The general asks for forgiveness from a woman whose brother he murdered.
Exhibition on view from
28th February to 19th March, 2011
11 am to 7 pm (Sunday holiday)
RSVP : Priya – 080 40535212 (10am to 5pm)
at 26/1, Sua house,
Kasturba Cross road,
Near the British Library,
Bangalore – 560080
Guided Tour by Ryan Lobo
Friday, 18th March, 6 pm onwards
Ryan Lobo co-produced the critically acclaimed feature documentary "The Redemption of General Butt Naked." which was awarded best cinematography at the recent Sundance film festival 2011.
He also discusses the project in his TED talk.
WAR AND FORGIVENESS
War enjoys exciting press in our storytelling tradition. Photographs of men firing guns and charging forward make for great selling visuals. A Pandora’s box of pestilence, humiliation, rape, egos’, NGO’s, poverty and intensely debated editorials read by people too far away most of the time, usually do not. Our headlines are normally readable. Our images are often of the ordinary and the obvious. They reinforce our worldview and our view of ourselves. After all we are normal and ordinary people deserving of justice and the right to live peacefully. Until Pandora comes knocking.
In 2007, I traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia. I experienced other peoples suffering at close quarters, immersed myself in stories and on occasion experienced fear for my own life. Unlike many people, I was fortunate enough to leave.
Child of poppy farmer watches photographer as fields are destroyed
Besides Iraq and Afghanistan I traveled to Liberia to shoot a story about a brutal warlord called “General Butt Naked”. He got his name from fighting stark naked and claims to have personally killed more than 10,000 people during Liberia’s civil war . He commanded his child soldiers to commit unspeakable crimes and enforced his command with brutality. The general is now a Christian evangelist named Joshua. We accompanied him as he walked the earth, visiting villages where he had once murdered, and as he says, seeking forgiveness and as he says, endeavoring to improve the lives of his former child soldiers.
I expected him to be killed outright but what I witnessed opened my eyes to an idea of forgiveness, which I always thought seemed impossible. In the midst of incredible poverty and loss, I watched people who had nothing, absolve a man who had taken everything from them.
Child of Afghan poppy farmers
Does forgiveness or redemption replace our idea of justice? Joshua says that sorry isn’t enough and one has to live it and prove it. He says he does not mind standing trial for his crimes and speaks about them from soapboxes across Monrovia to an audience that often includes his victims. Our ideas of victory often involve defeating an enemy outside ourselves. A terrorist. A naxalite. Not within.
Iraqi prison
We look upon these victims and perpetrators as others far away. We prevent ourselves from seeing ourselves in them. We do not allow ourselves to see what we fear the most, and which is so much a part of our deepest potentials. I am fascinated with the general because he represents the possibility of what we could be, for worse and for better.
“The banality of evil” is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt that was used to describe how the greatest evils in human history were not executed by psychopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises and ideas of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal, and ordinary.
I have come away from war with a sense of guilt which for a long while I could not explain. I wondered what use it would be to exhibit photographs, which I know will not sell, of faraway wars in India until I decided that the most depressing thing about working in war zones was not the fear of death. It is seeing the same thing, perhaps the seeds of the same thing within ourselves, in our conversations and in the way we treat our own people.
Disease, war and horror weren’t the only things that exited Pandora’s box. The last thing to exit was hope. If someone as atrocious as the general can attempt to redeem himself, regardless of whatever idea of justice prevails or its execution and regardless of the good or bad opinion of anyone, there is hope.
Child of Afghan heroin addict pretends to be a monster
Before one begs for forgiveness, he had to forgive himself. Healing comes with confession and acknowledgement of perpetration and then hopefully, forgiveness. Healing for all sides. And that is hope. Maybe for all of us.
Hindu Kush
0 comments:
Post a Comment