood that we are
all fundamentally the same” (133). Rather than allowing hate toward her captors
to foster inside her, Betancourt chose see them as human. Indeed she claims to
have “grown aware of how complex we human beings are. Because of that,
compassion appeared to [her] under a new light, as an essential value for
dealing” with her present condition (133).
Indeed, she saw compassion as “the
key to forgiveness” (133). The italics are Betancourt’s and they represent
her desire “to set aside any inclinations of vengeance” toward her captors
(133). In this reader’s interpretation, they represent her spiritual
transcendence.
This
compassion also was extended towards other prisoners of the FARC, including
complete strangers. At one point, the small group with whom Betancourt had been
imprisoned was merged with another group. Upon first seeing the strangers, she
recounted how “it was almost indecent to be looking at them; their humiliation
was laid bare, irrevocably exposed. They were human beings who had been
dispossessed of themselves while they waited for others to decide their fates”
(211). While it is clear that she saw herself in them, it is also a kind of
compassion that allowed her to see their unique humanity. This was brought home
most poignantly when she said “I felt sorry, sorry to see them like this and
sorry they would know they were seen” (211). Again, this extension of self to
other – and the willingness to set aside judgment under the most horrific
circumstances -- appears transcendent to the reader who sits in the comfort of
her living room.
What’s
more, this compassion was also extended to non-human creatures of the jungle.
On numerous occasions, Betancourt relates instances when the FARC guards treat
animals in ghastly ways. In one instance it was a snake, in another it was a
guacamaya. During one particularly graphic incident, a monkey was shot and
Betancourt relays with alarming detail the way in which the monkey “put her
finger in her wound and looked at the blood coming out” (344). Beyond the
anthropomorphic projection, however, Betancourt realized that she was at least
as capable as the guards of doing this kind of harm to other humans, and she
“understood that [she] could be like them” (344) in her hatred for her captors.
She recognized that she was “in danger of becoming like them. The worst would
not be to die; the worst would be to become something [she] abhorred” (346).
This understanding was extended when she realized that her fierce desire for
freedom might lead her to killing the guards, and thereby becoming like
them. This she was determined not to do.
She was “determined not to become a murderer. [She] would not kill, even to
escape. Nor would [she] eat monkey meat” (346). If the two – killing to escape
and eating monkey meat to survive – seem like non-sequiturs, Betancourt
acknowledges this when she says she does not “know why the two seemed to go
together in [her] mind, but it made sense” to her (346). Thus the reader is
offered is the identity formation, the chilling determination and the
compassion of a woman in captivity.
Finally a word about silence,
both as a theme and as a key concept in the title of the text, Even Silence Has an End. Silence, and
its inverse, sound – in the form of words,
whether written, spoken or heard on the radio -- play a profound part in
Betancourt’s psychological health and identity formation. For example, in the
months before she was rescued, the interplay between words and silence kept her
spirits up when she was very ill and thought she might be dying. She thought
about her father, and the way in which he read poetry to her: “he was arming
[her] for life. It was his words that [she] heard” (489). Thus words were life.
But the poem she remembered her father reciting, by Pablo Neruda, exclaimed “There is no silence that does not end”
(489), thereby ensuring that she was “killing [her] fears with Pablo Neruda’s
claim over death” (489). Life conquers death just as words conquer silence.
Betancourt took great consolation in the notion that the silence imposed upon
her by the FARC would some day end, and that life would return. She recognized
“how heavily [her] enforced silence weighed” (461) but that there was power in
the silence. Yet, this power cut in many directions. One the one hand, the FARC
guards used silence to punish and control the captives. They confiscated radios
that the captives used to listen for news of the outside world. The guards also
forced the prisoners to whisper or pass notes as forms of communication.
However the captives
also used silence as mechanisms for control, for example when Betancourt mused
about her hatred for the guards, “with every word, every order, every affront,
[she] stabbed them with [her] silence” (344). Unfortunately the captives also
attempted to gain power over each other as well as over the guards, as in the
time when Betancourt realized that she was “shocked . . . with how little [she]
knew about the inner workings of [her] own personality” (205) and that “in
captivity [she] discovered that [her] ego suffered the moment [she] was
deprived of something [she] wanted. It was over food that prisoners, urged on
by hunger, waged silent battles” with each other in attempts at taking control
of their circumstances (205). Silence is thereby related to power – taking it,
keeping it – but also to humiliation. It is easier to remain silent and thus
not show one’s humiliation, which is made poignantly real when Betancourt
reflected on memories and whether or not to talk about them with others:
My companions
wanted to speak, to confide in us, but the terrible things they had experienced
kept them silent. I could easily understand. As you share memories, an
evolution occurs. Some facts are too painful to be told; in revealing them you
relive them. And then you hope that as time goes by, the pain will disappear
and you’ll share with others what you’ve experienced and unburden yourself of
the weight of your silence. But often, even if you no longer suffer when you
revisit the memory, you keep quiet out of a feeling of self-respect – a
reluctance to expose your humiliation. (213)
It is worth pointing out that in
one of the most psychologically penetrating passages in the entire book,
Betancourt refrains from using the first person “I” but instead employs the
third person “you”. This is projection of the trauma onto the reader – you – as
a mechanism of control over the experience. Betancourt wants to talk about the
silence, but can only do so in the third person. Ultimately then, this is the silence
that must come to an end; the “weight of the silence” is about two pounds and
comes in the form of a hard back book.
Works
Cited
Betancourt, Ingrid. Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of
Captivity in the Colombian Jungle.
New York :
Penguin Press, 2010.
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