Putting Faces On The Unimaginable

Ninotchka Rosca

PHILIPPINES

JOURNALIST & NOVELIST

In 1972, after Marcos declared martial law, we passed in front of my newspaper building, and there was barbed wire around it and soldiers standing in front. The military wanted me to sign a confession that said I had "committed subversion, sedition, and/or inciting to rebellion." They never told me the grounds of my offense. The interrogator had no evidence. They would say: "Tell me your story. Where were you on a particular day?" Finally, they tried to link me to a shipment of arms that had been smuggled into the country. I realized that they were trying to convict me of something, no matter what. 

Veronica de Negri's apartment in Washington, D.C., is filled with souvenirs of the many countries she visited on the Amnesty World Tour, a series of benefit concerts for Amnesty International headlined by Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Bruce Springsteen. A youth worker, Veronica has large, quiet hands. As we speak, she raises them often in a fist. Head down, lips barely moving, she tells me of her torture and humiliation as a prisoner of conscience in Chile. A few years ago, in Chile, Veronica's oldest son was burned alive. 

Alicia Portnoy became an activist when her Argentinian university eliminated humanities majors, insisting that students learn a trade instead. One morning at dawn, she heard military trucks approaching her home. She fled, leaving her two-year-old daughter behind. Alicia raced down an alley and across a rooftop, only to confront soldiers with guns. She was blindfolded for her first six months in prison,  even while taking a shower. Six-and-a-half months passed before she saw her daughter, and then only through a wire screen. 

As a journalist in Nepal, student Durga Pokhrel wrote an article about the Nepalese king, omitting the royal pronoun. After she was imprisoned, guards encouraged her to escape. She knew that if she ran, she would be shot in the knees. In prison, she met a young girl whose parents had been murdered by the state. Young and confused, the child was led to believe she had murdered her own parents. 

My decision to photograph former prisoners of conscience now living in the United States was not political. I was more interested in the invisible strengths that helped these individuals survive torture and imprisonment. As I met with the people in these photographs, I had in mind to ask them to speak not about the kind of torture and humiliation they endured, but about the scars that will not heal. 

In the photographs, I wanted to come as close as possible to knowing what they felt, to get inside their struggle. I was interested in the kind of endurance that can bring a person from near-death back to life. 

I had seen this quality a month earlier when a friend invited me to take pictures of children with cancer at a camp in Maine. These were young children, in many cases with no hair and with a range of ailments, who had spent most of their short existence knowing they were going to die. They had seen their friends go through remission and relapse. They reached out to one another with a candor and greed that most adults have forgotten. 

A chance encounter with a student representing Amnesty International made me think about the inner strength of people deprived of their freedom. In this country, human rights are a birthright. I wanted to know about a culture in which these rights had been taken away. I wanted to know what it felt like. 

I am not drawn to melodrama. Cancer and torture are almost cliches in our time. They attack our idea of well-being and make us uncomfortable. But even pain needs to be sorted out. In order to see below the surface, we need to know the details. I wanted to dare myself to put a face to the unimaginable, to hear the stories from their source. 

As I began to contact refugees, through referrals from Amnesty International, my experience almost without exception was that of a foreigner. I would call people up and explain what I wanted to do, and then arrange to meet with them. Only one person at first agreed to meet and then later turned me down. I truly understood. To have a stranger come into your home and ask you to recreate your pain must be difficult. But people opened their doors to me. They tried not to judge me too harshly for my naiveté, for what I could not have known. At times, there was doubt about how much I could understand. 

The first person I met was Vladimir Albrecht. Gray-haired and in his fifties, he had just been released form four years of imprisonment in the Soviet Union for writing a book about how to survive KGB interrogation. When I arrived at his apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts, he kissed my hand and thanked me for coming. Four of us, including his wife and teenage son, sat at the dining table to listen as he told his story. 

There seemed to be two Vladimirs: the one boxed in the too-new flannel suit, and the one recessed deeper inside. He told his story chronologically, with the controlled pace of recollection. Eventually, it was  the look of weariness that filled his face that seemed to be the truth, the two selves united. 

Danny Lyons, the documentary photographer, said once, "Carrying a Leica is like having a pistol in my pocket." As I continued to photograph, my Nikon became a microscope -- a way of seeing and hearing, and ultimately speaking without words. 

Tenghiz Gudava lies with his brother, Edward, in an apartment tower near the Lynnway in Massachusetts. Graffiti is scrawled in the hall, and one of the elevators is broken. Above Tenghiz's right eye is an S-shaped scar. 

In the Soviet Union, Tenghiz was a medical student and Edward a research biologist. They played in a rock band called Phantom. They were imprisoned in Soviet Georgia for distributing anti-Communist literature. 

Gorbachev's reforms made it possible for the brothers to be released from prison after several years. Now they both live in this country with their mother. But they had to sacrifice their homeland for their freedom; they cannot go back. Edward is unable to pursue his research; it is as though his life has been erased.

What I find compelling is that all of these people have had to remake themselves in order to go on with their lives. My ultimate question came down to : How did you survive? What were you saying to yourself, or believing?

In most cases, there was no explicit answer. What I discovered in meeting with these people is that to protest is not a superhuman act; it is another kind of instinct that we ordinarily do not claim. When our basic rights are taken away, this instinct -- which must be similar to adrenaline -- rockets into play.

The only way to make sense of physical pain and moral outrage is to create something to describe it. Juan Carlos, who had never seen his son Patrick, born to his wife Marisa in another prison, expressed his love and joy by creating elaborate drawings in his prison cell. Although he was being brutally tortured, his drawings were made of magic and fantasy. 

Many of these people are writers, or they have become writers since having been prisoners of conscience. They speak at colleges and universities around the world. Their desire to speak is related to the part of themselves that got them through the experience. The stories I heard of life in totalitarian countries were only the beginning of a vocabulary of injustice. I began to reexaime words like shattering, horror, indignation, outrage.  

You have to wonder what kind of person can perform an act of torture. You have to wonder how the devices of abuse and death could have been imagined. What I have learned is that the most horrible is always yet to be imagined: that there is still room for future horrors to be invented.

The poetry of survival is hope. Almost all of the people I talked to survived torture and imprisonment by creating a cave within themselves, a secret place in which they stepped out of their pain and isolation into a neutral space. The mind's capacity to fight disease is not unlike the body's. Ironically, torture gives a person the power to disembody one's self from pain and turn it into something else. The psychic landscape is the last plane of survival. 

The people in these photographs have become part of my consciousness. When I said to Alicia Portnoy, "I don't pretend to understand," she insisted, "But you have to. In order to tell our story, you must understand." For me, the greatest act of understanding is a determination that these people will not be forgotten. 

What I have learned is that morality is political, that human rights are as palpable as our layers of skin. Without this protection, we are no different from animals, and have not truly evolved. 

veronica de negri

CHILE

When they apply electricity to different parts of your body - your mouth, the umbilical area - you feel your heart can no be longer in your body. You feel like it will blow up. I remember hearing a terrible scream coming out of my body. During all of these tortures, there was a doctor present taking my pulse making sure I would stay alive. 

Later I was moved to another place, and for the first time shared the room with somebody else. There was a window painted white, and int he top was a little light that came in. Through that window you could realize that life still continued. It was March, and the top of a tree was moving the wind. That was life, and during the day maybe you saw a bird flying. And the bird had a name - freedom.

TENGHIV GUDAVA

SOVIET UNION

When my brother Edward and I were students at the Moscow Medical Institute, we were both involved in the human rights movement. We distributed publications from the underground, and broadcast new about the abuses of human rights in the labor camps. We were arrested in 1978. I was in a labor camp in Ural. 

In the labor camp, there was no possibility for sleep. The cell was very small, and the temperature was zero degrees. They gave us summer clothes. I was obliged to run all the time to keep my body warm. We received food every other way. 

vladimir alBrEcht

SOVIET UNION
ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
FOUR YEARS IN PRISON

I wrote a book which instructed others about how to survive interrogation. When the KGB came to pick me up, they could not find this book, nor could they prove that I was the author. During my four years in prison, they continued to try to persuade me to confess to having written it. Other prisoners were bribed or ordered to beat me. If I had fought back in self-defense, I would have been charged with another crime.

I open the door to the secret police, and the next time I opened it was four years later.  

alicia portnoy

ARGENTINA
STUDENT ACTIVIST AND MOTHER
THREE YEARS IN PRISON

My husband was tortured in another room, and I could hear him screaming through the night. They tied him to a metallic bed and applied 220 volts of electric shock. He survived also. He lives in Seattle now. We are divorced. 

For five months, I did no know what had happened to my daughter. Afterwards, they had moved me to another jail, and my daughter had to travel 400 miles to see me every forty-five days. We had to talk to each other through a microphone. We couldn't touch each other for two-and-a-half years. 

marisa rodriguez

ARGENTINA
IMPRISONED BECAUSE OF HER HUSBAND'S ACTIVITIES

After I was imprisoned, I realized I was pregnant. Juan Carlos was not with me with Patrick was born. 

When the guards wanted to kill somebody, they usually came at night. I remember one night watching through the window when they took my friend away. If the guards had known I was watching, they would have killed me, too. Before people were killed, they were cut and tortured at the whim of the guards. I was more afraid of that than death. One woman had her vagina sewn shut with steel thread. 

jUAN cARLOS

ARGENTINA
UNION REPRESENTATIVE

At first, my wife Marisa and I were separated and put into two different prisons. Later, we were at the same place, but in different buildings. We were totally isolated for one year, with no news of the outside world. After a while, we had a small radio that we hid behind a cement block. Prisoners took turns standing guard while we listened. We wrote on toilet paper to tell others the news. I began to make drawings for my son, Patrick. Even though I had not yet seen him, I was filled with joy.