The Gorgon Effect

Today, we started with a lesson on Perseus and the Gorgon, Medusa, to create a metaphor about genocide. (Most students knew Perseus and Medusa from  Percy Jackson movies and books.) Inga Clendinnen, in Reading the Holocaust, calls this the "Gorgon effect":"The sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of will which afflicts so many of us when we try to look at the persons or processes implicated in [atrocities]."  She claims that we cannot afford being blinded  into silence or reverence by humanity's atrocities and, thus, from changing things.

Often times, people turn away from terrible things. We look away because it is unimaginable or unbelievable or even if we just feel like we can't make a difference. The gorgon petrifies the human in itself and its prey, or those who look into its eyes. However, because the students are just now thinking about what they might want to do with their lives or what kind of person they want to become, now is a good time to face the horrible and think about the choices we can make in our lives, how we can be agents of change. While it is difficult to know about genocide, it is more difficult to say, " I didn't know." Phillip Gourevitch, in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, writes, "The best reason I have for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy" (19). For Clendinnen and for Gourevitch, it is a politics of seeing: if we want to destroy the gorgon -- genocide -- we need to stare back and see the processes of genocide.

We read chapter nine of Tree Girl  out loud. In this chapter, Gabi has hid her sister Alicia and the baby she helped birth under a bush so that she could to go to a nearby market for food, a pueblo apparently untouched by the scorched earth policy of the Guatemalan army. There, she meets Mother Lopez, a nun who intends to help Gabi until the soldiers surround the market. Gaby runs and climbs a machichi tree, and from the branches, she bears witness to the soldiers' systematic massacre of every living being in the pueblo over a two-day period. This chapter is the most graphic chapter of the book, so after I read this, I ask students to journal a response to this question: Do you think the graphic nature of these chapters was necessary for a young adult book? Should history like this be retold or kept silent?  Is it more or less powerful in fiction than in a text book?  Why or why not?Students had a lot to say about this. I will post some pictures from their journals.

Chapter nine seems to be based off of the events at Dos Terres: Here is an episode from This American Life , which aired May 25, 2012; there are also updates as recently as September 25,2012.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/465/what-happened-at-dos-erres. Below is an ebook about the same story.

Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory, and Justice in GuatemalaBy ProPublica

BUY THE EBOOK

The harrowing and heartrending story of Guatemala’s Dos Erres massacre, and the survivors whose lives were forever changed by it

In 1982, at the height of Guatemala’s civil war, twenty soldiers from the army’s commando unit, called the Kaibiles, invaded the farming village of Dos Erres. Masquerading as leftist guerillas, the squad members cut their way through the small town, killing more than 250 men, women, and children. Only a handful of people survived. One of them, a young boy, was adopted by Kaibil lieutenant Ramírez and raised by Ramírez’s family, who named him Oscar. Just three years old at the time of the massacre, Oscar grew up unaware of his true origins. It wasn’t until almost thirty years later, living in the suburbs of Boston with a family of his own, that Oscar would learn the truth.

Drawn from interviews with massacre survivors, commandos-turned-protected witnesses, lawyers, and forensic anthropologists, Finding Oscar is a powerful, groundbreaking investigation into the Dos Erres massacre and its aftermath. It is an unforgettable account of the secret abductions of Dos Erres survivors, the mission to bring the perpetrators to justice, and the courage of the Guatemalan people.

This ebook contains content not available anywhere else. Additional features include:

-A preface by Sebastian Rotella

-An afterword by acclaimed author Francisco Goldman

Oscar’s story is also featured on the May 25, 2012, episode of This American Life, available for download atwww.thisamericanlife.org. A slide show, timeline, and details about how this story was reported can be found atwww.propublica.org.