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25 I-Witness an­ nette kobak Trans­ form­ ing trau­ matic ex­ pe­ ri­ ence into the writ­ ten word—as tes­ ti­ mony, me­ moir, the­ a­ ter, fic­ tion, or ad­ vo­ cacy—can be a com­ plex en­ ter­ prise, as the writ­ ers in this part of the book at­ test. If the ­ trauma has been ­ caused by an au­ thor­ i­ tar­ ian state, it can also be a ­ life-threatening one. Three of the writ­ ers here—Emin Milli, Na­ zeeha Saeed, and Hec­ tor ­ Aristizábal—not only found their lives in jeop­ ardy after speak­ ing out ­ against a ­ government-imposed story but still live under ­ threat of re­ pri­ sals. As I write, one of them, Emin Milli, has been im­ pris­ oned for a sec­ ond time, in spite of hav­ ing the sup­ port of dem­ o­ cratic or­ gan­ iza­ tions out­ side his coun­ try: a ­ graphic ex­ am­ ple of the per­ ils of in­ di­ vid­ ual tes­ ti­ mony, even in its ­ near-collegiate new dig­ i­ tal form. Si­ lence can be psycho­ log­ i­ cally on­ er­ ous (as the ­ fourth ­ writer, Molly An­ drews, sug­ gests), but it is often ex­ is­ ten­ tially the safer op­ tion—and any au­ thor­ i­ tar­ ian govern­ ment seems to know how to keep it that way. How did we get to this point—or, ­ rather, back to this point? ­ Wasn’t the ar­ bi­ trary ar­ rest of in­ di­ vid­ u­ als by an au­ thor­ i­ tar­ ian power at the core of what the En­ light­ en­ ment tried to ban­ ish? ­ Didn’t let­ tres stand up ­ against let­ tres de ca­ chet over two cen­ tu­ ries ago, and win? Why does an au­ thor­ i­ tar­ ian govern­ ment or dic­ ta­ tor still feel threat­ ened by one in­ di­ vid­ ual who ­ stands up for see­ ing ­ things dif­ fer­ ently, and says so? (Why, in an era of glo­ bal­ ized com­ mu­ ni­ ca­ tions, are there still dic­ ta­ tors?) You would think that any fledg­ ling dic­ ta­ tor might spot that tar­ get­ ing writ­ ers has been ­ self-defeating his­ tor­ i­ cally: writ­ ers usu­ ally win in the long run, even if they some­ times have to die to do so. Na­ po­ leon Bon­ a­ parte, who ­ created the blue­ print for mod­ ern to­ tal­ i­ tar­ ian re­ gimes, rec­ og­ nized this, even at the ­ height of his mil­ i­ tary power. “Do you know what I mar­ vel at most in the world?” he asked the man he had just ap­ pointed head of the Uni­ ver­ sity of Paris in 1808. “It’s the im­ po­ tence of force in or­ ga­ niz­ ing any­ thing. There are only two pow­ ers in the world, the sword and the mind. . . . In the long run, the sword is al­ ways ­ beaten 26 annette kobak by the mind.”1 And in that long run—sit­ ting on Saint Hel­ ena, see­ ing the im­ po­ tence of force, his half a mil­ lion ­ troops wiped out in Rus­ sia, his vast con­ quests hav­ ing re­ duced ­ France to less ter­ ri­ tory than it had when he took power—the­ ex-emperor had rea­ son to brood on his in­ sight, as he or­ dered thou­ sands of books to fill the empty ­ places of ­ swords and bat­ ta­ lions. What is it, then, that dic­ ta­ tors fear in writ­ ers? It’s ob­ vi­ ous, you might say: writ­ ers tell the truth, and dic­ ta­ tors need to sup­ press the truth in order to stay in power. Yet this is too sweep­ ing: “writ­ ers” are a hetero­ ge­ ne­ ous group­ ing, and not nec­ es­ sar­ ily more eth­ i­ cal or pro­ phetic or even truth­ ful than the rest of a sup­ pressed pop­ u­ la­ tion (al­ though the best may be some or all of those ­ things). In­ deed, be­ cause both fic­ tion and non­ fic­ tion—and even “sim­ ple” man­ i­ fes­ toes— need to ma­ nip­ u­ late form and lan­ guage to be ef­ fec­ tive, being ­ crafty with the truth is part of a ­ writer’s job spec­ ifi­ ca­ tion. The “truth” is...

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