Thursday, Books, Forgiveness, and Bad Design

It's Thursday and, unlike every other Thursday for the last two months, I am not frantically reading film theory in order to prep for my night class. Good ol' Dr. Shaviro is off at a conference somewhere so we students have a week off to watch Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing and do the reading for next week.

Consequently, I'm reading blogs, answering e-mail, and grading papers. It's a sweet life I have.

I finished reading A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela last night and I really, really liked it. PGM is a psychologist who was invited to be part of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the dismantling of apartheid. The book is a meditation on the idea of forgiveness in the face of despicable evil. It centers around her interviews with Eugene de Kock, an apartheid government operative who had been dubbed "Prime Evil" by the media. De Kock was responsible for countless murders, assassinations, night raids, bombings, disappearances, and instances of torture during the 70s and 80s and was the post-apartheid poster boy for everything that was depraved, evil, and wrong with the previous regime. Following the shift of power, he was sentenced to 212 years in prison and it was there in Pretoria that PGM interviewed him.

I know it sounds all "Hello, Clarice" but it's not that at all. The book asks questions about who is deserving of forgiveness and what the act of forgiving does for both the victim and the perpetrator. De Kock, who looks like a dowdy suburban dad rather than a killing machine by the way, deals with the weight of the crimes he's committed and PGM deals with completely unexpected feelings of compassion for someone who killed a lot of people who looked a lot like her. It's a very hopeful, intelligent, compassionate book and it's one of the best things I've been introduced to since I started here at Wayne. It's not academic or dry. On the contrary, it's quite compelling and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to read something meaningful about real forgiveness.



I also wanted to mention that I finally (after close to 20 years) got around to reading My Name Is Asher Lev. I mentioned it on my blog a month or two ago and wrote about how I couldn't bring myself to read it because the copy I had was too ugly. A few people wrote and urged me to get over it and read it anyway. I found a good looking copy on Amazon and read it in a couple of days. Not long after that, I tracked down its sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev, and read it over it a weekend. Needless to say, I loved them both. I loved the ideas about how God's world can/should be inclusive and that art can be as much of God as other, more traditional forms of worship. I had issues with the ways in which the first book in particular implied support for the whole "an artist creates because he has no other choice" way of thinking but I still loved the books very much. In fact, when I finished The Gift, I was really sad because I realized that Chaim Potok, the author, had passed away and that there wouldn't be any more books about Asher, his family, his friends. I felt a sense of loss -- like I was leaving a group of friends that I knew I'd never see again.


On the top is the version of My Name that I have. The lower on is one of the ugliest, funniest things I've ever seen. My copy The Gift was nicely designed. I came across this version while searching for the nice one. I was so struck by the awesome crapitude of this version, I had to share it. Thank me later.

(Yeah, that's right. Crapitude.)