| Friday, May 1, 2009 10:31AM | | | | Defiant Images | Posted By: Michael Kelleher
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When the Tiannanmen Square uprising occurred, I was a sophomore in college. I lived in the DC suburbs, where my father owned a small car rental company. That summer, I worked at a dismal location in an airport hotel, alone, in an office that had once been a maid's closet. When a customer arrived at the airport, I would pick them up at the terminal, drive them back to the hotel, and put them in a rental car. Then I would wait for the next call, and so in. I smoked a lot, too, and I also read the newspaper.
At some point, articles began appearing daily about a student protest that had begun to take place in Beijing. Each day I followed the progress of the protests in print and would then rush home in the evening to watch the latest images of the protest on the news.
I remember feeling a kind of euphoria as the protests wore on and the Chinese government did nothing about it. It seemed like the students might actually be winning.
I remember the image of a handmade Statue of Liberty rising in the Square.
And then I remember the tanks. And like that, it was over, but for the image of a lone man blocking the path of a tank that was trying to move forward towards the square. No one knew who he was or what is fate may have been, but the images of him putting himself in harm's way was so striking it moved me to tears.
I suspect this feeling was near universal outside of Red Army Headquarters, which was why it served as the catalyst for a night of readings in honor of the spirit of that lone protester. Writers were asked to read something by someone else or by themselves that they thought captured that spirit in words. Each writer read in front of a screen that at times showed the images of the lone man, at others the translation of the work being read on stage in its native language, and at still others was completely blank.
What was most interesting about the night, for this writer, anyhow, was thinking about the various distances between that one striking image on the screen and the words being spoken on the stage. During his introduction, which was given in Korean (and English, through a translator), to a reading of his work, Hwang Sok-Yong told a story about being in Beijing at the time of the uprising, while repeatedly gesturing toward the blank screen behind him, where he supposed the image of the lone man to be. The absence of that image from the screen served as a poignant reminder of what often happens to the men and women who make the decision to stand up and fight.
On several occasions, the words being spoken on the stage approached the refined eloquence of that image. Highlights for me were a reading by Sarah Schulman of an essay by poet Audre Lorde called, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" and Sergio Ramirez' reading of a poem about a violently repressed student uprising by Pablo Neruda.
The evening ended on an emotional note with ACLU lawyer, Jameel Jafferm, who read from a letter by an American military prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, who had been vigorously prosecuting a case against a 16 year-old Afghani until he realized something important: he was wrong. The evidence was flimsy and the kid should be sent home. In writing this letter, he was also writing his resignation from the Armed services, where he had had a distinguished career.
Though his image had long since disappeared from the screen, the spirit of the lone protester seemed then to echo through the mostly silent room, and I felt a fleeting sense of that same euphoria I felt the day I had thought the protesters might actually have won | | | |
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