Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News
Volume XXIII Number 7, July 2015
UPCOMING EVENTS
PLEASE NOTE: WE ARE NOT HAVING
THURSDAY MONTHLY MEETINGS FOR
JULY AND AUGUST. Meetings will resume
on September 24.
Tuesday, August 11, 7:30 PM. Letter writing
meeting at Caltech Athenaeum, corner of Hill
and California in Pasadena. In the summer we
meet outdoors at the "Rath al Fresco," on the
lawn behind the building. This informal
gathering is a great way for newcomers to get
acquainted with Amnesty.
Sunday, August 16, 6:30 PM. Rights
Readers Human Rights Book Discussion
group. This month we read the novel "A
Treacherous Paradise" by Henning Mankell.
COORDINATOR'S CORNER
Hello everyone,
{Kathy is on vacation. She'll be back to write next
month's column.]
Save the Date. The Amnesty West Regional
Conference will be held the weekend of Nov. 20
in Los Angeles at the Sheraton Hotel near LAX.
What with one thing and another, it's been two
years since any Group 22 members attended an
AIUSA conference, so we're eagerly looking
forward to this one. We'll post more details
when they are available.
New case, new case coordinator. Our group has
begun the process of adopting a new Prisoner of
Conscience. Alexi will be our new Case File
Coordinator. She is in contact with the AIUSA
Individuals At Risk program, which is
responsible for assigning cases to Local Groups
who wish to make long-term commitments.
Best wishes to group members Ido and Niki,
who are settling into their new home in
Portland, Oregon. We miss you!
Cheers, Joyce and Stevi
RIGHTS READERS
Human Rights Book Discussion Group
Keep up with Rights Readers at
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Next Rights Readers meeting:
Sunday, August 16, 6:30 PM
Vroman's Bookstore
695 E. Colorado, Pasadena
A Treacherous Paradise
By Henning Mankell
BOOK REVIEW
[The New York Times Sunday Book Review]
By WILLIAM BOYD
JULY 19, 2013
We forget, in these postcolonial times, that until
comparatively recently the world was replete
with empires. I was born in a corner of the
British Empire, in West Africa, in a colony
known as the Gold Coast, and the Africa of
those days (the early 1950s) was divided among
several empires: British, French, Belgian,
Spanish and Portuguese (the Germans having
been expelled in World War I and their colonies
appropriated).
The Portuguese had been there longest, since the
15th century, and their colonies - Mozambique,
Angola and Guinea - were surprisingly
integrated compared with others. The
Portuguese had abolished slavery by the end of
the 19th century, the death penalty had been
rescinded (apart from cases of treason), and
intermarriage between the settler class and the
local Africans was tolerated, thereby earning the
Portuguese colonies a louche reputation for
decadence and immorality, particularly from the
point of view of the British. A chapter of my
second novel, "An Ice-Cream War," was set in
Portuguese East Africa (as Mozambique was
then known) during World War I, and as I did
my research this attitude of prurient revulsion
on the part of its British colonial neighbors was
particularly striking.
Henning Mankell's fascinating new novel, "A
Treacherous Paradise," is largely set in
Mozambique during the early years of the 20th
century. But the story starts in Sweden. A young
girl, Hanna Renstrom, is sent away from her
isolated rural home because her family,
confronting a famine, can no longer feed all its
members. Assisted by a fur-wearing, sleigh-
driving businessman, Hanna secures a place as a
cook on a Swedish steamship bound for
Australia, hauling a cargo of timber. On the first
leg of the journey she marries the third mate,
who promptly dies of fever off the coast of
Africa. Eyeing the shoreline and the Portuguese
city of Louren¨o Marques as the steamer takes
on supplies, Hanna, a very young widow, only
18, spontaneously decides to jump ship and
make a new life on the African continent. Now
her adventures really begin.
Mankell, as it happens, divides his time between
Sweden and Mozambique and has great
familiarity with both countries. His
juxtaposition of the two - cold north versus hot
south, Swedish temperament combining with
African license - gives the novel its unusual
flavor. It often reads like a fable or a folk tale, as
this young Swedish girl encounters the cruel
realities of African colonial life. Having fled her
ship, she checks in to a hotel, only to discover
that it's Louren¨o Marques's most prestigious
brothel. After just a few weeks the brothel
keeper, a man called Vaz, asks her to marry him,
which she does. Then he also dies, and Hanna
finds herself running the business in his place -
with considerable aplomb and success.
The brothel, called O Paraiso ("The Paradise,"
giving the novel's title one of its nuances), is a
curious, surreal place. Vaz's pet chimpanzee,
Carlos, who wears clothes and serves
refreshments to clients from a tray, becomes
attached to Hanna and is a constant presence.
Hanna also develops strong relationships with
her "girls" and some of her clients, and the
narrative reflects the bizarre, anecdotal,
meandering nature of the brothel keeper's life.
Increasingly wealthy and becoming a person of
some local stature and influence, Hanna
discovers that paradise can be treacherous. One
young black woman who has killed her white
brute of a husband is found dead, hideously
mutilated, in her jail cell, despite Hanna's efforts
to save her. With her strange paradise well and
truly besmirched, Hanna finds some comfort in
the arms of the victim's brother. Soon she leaves
Louren¨o Marques and travels north to Beira,
Portuguese East Africa's second city, and there,
in the Africa Hotel, she hides the diary she's
been keeping and disappears. She is never heard
of again until, almost a hundred years later, her
diary is discovered.
In an afterword, Mankell explains the origins of
the novel: in fact there was a Swedish woman
who ran a brothel in Louren¨o Marques at the
beginning of the 20th century, a woman who
dutifully paid her taxes (hence the documentary
evidence of her existence) but about whom
nothing more is known. From this starting point,
Mankell has constructed his fantastical
narrative.
He has, on the whole, been well served by his
translator, Laurie Thompson, who renders
Mankell's Swedish into a simple and enchanting
English: "Somebody called Elin ought to be slim
and delicately formed, with hands like milk and
fair hair hanging down over her back. But . . .
Elin Renstrom . . . was powerfully built with
lank reddish-brown hair, a large nose and teeth
that were not quite regular. They gave the
impression of wanting to jump out of her mouth
and run away. Elin Renstrom was certainly not a
beautiful woman. And she knew it."
Occasionally there's a slip into colloquial
anachronism (did Swedish people say "O.K." in
1905?), and there are instances of other lapses
and cliches: "He wasn't messing her about"; "If
the bottom line was that there was no way in
which she could help the imprisoned woman. . .
. " But over all, the novel's tone - reminiscent
of Latin American magic realism, transplanted
to Africa - makes it work. Carlos the chimp
might have come out of a Garcia Marquez novel,
and the richly colored details of brothel life
could be from a sprawling Jorge Amado tale.
The translator's task is always a fraught and
personal one: fidelity to the original or fidelity to
a linguistic fluency in the new language? For the
reader who isn't familiar with Swedish, and
who, upon opening "A Treacherous Paradise,"
is unable to make comparisons between the
languages, the latter inclination is, I believe,
always preferable. Translated novels must read
well, above all, without sacrificing accuracy. We
need literature in translation: it's a great boon to
our various cultures, as the sensuous, beguiling
tapestry of "A Treacherous Paradise" makes
abundantly clear.
AUTHOR BIO
Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm 1948.
When he was two years old the family moved to
Sveg where the father worked as a court judge.
The family lived in the court house in Sveg and
young Henning much enjoyed listening to the
grown-ups discussions on crime and
punishment. At age 16 Henning Mankell
dropped out of school in order to work as a
merchant seaman for two years before settling in
Paris. After a year and a half in the French
capital, Henning returned to Sweden and got a
job as a stagehand in a Stockholm theatre.
"Although my father passed away before my first novel
was published I knew he believed in me and was confident
that I would have success as a writer."
In 1973, Mankell released his debut novel,
Bergsprangaren (The Rock Blast). In the same
year, he went to Africa for the first time. Ever
since he has divided his time between Africa
and Sweden and since 1986 he is the artistic
leader of Teatro Avenida in Maputo,
Mozambique.
In 1991, the first novel in the Wallander series,
Faceless killers, was published. Since, Henning
Mankell has written nine more novels in the
series, including the novel Before the Frost,
about Kurt Wallander's daughter Linda. Next to
the Wallander novels, Mankell has also written
more than twenty novels and a dozen children's
and youth books. In addition, he is also one of
Sweden's most frequently performed
dramatists.
In 2013 Henning Mankell participated in World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He is
currently working on a new novel. Henning
Mankell's latest novel, A Treacherous Paradise,
was published in Sweden in August 2011 and
will be translated into English in 2013.
SECURITY WITH HUMAN
RIGHTS
by Robert Adams
AIUSA released the following press release on July 1,
2015:
UK surveillance Tribunal reveals the
government spied on Amnesty International
In a shocking revelation, the UK's Investigatory
Powers Tribunal (IPT) today notified Amnesty
International that UK government agencies had
spied on the organization by intercepting,
accessing and storing its communications.
In an email sent today, the Tribunal informed
Amnesty International its 22 June ruling had
mistakenly identified one of two NGOs which it
found had been subjected to unlawful
surveillance by the UK government. Today's
communication makes clear that it was actually
Amnesty International Ltd, and not the
Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)
that was spied on in addition to the Legal
Resources Centre in South Africa.
The NGOs were among 10 organizations that
launched a legal challenge against suspected
unlawful mass surveillance of their work by the
UK's spy agencies.
"After 18 months of litigation and all the
denials and subterfuge that entailed, we now
have confirmation that we were in fact subjected
to UK government mass surveillance. It's
outrageous that what has been often presented
as being the domain of despotic rulers has been
occurring on British soil, by the British
government," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty
International's Secretary General.
"How can we be expected to carry out our
crucial work around the world if human rights
defenders and victims of abuses can now
credibly believe their confidential
correspondence with us is likely to end up in the
hands of governments? The revelation that the
UK government has been spying on Amnesty
International highlights the gross inadequacies
in the UK's surveillance legislation. If they
hadn't stored our communications for longer
than they were allowed to, we would never even
have known. What's worse, this would have
been considered perfectly lawful."
Today's IPT email made no mention of when or
why Amnesty International was spied on, or
what was done with the information obtained.
This shows the urgent need for significant legal
reform, including proper pre-judicial
authorization and meaningful oversight of the
use of surveillance powers by the UK security
services, and an independent inquiry into how
and why a UK intelligence agency has been
spying on human rights organizations. It also
underlines Amnesty International's call for an
end to mass communications surveillance by
governments.
Earlier this year Amnesty International
launched #UnfollowMe, a global campaign
against indiscriminate mass surveillance, to
challenge governments that want to invade
privacy and restrict freedoms on an industrial
scale. The organization has also initiated legal
challenges against the targeted mass
surveillance practices of both the US and UK
governments.
DEATH PENALTY NEWS
By Stevi Carroll
Glenn Ford: October 22, 1949 - June 29, 2015
After spending almost 30 years on death row for
a murder he did not commit, Glenn Ford was
released only to find a new executioner awaited
him: cancer. As he died, people who cared
about him were near and he listened to a song
he loved.
According to Sr Helen Prejean, Mr. Ford
requested any remembrances be donations
made in his name to Resurrection After
Exoneration, the organization that provided him
housing and support after his release from
prison. (http://www.r-a-e.org/home)
Midazolam gets the A-OK Nod from the
Supremes - 5 to 4
The end of June saw the Supremes singing
joyous songs of the Affordable Care Act and
Marriage Equality, but not so much for
rendering Midazolam ineffective in
anesthetizing people strapped to a gurney,
ready for the next two drugs in the three-drug
protocol for lethal injection.
The ruling was 5-4 with Justice Samuel Alito
writing for the majority:
"First, the prisoners failed to identify a known
and available alternative method of execution
that entails a lesser risk of pain, a requirement of
all Eighth Amendment method-of execution
claims. ... Second, the District Court did not
commit clear error when it found that the
prisoners failed to establish that Oklahoma's use
of a massive dose of midazolam in its execution
protocol entails a substantial risk of severe
pain."
The silver lining in this cloud of State-
sanctioned murder would be Justices Stephen
Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg who used this
ruling as an opportunity to say the court should
consider whether the death penalty itself is
constitutional. Justice Breyer wants someone to
bring a case that would allow the Court to
reconsider capital punishment for the first time
since 1977, and he wrote, "I believe it highly
likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth
Amendment." To which Justice Antonin Scalia
responded that Justice Breyer's arguments were
full of "internal contradictions" and "gobbledy-
gook." I am sure the latter is a well-respected
judicial term with which I am not familiar.
Following the Supreme Court's decision, Steven
W. Hawkins, executive director of AIUSA,
posted
"This decision does not change the fact that
regardless of the method of execution, the death
penalty is broken beyond repair. The death
penalty is the ultimate violation of human
rights. The Court's decision today will not
resolve the death penalty's fundamental flaws,
including the risk of executing a wrongfully
convicted person. The only discussion should be
how to put an end to this cruel, inhuman and
degrading punishment once and for all."
In a very real way, this decision impacts the
lives of the remaining three people who were
plaintiffs in this case - Richard Glossip, John
Grant, and Benjamin Cole. The Oklahoma Court
of Criminal Appeals made haste to set their
execution dates.
Richard Glossip - September 16
Benjamin Cole - October 7
John Grant - October 28
90 Million Strong Campaign
In a 1997 survery, 78% of our brothers and
sisters favored the death penalty with only 18%
opposed. In a new Pew Research Center survey,
that number dropped to 56% with 38% opposed
it. So, what can we do?
One option is the 90 Million Strong Campaign.
To get involved with this, the organizers have a
few suggestions: sign-up; speak out; stay
informed; spread the message. For more
information (and maybe to sign up!), go to
http://www.ncadp.org/page/s/90-million-
strong-campaign
Stays of Execution
July
15 Alva Campbell OH
15 Warren K. Henness OH
16 Clifton Williams TX
August
18 David Miller TN
Execution
July
14 David Zink MO
Lethal Injection 1-drug (pentobarbital)
GROUP 22 MONTHLY LETTER COUNT
UAs 25
Total 25
To add your letters to the total contact
aigp22@caltech.edu
Amnesty International Group 22
The Caltech Y
Mail Code C1-128
Pasadena, CA 91125
www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Amnesty International's mission is to undertake research and action focused on
preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity,
freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the
context of its work to promote all human rights.