The New York Review Abroad
Page 1
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
THE NEW YORK REVIEW ABROAD
FIFTY YEARS OF INTERNATIONAL REPORTAGE
Copyright © 2013 by The New York Review of Books
Prologues © 2013 by Ian Buruma
All pieces © by individual authors:
“Left Out in Turkey” © 2005 by Christopher de Bellaigue. Reprinted with permission.
“A Farewell to Haiti” © 2012 by Mischa Berlinski. Reprinted with permission.
“Liverpool: Notes from Underground” © 1979 by Caroline Blackwood. Reprinted with permission.
“Tibet Disenchanted” © 2000 by Ian Buruma. Reprinted with permission.
“Delusions in Baghdad” © 2003 Mark Danner. Reprinted with permission.
“In El Salvador” © 1982 by Joan Didion. Reprinted with permission.
“Going Crazy in India” © 1981 by Rosemary Dinnage. Reprinted with permission.
“The Nowhere City” © 1993 by Amos Elon. Reprinted with permission.
“AIDS: The Lesson of Uganda” © 2001 by Helen Epstein. Reprinted with permission.
“An Exclusive Corner of Hebron” © 2012 by Jonathan Freedland. Reprinted with permission.
“The Revolution of the Magic Lantern” © 1990 by Timothy Garton Ash. Reprinted with permission.
“Letter from South Africa” © 1976 by Nadine Gordimer. Reprinted with permission.
“Love and Misery in Cuba” © 1998 by Alma Guillermoprieto. Reprinted with permission.
“Sad Brazil” © 1974 by Elizabeth Hardwick. Reprinted with permission.
“The Sakharovs in Gorky” © 1984 by Natalya Viktorovna Hesse and Vladimir Tolz. Reprinted with permission.
“With the Northern Alliance” © 2001 by Tim Judah. Reprinted with permission.
“Fire on the Road” © 1986 by Ryszard Kapuściński. Reprinted with permission.
“The Suicide Bombers” © 2003 by Avishai Margalit. Reprinted with permission.
“Report from Vietnam I. The Home Program © 1967 by Mary McCarthy. Reprinted with permission of
The Mary McCarthy Literary Trust.
“The Corpse at the Iron Gate” © 1972 by V.S. Naipaul. Reprinted with permission.
“Is Libya Cracking Up?” © 2012 by Nicolas Pelham. Reprinted with permission.
“ ‘I Am Prepared for Anything’ ” © 1984 by Jerzy Popieluszko. Reprinted with permission.
“The Battle for Egypt’s Future” © 2011 by Yasmine El Rashidi. Reprinted with permission.
“The Burial of Cambodia” © 1984 by William Shawcross. Reprinted with permission.
“Godot Comes to Sarajevo” © 1993 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.
“Paris in the Spring” © 1968 by Stephen Spender. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Estate of Stephen Spender.
“Arrested in China” © 2001 by Kang Zhengguo. Reprinted with permission.
All reasonable attempts have been made to contact the proper copyright holders.
If insufficient credit has been shown please contact the Publisher for proper citation in all future editions.
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Published by The New York Review of Books, 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage/ edited and with a preface by
Robert B. Silvers.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books collections)
Cover Design: Pentagram
eISBN: 978-1-59017-632-0
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
1 Report from Vietnam I. The Home Program by Mary McCarthy
2 Paris in the Spring by Stephen Spender
3 The Corpse at the Iron Gate by V. S. Naipaul
4 Sad Brazil by Elizabeth Hardwick
5 Letter from South Africa by Nadine Gordimer
6 Liverpool: Notes from Underground by Caroline Blackwood
7 Going Crazy in India by Rosemary Dinnage
8 In El Salvador by Joan Didion
9 The Sakharovs in Gorky by Natalya Viktorovna Hesse and Vladimir Tolz
10 The Burial of Cambodia by William Shawcross
11 ‘I Am Prepared for Anything’ by Jerzy Popieluszko
12 Fire on the Road by Ryszard Kapuściński
13 The Revolution of the Magic Lantern by Timothy Garton Ash
14 Godot Comes to Sarajevo by Susan Sontag
15 The Nowhere City by Amos Elon
16 Love and Misery in Cuba by Alma Guillermoprieto
17 Tibet Disenchanted by Ian Buruma
18 AIDS: The Lesson of Uganda by Helen Epstein
19 Arrested in China by Kang Zhengguo
20 With the Northern Alliance by Tim Judah
21 The Suicide Bombers by Avishai Margalit
22 Delusions in Baghdad by Mark Danner
23 Left Out in Turkey by Christopher de Bellaigue
24 The Battle for Egypt’s Future by Yasmine El Rashidi
25 An Exclusive Corner of Hebron by Jonathan Freedland
26 A Farewell to Haiti by Mischa Berlinski
27 Is Libya Cracking Up? by Nicolas Pelham
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
A Note from the Editor
OVER THE LAST fifty years, many of the writers of these reports set to clarify some corner of history they thought was misunderstood, particularly the ways people were being treated and mistreated by governments and by their neighbors. In some cases they took considerable risks in order to observe and understand baffling violence. How much we owe them and how grateful we are to all of them.
—Robert B. Silvers
1
Report from Vietnam I. The Home Program
Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy traveled in Vietnam after Operation Rolling Thunder began in 1965, and before the Tet Offensive of 1968. Rolling Thunder (along with Operation Arc Light and Operation Commando Hunt) was a terrifying bombing assault on North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that laid a toxic trail of devastation for several years. The US mission was to stop North Vietnamese support of the Vietcong, Communist guerrillas operating in the South. The mission failed.
In 1968, during the Tet, or Chinese New Year holiday, the Vietcong managed to attack dozens of cities in South Vietnam. Vietcong guerrillas even penetrated the US embassy in Saigon. Their mission was to spark a national uprising in the South. This, too, failed, at least in a military sense. Politically, it was the beginning of the end of the US war in Indochina.
In 1967, General Westmoreland still promised a victory against the Communists by the end of the year. The South was showered not just in weaponry, but fine American cars, refrigerators, rock-and-roll records, ice cream, hot dogs, Coca Cola, TV sets, garden sprinklers, and dollars. Meanwhile, the bombing rolled and thundered on and on and on.
—Ian Buruma
I CONFESS THAT when I went to Vietnam early in February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest and that I found it, though often by accident or in the process of being briefed by an official. Finding it is no job; the Americans do not dissemble what they are up to. They do not seem to feel the need, except through verbiage; e.g., napalm has become “Incinder-jell,” which makes it sound like Jello. And defoliants are referred to as weed-killers—something you use in your driveway. The resort to euphemism denotes, no doubt, a guilty conscience or—the
same thing nowadays—a twinge in the public-relations nerve. Yet what is most surprising to a new arrival in Saigon is the general unawareness, almost innocence, of how what “we” are doing could look to an outsider.
At the airport in Bangkok, the war greeted the Air France passengers in the form of a strong smell of gasoline, which made us sniff as we breakfasted at a long table, like a delegation, with the Air France flag planted in the middle. Outside, huge Esso tanks were visible behind lattice screens, where US bombers, factory-new, were aligned as if in a salesroom. On the field itself, a few yards from our Caravelle, US cargo planes were warming up for takeoff; US helicopters flitted about among the swallows, while US military trucks made deliveries. The openness of the thing was amazing (the fact that the US was using Thailand as a base for bombing North Vietnam was not officially admitted at the time); you would have thought they would try to camouflage it, I said to a German correspondent, so that the tourists would not see. As the Caravelle flew on toward Saigon, the tourists, bound for Tokyo or Manila, were able to watch a South Vietnamese hillside burning while consuming a “cool drink” served by the hostess. From above, the bright flames looked like a summer forest fire; you could not believe that bombers had just left. At Saigon, the airfield was dense with military aircraft; in the “civil” side, where we landed, a passenger jetliner was loading GI’s for Rest and Recreation in Hawaii. The American presence was overpowering, and, although one had read about it and was aware, as they say, that there was a war on, the sight and sound of that massed American might, casually disposed on foreign soil, like a corporal having his shoes shined, took one’s breath away. “They don’t try to hide it!” I kept saying to myself, as though the display of naked power and muscle ought to have worn some cover of modesty. But within a few hours I had lost this sense of incredulous surprise, and, seeing the word, “hide,” on a note-pad in my hotel room the next morning, I no longer knew what I had meant by it (as when a fragment of a dream, written down on waking, becomes indecipherable) or why I should have been pained, as an American, by this high degree of visibility.
As we drove into downtown Saigon, through a traffic jam, I had the fresh shock of being in what looked like an American city, a very shoddy West Coast one, with a Chinatown and a slant-eyed Asiatic minority. Not only military vehicles of every description, but Chevrolets, Chryslers, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagens, Triumphs, and white men everywhere in sport shirts and drip-dry pants. The civilian takeover is even more astonishing than the military. To an American, Saigon today is less exotic than Florence or the Place de la Concorde. New office buildings of cheap modern design, teeming with teazed, puffed secretaries and their Washington bosses, are surrounded by sandbags and guarded by MP’s; new, jerry-built villas in pastel tones, to rent to Americans, are under construction or already beginning to peel and discolor. Even removing the sandbags and the machine guns and restoring the trees that have been chopped down to widen the road to the airport, the mind cannot excavate what Saigon must have been like “before.” Now it resembles a gigantic PX. All those white men seem to be carrying brown paper shopping bags, full of whiskey and other goodies; rows of ballpoints gleam in the breast pockets of their checked shirts. In front of his villa, a leathery oldster, in visored cap, unpacks his golf clubs from his station wagon, while his cotton-haired wife, in a flowered print dress, glasses slung round her neck, stands by, watching, her hands on her hips. As in the American vacation-land, dress is strictly informal; nobody but an Asian wears a tie or a white shirt. The Vietnamese old men and boys, in wide, conical hats, pedaling their Cyclos (the modern version of the rickshaw) in and out of the traffic pattern, the Vietnamese women in high heels and filmy ao-dais of pink, lavender, heliotrope, the signs and Welcome banners in Vietnamese actually contribute to the Stateside impression by the addition of “local” color, as though you were back in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco or in a Japanese suki-yaki place, under swaying paper lanterns, being served by women in kimonos while you sit on mats and play at using chopsticks.
Perhaps most of all Saigon is like a stewing Los Angeles, shading into Hollywood, Venice Beach, and Watts. The native stall markets are still in business, along Le Loi and Nguyen Hue Streets, but the merchandise, is, for Asia, exotic. There is hardly anything native to buy, except flowers and edibles and fire-crackers at Tet time and—oh yes—souvenir dolls. Street vendors and children are offering trays of American cigarettes and racks on racks of Johnnie Walker, Haig & Haig, Black & White (which are either black market, stolen from the PX, or spurious, depending on the price); billboards outside car agencies advertise Triumphs, Thunderbirds, MG’s, Corvettes, “For Delivery here or Stateside, Payment on Easy Terms”; non-whites, the less affluent ones, are mounted on Hondas and Lambrettas. There are photocopying services, film-developing services, Western tailoring and dry-cleaning services, radio and TV repair shops, air-conditioners, Olivetti typewriters, comic books, Time, Life, and Newsweek, airmail paper—you name it, they have it. Toys for Vietnamese children (there are practically no American kids in Vietnam) include US-style jackknives, pistols, and simulated-leather belts, with holsters—I did not see any cowboy suits or Indian war-feathers. Pharmaceuticals are booming, and a huge billboard all along the top of a building in the central marketplace shows, for some reason, a smiling Negro with very white teeth advertising a toothpaste called Hynos.
If Saigon by day is like a PX, at night, with flares overhead, it is like a World’s Fair or Exposition in some hick American city. There are Chinese restaurants, innumerable French restaurants (not surprising), but also La Dolce Vita, Le Guillaume Tell, the Paprika (a Spanish restaurant on a rooftop, serving paella and sangría). The national cuisine no American wants to sample is the Vietnamese. In February, a German circus was in town. “French” wine is made in Cholon, the local Chinatown. In the nightclubs, if it were not for the bar girls, you would think you were on a cruise ship: a chanteuse from Singapore sings old French, Italian, and American favorites into the microphone; an Italian magician palms the watch of a middleaged Vietnamese customer; the band strikes up “Happy Birthday to You,” as a cake is brought in. The “vice” in Saigon—at least what I was able to observe of it—has a pepless Playboy flavor.
As for virtue, I went to church one Sunday in the Cathedral (a medley of Gothic, Romanesque, and vaguely Moorish) on John F. Kennedy Square, hoping to hear the mass in Vietnamese. Instead, an Irish-American priest preached a sermon on the hemline to a large male white congregation of soldiers, construction-workers, newspaper correspondents; in the pews were also some female secretaries from the Embassy and other US agencies and a quotient of middle-class Vietnamese of both sexes. The married men present, he began, did not have to be told that the yearly rise or fall in skirt lengths was a “traumatic experience” for a woman, and he likened the contemporary style centers—New York, Chicago, San Francisco—to the ancient “style centers” of the Church—Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem. His point seemed to be that the various rites of the Church (Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Maronite—he went into it very thoroughly) were only modes of worship. What the Sunday-dressed Vietnamese, whose hemline remains undisturbed by changes emanating from the “style centers” and who were hearing the Latin mass in American, were able to make of the sermon, it was impossible to tell. Just as it was impossible to tell what some very small Vietnamese children I saw in a home for war orphans were getting out of an American adult TV program they were watching at bedtime, the littlest ones mother-naked. Maybe TV too is catholic, and the words do not matter.
Saigon has a smog problem, like New York and Los Angeles, a municipal garbage problem, a traffic problem, power failures, inflation, juvenile delinquency. In short, it meets most of the criteria of a modern Western city. The young soldiers do not like Saigon and its clip joints and high prices. Everybody is trying to sell them something or buy something from them. Six-year-old boys, cute as pins, are plucking at them: “You come see my sister. She Number One fuck.” To help the GI resist the t
emptations of merchants—and soak up his buying power—diamonds and minks are offered him in the PX, tax free. (There were no minks the day I went there, but I did see a case of diamond rings, the prices ranging up to 900-odd dollars.) Unfortunately, the PX presents its own temptation—that of resale. The GI is gypped by taxidrivers and warned against Cyclo men, (probably VC) and he may wind up in a Vietnamese jail, like some of his buddies, for doing what everybody else does—illegal currency transactions. If he walks in the center after nightfall, he has to pick his way among whole families who are cooking their unsanitary meal or sleeping, right on the street, in the filth. When he rides in from the airport, he has to cross a bend of the river, bordered by shanties, that he has named, with rich American humor, Cholera Creek.
To the servicemen, Saigon stinks. They would rather be in base camp, which is clean. And the JUSPAO press officer has a rote speech for arriving correspondents: “Get out of Saigon. That’s my advice to you. Go out into the field.” As though the air were purer there, where the fighting is.
That is true in a way. The Americanization process smells better out there, to Americans, even when perfumed by napalm. Out there, too, there is an enemy a man can respect. For many of the soldiers in the field and especially the younger officers, the Viet Cong is the only Vietnamese worthy of notice. “If we only had them fighting on our side, instead of the goddamned Arvin [Army of the Vietnamese Republic], we’d win this war” is a sentiment the newspapermen like to quote. I never heard it said in those words, but I found that you could judge an American by his attitude toward the Viet Cong. If he called them “Charlie” (cf. John Steinbeck), he was either an infatuated civilian, a low-grade primitive in uniform, or a fatuous military mouthpiece. Decent soldiers and officers called them “the VC.” The same code of honor applied in South Vietnamese circles; with the Vietnamese, who are ironic, it was almost a pet name for the enemy. Most of the American military will praise the fighting qualities of the VC, and the more intellectual (who are not necessarily the best) praise them for their “motivation.” Americans have become very incurious, but the Viet Cong has awakened the curiosity of the men who are fighting them. From within the perimeter of the camp, behind the barbed wire and the sandbags, they study their habits, half-amused, half-admiring; a gingerly relationship is established with the unseen enemy, who is probably carefully fashioning a booby trap a few hundred yards away. This relation does not seem to extend to the North Vietnamese troops, but in that case contact is rarer. The military are justly nervous of the VC, but unless they have been wounded out on a patrol or have had the next man killed by a mine or a mortar, they do not show hatred or picture the black-pajama saboteur as a “monster,” a word heard in Saigon offices.