You Must Set Forth at Dawn (66 page)

The words sounded somewhat familiar, and I recalled that I had used similar lines in
The Trial of Brother Jero.
It only made me wax more creative. I retreated even farther, ever backward, keeping my eye on the taxi, whose occupants had fallen silent. Joe was now closer to me, and I grew more confident. “That's right, sir, please love each other to death, but I implore you, first beat the living shit out of the lady. She needs it, she deserves it, and you'll be fulfilling both a lover's and a civic duty.”

As we passed the doorman, he now appeared to have woken up, ready to advertise his role as a concerned citizen and spectator. I could not believe my ears at his fatuous inquiry: “What happened there? What did he say to her?”

At which point, I did not care that he still struck me as a cross between Mike Power, the Nigerian wrestler, and Sonny Liston at the height of his reign of demolition. I stopped, fixed him with a glare full of naked Ijegba hatred, then ejected onto him a brief, semicoherent, but pithy summary of my assessment of him, his race, and his sick society. There was so much violence stored up in me that I think I secretly wished he would take a swing at me and connect, if only to remind me forcefully that there are societies where the norm is to remain uninvolved, even if murder is being committed right under one's foreign nose.

Thank goodness, my compatriots who refused to “get in the taxi” far outnumbered those who were not only content to go for the ride but narrated to the outside world the idyllic vistas through which their purring limousine was being driven, and its utopian destination. The majority of Nigerians were being forced, not even into taxis but into Black Marias, straight from domestic haven or workplace and, sometimes, directly into hearses. Their screams for help did not come from them alone or reverberate against our gut linings as exiles but rose from within ourselves. The only question that was left to us was: What form should such self-help take? If we were compelled to embrace violence, we had to analyze the conditions of violence and mediate its unpredictable nature with a controlling, discriminating philosophy of violence.

ONE EVOLVES SPECIFIC rules of engagement simply from habit, even if only as a theoretical framework from within which one can endure, morally, a violent world. Combatants in war know the nature of the terrain into which they are thrust, an unambiguous arena of violence. However, even within the conceded space of violence, codes of restraint must exist. For instance, I have always considered the taking of innocents as hostages a despicable form of struggle, a pathetic mimicry of the renegade state that takes its entire people hostage. I always took my leave, thankfully and painlessly, of rhetoricians of sweeping, nondiscriminating violence, especially during those heady days of Marxist and Troskyite arrogation, now supplanted by a jihadist competitiveness of all religious colors. “There are no innocents.” Thus are the slaughter and kidnapping of innocents justified in the name of a Higher Cause—secular or religious. The right word is “megalomania,” a presumptuousness of a divine right of the random appropriation of lives. It has always struck me as merely blasphemous, no matter how just one may find the fundamental causes to which such catechisms attach themselves.

In the solitude of moral conscience, there is a genuine dilemma when one is confronted by the specter of actually generating violence. Such a dilemma is a natural product of reflection. It is a recollection of one's humanity, bringing to the forefront of one's thoughts the invisible future, the potential transformation—for the better—of the social entity that must pay the price of bloodshed and social disruption. When it is glaring that power has gone rabid in society and the reality of daily existence is that of ongoing terror, cruelty, and repression, there is really little room for hand-wringing or agonizing. The choice is made, and then the mind is set free to address the management of such an unwanted commodity, to set limits on its deployment in the cause of redress and restitution. The schooling of the individual participant is crucial: a keen and constant assessment of the ultimate goal and an awareness of the danger that such a goal can be corrupted by divergences from a code of conduct that must be set beforehand and subscribed to collectively.

After the first Persian Gulf War and the release of prisoners, I was riveted by a program of interviews with some of the former prisoners of war. A pair of infiltrators from the anti-Saddam coalition force, two Britishers from the Special Unit—those adepts of derring-do who precede an invasion and establish tactical vectors in the empty dunes behind enemy lines—had been surprised by a mere child of some six or seven years. He had wandered far from his home and stumbled on their hideout. For several moments, the invaders had stood staring at the seeming apparition, moments during which they could have shot, knifed, or smothered him.

Said the Special Unit man, “My training was really to have killed him, but I couldn't do it.” The child was allowed to run off. He reported the presence of the intruders to his parents, who alerted their local army unit. The capture of the intruders and their imprisonment followed swiftly. I have often compared that moment to the “there are no innocents” combatants of Ireland, both the Ulster Defence Association psychopaths and their soul mates within the Irish Republican Army who think nothing of tossing a bomb into a pub or blowing up a crowded shopping mall. Nor do I find any enlightenment in suicide bombers, never mind the sobering thought that some do it out of total, terminal conviction, their entire consciousness consumed by the indignity of what to them is an existential negation—that is, life is not living when lived as such but may be validated, indeed purified, when sacrificed in avenging its indignity: “I die, therefore, I am”; or, better still, “I die, and thus—become.” Yet others immolate themselves in this manner out of the expectation of a reward: the guarantee of resurrection in the eternity of a sybaritic paradise. They believe in this recompense, and that is the true inducement to their surrender to self-immolation.

The accidental casualty that is inflicted on innocents in the course of a conflict—I detest the expression “collateral damage” when applied to human lives—occupies a different level of responsibility and censure, to be judged on the efforts made by participants in the conflict to avoid such violations of innocence or neutrality. But that disingenuous mantra “Violence is violence” requires repudiation as an abdication of all moral responsibility, an attempt to justify any level of criminality under the untenable, indeed obnoxious, argument that when the consequences are the same, the causes acquire a moral equivalence. The glorification of random violence in particular leaves no room for moral ambiguity, that conditioning of the mind that declares all of humanity culpable and deserving of random punishment for being whole while others are mutilated or satiated while others are starving, for sleeping soundly while others are insomniacs—indeed, for being alive while others are dead!

ONE MORE INSTRUCTIVE encounter, this time with the thrill seeker, the vicarious collaborator in indiscriminate violence. Traveling between London and the United States in the summer of 1971, I found myself an object of attention by a young, eager face from Egypt, a member of a group on its way to attend some kind of youth event sponsored by the United Nations. I was working at my portable typewriter, and he could not resist coming over to ask me if I was a writer. I confessed to the crime. Where was I from? Nigeria, I said. He was clearly dying to engage me in conversation, perhaps because there were just the two black faces in the plane, those of my female companion and me. The youthful interloper—he could not have been more than nineteen—plunged straight into the politics of colonialism but did not really take too long to ask the question on his mind: How did we, in Nigeria, view the Palestinian problem?

“With support for the displaced Palestinians,” I responded. “They deserve their own homeland.”

We discussed the plight of the refugees, the ambiguous role of the United Nations, and the likelihood (or unlikelihood) of peace in the Middle East in our lifetime. He was then unaware that the Nigerian government—and most African nations—had broken off relations with Israel after the Six-Day War with Egypt: Israel had been warned not to advance into any portion of the African continent but had ignored the warning. So the Organization of African Unity had exhorted all its members to break off relations, and several had. When I revealed that Nigeria had indeed been one of the first to do so, it was all he could do to refrain from throwing his arms around me. Our love feast underwent a sudden hiccup, however, when, with a confident, even gloating smile on his face, he asked, “Ah, my friend, so what do you think of the blow struck by the liberation movement against Switzerland?”

I thought I was sure what he meant, but I asked anyway, “A blow against Switzerland? When was this?”

“But you must have heard. The plane—
boom!
”

I studied him with some keenness, put my work aside, and said carefully, “If you have any friends in the PLO, I suggest you tell them that that kind of outrage is certain to lose them the support they enjoy right now among most African governments—and peoples.”

He stopped dead. My companion, an African American, gave a wry smile, as if to say, Well, end of in-flight romance.

“And you?” asked this young man of righteous intensity. “What do you think?”

“Sickening,” I said.

Slowly, he sank down on his knees beside me, the intent would-be tutor of a backward child. “But you see, the Swiss government had been supporting the Zionist cause. And Swiss business—they pour millions and millions into Jewish business, and that money is used in turn to suppress the Palestinian movement.”

“I don't know about your facts,” I told him, still in the same comradely mode. “You probably have information that I do not, but even if that were true, does it justify the murder of innocents?”

His face was wreathed in that understanding smile—the patient, dedicated teacher accommodating a retarded pupil. “Ah, my Nigerian friend, you have to understand that the Swiss government is guilty of the deaths of many innocent Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis. This was a plane owned by the Swiss government. The profits find their way sooner or later into the hands of the enemies of the Palestinians.”

I decided to change tack. “For how long have the North Vietnamese engaged first the French and then the Americans in a bloody war of liberation?”

He looked puzzled. I spoke as gently as I could. “Well, at least two decades taken together, wouldn't you say?” He nodded agreement.

“Well, then,” I continued with self-conscious gentleness, “would you claim that their cause is any less just than others? Than the Palestinians', for instance? For nearly twenty years they've fought superior forces armed with the most sophisticated weaponry, defeated one, and brought the other to a virtual standstill. Explain to me why they haven't chosen to go around blowing innocent people out of the air. Do you think they are mentally retarded? Trapped in antiquated notions?” The effort to keep my voice even was becoming frayed. “Do you think it possible there may be some valid principles—even pragmatic reasoning—behind such restraint? Some careful political calculations? Well, tell me, whose choice strikes you as being more politically rational and/or morally superior to the other? Which one do you find arrogant and insulting?”

At the time, inquiries had not uncovered the source and details of the Swissair attack, only that the plane had exploded in the skies, the work of an altimeter bomb. Yet to come was the revelation of the callousness with which the perpetrators had set out to gain the affection of two females, invited them home on holiday, and then made excuses that they had been prevented from traveling at the last moment; they would join their women later. An engagement had been concluded with one; a marriage was to follow shortly afterward. What was more natural than that the bride-to-be should agree to take her fiancé's suitcase with her? In short, in addition to the total strangers aboard, there were two beings with whom they had broken bread and drunk wine, whom they had fondled, and to whom they had made love—then sent to their deaths, making them the instruments of their own annihilation. The cynical details were yet to be uncovered, but one could still approach the outrage clinically, devoid even of that personalized dimension. My liberation warrior continued to stare at me with an expression that I could not immediately decipher, and I decided to restrict our scope of discussion to overall strategic choices, even within the brutal parameters of armed struggle.

“Any liberation war,” I pressed on, “involves more than mutual destruction. It is also a war of opinion, a contest for support, for solidarity. In other words, all action should be guided by considerations of a long-term advantage. So when one side acts with a brutal contempt for innocent lives, it alienates potential support. Doesn't that stand to reason?”