[PEN-L:6079] The Politics of Memory

[Thomas Kruse <tkruse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear PEN-Lers:

I feel like sharing this, especially as we are again in a time of war.  I
wrote the following piece to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Ben
Linder's death, but also in part as a response to a New Yorker article
("The Killing of Ben Linder") that portrayed Ben and his work in a very
belittling way.  Comments welcome.

---------

The Politics of Memory: Remembering Ben Linder
Tom Kruse, Cochabamba, April 1997

I.  28 April 1987

I can't bury what is so important.  I used to be able to, but that was when
struggle and revolution and dignity of people only existed in theory.
	Ben Linder, 1959-87

April 28 marks ten years since the contras killed Ben Linder in Nicaragua,
and I have been asked to explore the relevance of Ben's work for struggles
today.  I confess to be unequal to the task; what I can address is how he,
both as symbol and living memory, guides my work and thought today.

Beginning in 1984, when I first visited Nicaragua, I came to know Ben well.
We met on the set of Haskel Wexler's film Latinos. Ben and I were extras,
playing US marines.  He had come one year earlier, fresh out of the
University of Washington's mechanical-engineering undergraduate program and
convinced that the U.S.-backed war against Nicaragua was wrong. He thought
the revolution, which ended the Somoza family's 43-year dictatorship, was a
pretty good thing, and that he had something to offer.

Before landing a job Ben spent a lot of time clowning; he was an
accomplished juggler, actor and unicyclist.  Finally, he was put to work on
the kind of projects the architects of national development like best: big,
technologically advanced monsters, in this case the Nicaragua Energy
Institute's plans for a geo-thermal plant.  He was assigned to piping
design, for which he had no preparation.  But that was in the spirit of
things: by definition no one has the requisite preparation for making
revolution.  He did his work, but his heart lay elsewhere, closer to
grassroots.

In 1986 Ben was finally able to make the move to the small hydro-electric
projects department.  The site was El Cuá, northern Matagalpa province, an
area very hard hit by the war.  When Ben moved from Managua to El Cuá I saw
him on those days he would come to Matagalpa for rest or work.  He would
share my bedroom, we'd eat and talk, and inevitably he'd leave me with
tasks either personal (dirty laundry, outgoing mail) or work related
(typing, calls, etc.).

In short, we became good friends the last months of his life, and I fancy
that in some way he used me as confidant to unload his ideas, worries, and
pleasures when he left "the zone"-- as we called El Cuá and other war torn
areas -- to decompress.

I often had his mail for him when he arrived, sometimes the highly coveted
packages from home, containing tapes of Shostakovich or Benny Goodman.
That was my first impression of Ben's father -- someone far away, with very
good taste in music, and a good relationship to his son.

The last time I saw him alive the issues of his legal residency in
Nicaragua came up, his papers having expired.  His response was, basically,
"So what?  The immigration authorities don't make trips to El Cuá."  True
enough, but as he made for the door I suggested he might want to be legal
anyway.  He understood my comment as an offer to do the legwork.  It
wasn't, but I did it anyway.

On April 28, 1987, I had finally gotten around to starting his visa renewal
process.  That morning I had dropped off filled out forms, the requisite
photos, and forged his signature.  Returning to my office I was instructed
to see my boss, who I found with his face in his hands.  "¿Que?," I asked.
"Mataron a Benjamín -- they killed Benjamin," he replied.

Ben's body was brought to Matagalpa for the wake and funeral in a simple
casket in the back of a pickup truck.  Four of us -- all US citizens, two
doctors, a nun and myself -- were to undress and change his clothes, and
lay him out in another casket.  Present also were the second-in-command in
the Region VI, who shuffled about not quite knowing what to do with
himself, and the regional director of Civil Defense.  I drove home to get
some of the clothes Ben as a matter of practice left at the house.  I
remember my mind reeling, thinking "perhaps I should cry", hitting the
dashboard with my fist, and looking through the windshield as if through a
set of binoculars backwards.  Returning with clothes, I remember vividly
not wanting to touch Ben, as if physical contact would render too concrete
a reality I was still unable to assimilate.

As he was lifted out of the casket I held his head, his hair partially
matted with blood.  I had to step back.  I stayed, but I couldn't continue.
 The doctors removed themselves into a rehearsed clinical distance, though
with some difficulty.  The nun seemed the most composed of all of us,
having had more experience than us in such things.  After the explosion of
an anti-tank mine some weeks earlier, she had helped in re-assembling the
victims so that proper burials could be held with the bodies present, a
detail vitally important to Nicaraguans.

The office I worked in was turned into a makeshift funeral parlor; desks
and chairs we whisked out, Ben put in place.  The wait for the family
began.  During the day and the first night, Ben remained in the office; the
second night it was decided he should be taken to the morgue, to be
returned the next day.  I asked William, the civil defense guy, to help
move him.

William was a fellow who hid a very sharp, incisive judge of character
behind a jovial exterior.  Outwardly it was all fun and jokes, but you got
the feeling he knew things about you that you yourself didn't even know.  I
always felt a wee bit off balance around him, as if the better part of his
joviality was patient tolerance of someone he hadn't expected to find in
his midst, yet there I was nonetheless.

Not so with Ben.  When he would come to town for a few days, a meeting with
William at the Casa de Gobeierno was one of the first stops.  William
seemed to genuinely enjoy Ben, his energy and vitality.  He thought the El
Cuá team a bit wild (they were) but clearly held them, especially Ben, in
high regard.  Ben in turn sought out, and listened carefully to William.  I
remember envying Ben his ability to win friends even among the toughest
customers like William.

William was hard hit by Ben's death.  When I asked William to help me move
Ben he balked, any pretense of joviality gone.  He couldn't say no, while
saying yes was taking another step towards acknowledging Ben was dead.
William and I rode in the back of the pickup with Ben up the hill to the
regional hospital.  Etched into my memory is his silhouette, his large hulk
of a body, slumped over, bumping along.  In that land of unbridled
machismo, it was the first man I had seen openly mourning.

The next day Ben's family arrived.  Just prior to their arrival at our
office where Ben lay in wake, two representatives of the US Embassy tried
to make an entrance.  When I asked what they had come for they responded
"to pay our respects."  I was dumbstruck absolutely, like in a dream in
which you desperately need to scream, yet nothing comes out.  A Guatemalan
friend who had seen the exchange stepped in and said simply "you'd better
go."  They did.

Shortly thereafter I met Ben's family for the first time, and Ben was
carried to the local cemetery and buried.  Thousands participated, dozens
taking up supporting roles as if they had been planned in advance: food and
coffee were prepared, an endless supply of cigarettes materialized, marches
called, statements made.  For me it was a beginning and an end; for the
Nicaraguans is was yet another iteration of peculiar collective social
choreography born of war, far too many times enacted.

The picture I have of Ben -- black and white, in profile -- is the one I
went and took back from the immigration office.  (A little known fact: when
Ben was killed he was "illegal".)  Our commitment to stay in Nicaragua was
reaffirmed, though no semblance of "normalcy" was to return to our lives
for many months: plans were changed, outlooks adjusted.  Soon I found
myself accompanying three colleagues from Nicaragua and the Linder family
on a tour to let people in the US know who Ben was, how he died, and why.
I found incessant talking about the life and death of Ben a very effective
way to postpone grieving.


II. Looking Forward, Looking Back

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time.  It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice.
	Wallace Stevens, on modern poetry

In talking about Ben all too often the conflicts over symbols and meanings
overshadow the person, with precious little mention of what he was actually
like.  For example, upon learning of my relationship to Ben my current boss
wrote to me: "The Ben Linder I knew of was a cross in a front yard on
Precita Ave. on Bernal Heights in San Francisco.  In 1989, I used to walk
past it several times a week on my way to a friend's house or to Mission
St.  It just said 'Ben Linder -- Killed by Contras.'  I had no idea who Ben
was.  I had been living in Bolivia some time by then, but every time I saw
it, it moved me."

That Ben is a symbol is neither good nor bad in itself, simply inevitable.
Most "exemplary" people -- at least those we learn of -- come to us that
way, already abstracted somehow, with a meaning attached.  Almost without
exception abstraction involves first nailing down and redefining a complex
process as a static object, rendering it "open to analysis", and then
highlighting certain salient features while pushing to the background
others in order to make a desired point.  How we go about abstracting
usually determines the lion's share of the meaning we finally attach.  Thus
struggles arise as different people use "Ben Linder" to make different
meanings of things.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, I suppose, but I insist that in having
known Ben our opinions perhaps ought to weigh in a bit heavier.  I think we
need to tell what we know of Ben -- our friend -- so that he can be seen a
person, and not just a circulating symbol, used and sometimes abused.

We need to do this first as part of a defense of Ben before his detractors,
and second because in how he went about his life there are, I feel, some
vitally important suggestions for how we might go about our own today.

Critics characterize the solidarity movement as populated by starry-eyed
idealists, who found in Central America a stage to play out their own
repressed desires for social change, in the process missing entirely what
was really going on.  (There is, of course, a kernel of truth in the claim.
 For example, many of us were, I feel, saddled with very simplistic ideas
of who the contras were, ideas which obscured much more than they revealed
of the processes we were involved in.)

Yet Ben was a critical thinker, with a judicious sense of how and when to
place the critique.  But such criticism is dicey business, especially when
one is a gringo guest of the revolution.  In this he and the remarkable
team of Nicaraguans and foreigners that worked with him stand as a powerful
antidote to the image of ungrounded idealists.  They hardly idealized the
Sandinistas, and there were painful daily reminders of the arrogance and
indolence that riddled officialdom, just as there were consistent
indications that the revolution had created very real spaces of empowerment
without parallel in Central American history.  Following the example of
scores of other Nicaraguans, in conception and practice their work
consistently pushed to take advantage of and broaden such spaces, while
criticizing encroachments implicitly or explicitly.  In this Ben was, I
feel, a very constructive example, though his non-confrontational manner
was sometimes misunderstood as complicity by more direct critics.

At the broadest level to do "appropriate technology" projects at all was a
clear critique of government programs aimed at accelerated modernization
through technological sophistication.  But it was critique by example, not
denouncement.  At a more "micro" level, the team Ben was a part of took the
"radical" steps of suggesting power companies could be run locally, and
supporting a woman, Gilda Granados, in the role of plant operator.  I am
told that when they took Gilda to Managua to sign her onto the INE
payrolls, the bureaucrats were astonished.

Ben was also very good listener, letting others say their fill before
responding.  Among other foreigners he was respected as someone with
sensible analysis and sage advice.  Ben paid extraordinary attention to
people.  Our conversations about his work in the El Cuá inevitably turned
on the people involved in the project.  Frankly, sometimes he bored me with
long, involved and arcane descriptions of who was who in El Cuá, and how
so-and-so's cousin, who was also the father of a technician, had to bought
on board so the son could have more time off the farm to learn basic math,
thus making him eligible for work as lineman, after all he did seem very
bright, etc., etc.  "Uh huh ... yup ..." I would respond.  Only now do I
see that for Ben materials could be procured, technicians brought in, but
the real business was working with and training people so that they could
establish and sustain a local power grid.

The single most powerful memory I have of Ben are his tears of frustration
and anger upon finding out how Gilda, their young plant operator, had been
treated by local authorities following a contra attack on the power plant.
Rather than hearing her fears about continuing in the plant, and supporting
a woman who had barely escaped with her life and that of her children
(AK-47 fire and a rocket propelled grenade had been shot into her house,
mistaken for the plant), the authorities insisted she remain firm.  There
was no acknowledgment of the road traveled, only further demands.  Ben said
simply, "you don't treat people that way." I read into this gesture a
profound affirmation of what was at the center his work: people's dignity.
For Ben, dignity was a very concrete thing, sustained or undermined in the
day-to-day.

Ben thrived on being a part of thick personal and community networks -- the
same ones I often found stifling and confusing -- and built up a formidable
circle of friends and colleagues.  He involved himself responsibly in the
lives of others, and had a natural vocation for remembering a birthday,
anniversary, or the day another son was to report for military service.  He
would go to extraordinary lengths to send a note of commiseration or
celebration, or send a little packet of beans, coffee, or whatever he knew
would elicit a smile from the recipient.  I could barely leave Matagalpa
with him loading me up with such notes and packets.

Finally, significantly, Ben -- as clown and engineer -- was an artist in
the mode Wallace Stevens suggested for modern poetry.  "Living" and
learning "the speech of the place" it must "think about war/And it has to
find what will suffice."  Can we speak of a social poetics to engineering
practice?  If so this was Ben's: it was curious, excited about the world,
attentive to detail, with a fine ear for and a clear focus on people.
Ben's unicycle and juggling pins were never too far from his calculator.
For him riding through town dressed a clown to woo children to a local
clinic for measles shots was a development initiative as important as
manufacturing turbines locally.  Clowning was the logical extension of
engineering by other means -- and vice-versa.

Yet underneath it all I think Ben was a pretty insecure guy.  Such
insecurity might seem paradoxical given that he was an accomplished
actor/clown.  Or perhaps the two are compatible, and in clowning he found a
way to be enact a different, fearless self.  Ben took the business of
happiness very seriously, and he possessed a wild, exuberant creativity
that in clowning found an outlet.

In his journal shortly before his death he noted his key worry was living
up to his self-expectations of and those of his team members, given that
the most experienced team leader had recently left Nicaragua.  Far from a
weakness, I think this insecurity, in him, was in some ways a strength.
Nicaragua was a place of unrestrained machismo, in which I always felt Ben
was a good bit uncomfortable.  Recoiling from the role of a "man in a man's
world" -- a healthy response -- he was able to forge a kind of sociability
that allowed him to befriend men and women, while avoiding to some degree
complicity in machismo.

Amongst his friends, Ben was notoriously unsuccessful in sex and love.  Far
from being incapable of intimacy, he was perhaps too capable and too
desirous of it.  Not that he was pushy, rather he was simply incapable of
playing the role of predator.  And in a "man's world" such incapacity is
suspect.  For his time and place, and much to his credit, he was the "wrong
kind of man", much praised by Marge Piercy.

Making sense of our experience means, in part, sorting out the ideas that
guided our action: identifying what was good, what was bad, what is still
salvageable.  This is the stuff of content; but there is also form -- that
is, the manner in which we went about our business regardless (almost) of
our ideas.  "Almost" because it would be absurd to suggest that Ben's way
of going about his business was somehow separate from his commitments and
ideas; none the less, there were a lot of people -- a lot of us -- who
espousing the same ideas and convictions could have learned a lot from Ben
in this regard.

Proud, puffy-chested ideologues will always strut about the stages of our
lives clamoring for attention, demanding subservience, imploring us to "not
worry our little heads" or "be reasonable".  In the past such ideologues
claimed a vanguard status, before which we needn't think; now they announce
the end of history itself.  In the face of all this noise I will always
hold my antidote, my images of Ben.  He's attentive, respectful, but not
joining the shouting match, preferring instead to register his voice
through his work.

One such image I have is from a Matagalpa evening spent together.  After
carne asada and beer at the Pensión San Martín we wandered over to the
Parque Darío.  There, by chance, we met a responsable político (FSLN party
ideologue) assigned to a BLI or Light Infantry Battalion, on leave in the
city.  Upon discovering we were there in solidarity with the revolution,
and seeing in us a captive audience, he launched off on a dreadful,
rehearsed speech about the heroic struggle of the FSLN, the important role
of international proletarian solidarity (us? proletarians?), etc.

We couldn't tear ourselves away fast enough, though Ben was polite in
extracting us.  As we walked away he let out a big sigh and muttered,
simply, "Oh dear, time to get back to El Cuá."


III.  The Politics of Memory

Poetry is the way we help give names to the nameless so it can be thought.
The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems,
carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
	Audre Lorde

Ten years past, and the distance from there to here is enormous.  Ben
missed glasnost, the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the Cold War, the
transition to "democracy" in Chile, the 1989 and 1996 elections in
Nicaragua, a negotiated settlement in El Salvador, the 1992 uprising in Los
Angeles, the OJ Simpson trial, the birth of my son.

In the 1980s the lines of conflict seemed more clearly drawn.  We
struggled, internally, over whether we were in support of the revolution or
just against US intervention, but when a 500 lb. US anti-tank mine reduced
civilian transport vehicles to scrap, killing 32 in the process (as
occurred in San José de Bocay in June 1986) it was pretty easy to choose
sides.

In the post-Cold War world global inequity grows while the lines of
struggle grow fuzzier.  East and West have dissolved, while the South in
the North expands and the North re-colonizes the South, this time without
sending armies or planting flags.  Globalization, we're told, is eroding
the basis of the nation-state, and alternatives seem few.  The World Bank
spins itself the champion of "poverty reduction" in the Third World, while
blocking unionization efforts by Bank janitors in Washington, many of whom
are from the Third World.  It requires a great deal of effort to unravel
such things.

It's easier to marshal opposition to the effects of anti-tank mines on
civilian populations than against complex trade agreements or the
"structural adjustment programs" (read: savage restructuring to meet the
exigencies global capital) demanded by multilateral lending agencies.  Yet
the effect of the latter may in fact be more destructive than bombs.  As
one displaced tin miner poignantly put it to me here in Bolivia, structural
adjustment and mine-closings were like having "a bomb dropped on your
community."

Systems of governance -- politics -- are "structurally adjusted" too.
World Bank conditions for loan approval now routinely include "public
sector reforms."  And as government is forced to change, those who govern
find that the governed are often of the wrong variety, or in today's lingo,
a problem of "governability" arises.  One is reminded of Brecht's quip
about an impatient legislature that moved to have the populace dissolved,
and a new one voted in.  Likewise, governments now find themselves faced
with the task of "adjusting" peoples' aspirations, values, horizons.
Imposing the "neo-liberal model" requires structural adjustments of
meaning, too.

Examples of this abound here in Bolivia.  After a worker take-over in
December, the government sent in troops to protect the property of Vista
Gold Crop., a Denver-based mining firm.  In the aftermath 11 were dead,
over fifty wounded, but the proper signals had been sent to the world
market: Bolivia is safe for investment.  The repression was  justified as a
"police action" against a lawless group.  In the past such events would
have been rapidly assimilated as just the latest round of state sponsored
violence (similar massacres happened in '42, '49, '64, '67, etc.) and the
response, through popular organizations and unions, would have been swift.
Today those unions have been largely destroyed, and we are told these are
new times.  Today's "police actions", we are told, bear no resemblance to
the massacres of the past.  This, then, is the politics of memory, when we
are cut off from the "rock experiences of our daily lives", rendering that
for which we had a name empty, nameless.

In similar fashion a recent New Yorker article used "Ben Linder" to revise
the history of the 1980s, casting all activism as misguided and
embarrassingly out of style.  The argument ran like this: the Sandinistas
were a bumbling, authoritarian bunch, whose blunders generated the contras,
a massive, popular resistance movement in the countryside.  The US stepped
in to lend a hand to the contras, who were really an idealistic bunch.  In
this they resembled "Ben Linder", an idealistic though misguided activist,
who couldn't see what our New Yorker critic now does, and, sadly, got
caught in the crossfire and died.  Conclusion: Life is complicated; we
cannot predict how are actions of today will be determined folly by the
shrewd critics of tomorrow, so best not get involved.

The points of fact are easily enough refuted (the contras were originally
created by US; the symmetry between Ben and contras is bogus, etc.).
Harder is to make our alternative version heard or stick.  This too is the
politics of memory.

With this assault on our collective capacity to remember our past and
envision a different future -- the structural adjustment of our horizons --
I see one of my principal tasks as that of defending memory.  Here in
Bolivia many are involved in the same struggle.  Former dictator Hugo
Banzer (1971-78) is now immune from prosecution for his crimes of torture,
repression and disappearances, the statutes of limitations having run out.
And he won the 1997 presidential elections.

We must resist the alienation which makes inaccessible the quarries where
memories reside.  Bread is essential; a roof too; and in equal measure the
right to poetry, to plumb our experiences and make sense of and communicate
them our way.  For me, Ben -- friend and symbol -- is absolutely central to
the project.

With the snapshots I presented above, I am jumping into the fray over the
"meaning of Ben", his life, his work, his death.  I am not averse to
"trafficking" in symbols; on the contrary I feel it is urgent we promote
and defend a "Ben" that is in accord with the principles and practices of
the Ben we knew.  But this in not just about screaming louder a "yes he
was" to someone else's "no he wasn't".  It's also about telling our side,
to elicit and bring into view a polyphonic symphony of stories from all
those who knew him.  And for me, these stories are not just about doing the
right thing, but also about doing it in the right ways.  Over time, this is
how Ben continues to speak to me.


IV.  Dialog

.... y en nosotros nuestros muertos, pa' que nadie quede atras.
	Atahualpa Yupanqui

Over the past 10 years my relationship with Ben has changed a great deal;
it remains a dialog.  He is a present-yet-missing friend, before whose
memory I try to sort things out, asking myself how would I bring them up in
conversation with him.  I can't bullshit him; he would want the sensible
version, not too divorced from action.

My son bears his name, and he knows and speaks of the "other Benjamin".  In
this I hope, modestly, to begin to break with the endless present of
consumer capitalism, which renders history and memory irrelevant.

Ben told me once that when he got old what he wanted most was to sit in a
rocking chair on a porch in El Cuá, observing others as they set about to
change the world.  That's where I see him today, and he's laughing at my
follies.  On bad days I want to snap "stop it!"  On good days I see it for
what it is: judicious, not malicious, and pleasure in watching others do
what must be done, muddling through all the way -- a kernel of subversive
laughter that always upsets a little bit the best laid plans, making us
laugh at ourselves too.





Tom Kruse
Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia
Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242, 500849
Email: tkruse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx