Our September Book: The Devil and Mr. Casement by Jordan Goodman

This month, we are reading The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness by Jordan Goodman. Roger Casement is a fascinating historical figure who we have encountered before (in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost and Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil) who is also the subject of Mario Vargas Llhosa's most recent novel, The Dream of the Celt. It's a wonder there hasn't been a biopic starring, say, Daniel Day-Lewis about him, though there is really too much drama for just one film, just as there is too much to cover in one book. Although this book concentrates on Casement's investigations of the exploitation of indigenous peoples by rubber barons in the Amazon, there are a couple of enjoyable ways to get a thumbnail summary of his entire life. One is to listen to the ballad below, but if you have a little more time you can listen to the radio drama The Dreaming of Roger Casement (download via iTunes) from RTE (Radio Ireland).



I wish I could provide a little more background on Jordan Goodman or an interview about his book but I have hit a dead end on that front. There are still a few resources on the internet to supplement our reading, however. You can actually page through Walter Hardenburg's 1913 report "The Putumayo, the devil's paradise; travels in the Peruvian Amazon region and an account of the atrocities committed upon the Indians therein."  Here's a very brief film clip of Casement and a newsreel about his state funeral in Ireland almost fifty years after his death.  RTE also has a program in which a panel speculates "What if Roger Casement had not kept a diary?" (download via iTunes). An Independent 2011 news story of interest, "The Mystery of the Missing Amazonian Rubber Slaves" traces the fates of Omarino and Ricudo, the two Indians Casement brought back to England,

"We are sent far, far into the forest to get rubber, and if we do not get it, or if we do not get it quickly enough, we are shot," Omarino told the Daily News, a popular national newspaper founded and edited by Charles Dickens. "London is very wonderful, but the great river and the forest, where the birds fly, is more beautiful. One day we shall go back."
The men did make it back to South America in the end, but the last known record of their whereabouts shows them separated from their homes by thousands of miles of thick rainforest.

I tend to think of the movement for corporate responsibility in human rights as a relatively new development so this book was very instructive in showing that human rights activists have been seeking justice, not just from governments, but from businesses for more than a hundred years. Unfortunately, the descendants of the Putamayo Indians are still facing environmental threats brought on by corporate exploitation of their resources. This Survival International article compares the Roger Casement story to the current illegal trade in mahogany, which we read about in Ted Conover's The Routes of Man. Jordan Goodman notes the exploitation of the Putumayo by the oil and gas industry.  You can learn more about the current struggle by watching the documentary, Crude  or check out Amnesty International's corporate accountability program, their specific work on Chevron in Ecuador, a success story for indigenous rights in Peru, and an action you can take here.

For September: The Devil and Mr. Casement

For September, we have selected Jordan Goodman's book about Roger Casement's anti-slavery work in South America, The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness:

In September 1910, the activist Roger Casement arrived in the Amazon jungle on a mission for the British government: to investigate reports of widespread human-rights abuses in the forests along the Putumayo River. Accusations against the Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana had been making their way back to London, and the rumors were on everybody’s lips: Arana was enslaving, torturing, and murdering the local Indians. Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company, with its headquarters in London’s financial heart, was responsible. Casement was outraged by what he uncovered: nearly 30,000 Indians had died to produce 4,000 tons of rubber. When Casement’s 700-page report of the violence was published in London in 1912, it set off reverberations throughout the world. People were appalled that murderous acts were being carried out under the cloak of British respectability. The Peruvian Amazon Company was forced into liquidation, and its board of directors was publicly shamed. From the Amazonian rain forests to the streets of London and Washington, D.C., Jordan Goodman recounts a tragedy whose exposure in 1912 drew back the curtain on exploitation and the wholesale abuse of human rights. Drawing on a wealth of original research, The Devil and Mr. Casement is a haunting story of modern capitalism with enormous contemporary political resonance.

(If you show up for the discussion having read the just-released novel The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa, also about Roger Casement, you won't be turned away!)

Our April Author: Santiago Roncagliolo

This month we are reading Santiago Roncagliolo's Red April.  The book was recently shortlisted (with Orhan Pamuk) for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the author is the youngest to have received the Spanish Alfaguara Prize.

I'm sure there are many interviews and other great resources available in Spanish, but here is what I could find in English.  This Boston Globe interview is a good place to start. We learn about the similarities between the author and the central character of the book,

Q. Chacaltana is a wonderfully odd character.

A. Well, he's more or less like me, really. I worked in human rights in Peru in the '90s. Like Chacaltana, I was this ridiculous little figure who saw himself as enforcing the law and upholding order. His process is the same process I lived, which was gradually realizing that the state and the terrorists could be really similar. I didn't have a serial killer to track, but I saw a lot of serial killing. I was probably not as ridiculous as he is, but for sure I was a bit ridiculous.

More insight from an interview from Latineos about how human rights influences the author's writing and how we might relate this Peruvian story to other contexts:

LP:  When I worked with PEN, I remember campaigning on behalf of Peruvian writers and journalists persecuted under Fujimori’s regime in the 1990s. You worked in human rights in Peru at a similar time, when it would have been particularly dangerous for you. Do you believe in “the power of the pen” and do you think writers and journalists have a moral duty to campaign against injustice?

SR: I would force no writer into political subjects. Power is always to be mistrusted, no matter where it comes from. The only way to control it is civil action. What would Norwegians write about? Red April is about violence and death. It is not just about Peru’s war, but also Baghdad’s or even World War II. I just picked the violence and death I knew well, which was Peruvian. But each reader recognises his own terrible past in it.  I think it is important that citizens take part in public life, not just writers, although writers or photographers can also show the injustices to other people. 

Three Percent, the website dedicated to literature in translation, offers a taste of what's in his yet untranslated work.

One of Roncagliolo's books, Pudor, has been made into a film.  I can't see that the film has had a North American release, but you can watch the trailer (in Spanish) here.

Roncagliolo was featured in Granta's recent "The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists" issue. In a web feature related to the issue, the author talks about fellow Peruvian and 2010 Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llhosa and another recent Rights Readers author, Roberto Bolano,

And just what is a Latin American writer? I’ve no idea. Vargas Llosa’s next novel is the story of an Irishman. He also wrote the story of a French painter – Gauguin. And The Bad Girl takes place in Europe and Japan. Bolaño’s detectives travel through Africa and many of his characters live in Barcelona or Paris. In my opinion, what these two authors have in common is their boldness. Vargas Llosa has always taken risks, always tried out new ways of writing, without ever getting bogged down in his own creative past. And Bolaño was always implacably himself, and did things his own way.

The author reads from the Red April in Spanish:



Finally, please visit the Amnesty International site for more information about current human rights concerns in Peru.

The Empty Chair

This Human Rights Day we pause to honor Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo by acknowledging the empty chair at the Nobel ceremonies. Amnesty International urges you to take action:

Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo was charged with "inciting subversion of state power" and given an 11-year prison sentence on December 25, 2009 simply for co-authoring a proposal for political and legal reform in China. On October 7, the Beijing Municipal Higher People's Court upheld Liu Xiaobo's prison sentence. Urge Chinese authorities to release Liu Xiaobo immediately and unconditionally.

And we urge you to slip in a reference to Group 22 Pasadena's Chinese prisoner of conscience case Gao Zhisheng too. Check out the Globe and Mail's profiles of a courageous "Gang of 10" dissidents to watch, including Gao. To learn more about Liu Xiaobo, visit PEN's resource page.  You might also want to check out PEN President Kwame Anthony Appiah's piece on Liu in Foreign Policy: China's Burden of Shame which also mentions Gao. The NYT offers a Liu poem today.

Rights Readers authors have commented on Liu Xiaobo's plight and it's implications for the future of Chinese democracy.  Here's Orville Schell (Mandate Of Heaven) on PBS Newshour.  And Ma Jian (The Noodle Maker) writes in the Scotsman,

Though now better off than they have ever been in material terms, the Chinese people are denied any real opportunity to retain and refine their own dignity beyond the quest for wealth and luxury goods.   Liu's prize is a rebuke to the regime, because it rejects the dogma that nothing but the pursuit of economic interest matters.

We wouldn't want to overlook the Nobel Literature Laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa.  Many years we enjoyed reading Death in the Andes.  Rights Readers author Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) reacts to the news of his award on WNYC and offers up a bit of fan worship in the Paris Review.  Vargas-Llosa's Nobel speech is well worth the read for this thoughts on reading, exile, and human rights, not missing the chance to acknowledge the empty chair himself,

...a dictatorship represents absolute evil for a country, a source of brutality and corruption and profound wounds that take a long time to close, poison the nation’s future, and create pernicious habits and practices that endure for generations and delay democratic reconstruction. This is why dictatorships must be fought without hesitation, with all the means at our disposal, including economic sanctions. It is regrettable that democratic governments, instead of setting an example by making common cause with those, like the Damas de Blanco in Cuba, the Venezuelan opposition, or Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo, who courageously confront the dictatorships they endure, often show themselves complaisant not with them but with their tormenters. Those valiant people, struggling for their freedom, are also struggling for ours.