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  • Those to whom evil is done do evil in return

    DiePresse.com
    May 30 2009


    Those to whom evil is done do evil in return

    30.05.2009 | 18:15 |
    von John Banville (Die Presse)

    Ich war der Liebling des Lehrers, Duffy war sein Opfer und
    Spielzeug. Er musste täglich Erniedrigungen ertragen. Doch
    niemand erzählte zu Hause Geschichten aus der Schule.

    Everyone knew. When the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse issued
    its report this week, after nine years of investigation, the Irish
    collectively threw up their hands in horror, asking that question we
    have heard so often, from so many parts of the world, throughout the
    past century: How could it happen?

    Surely the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of
    children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914
    to 2000, the period covered by the inquiry, but particularly from 1930
    until 1990, would have been prevented if enough right-thinking people
    had been aware of what was going on? Well, no. Because everyone knew.

    I grew up in the 1950s, in Wexford, a small town on the southeast
    coast of Ireland. It was not a bad place in which to be young, if you
    came from a ?respectable` family ` which mainly meant not being
    poor ` and had parents who were responsible and loving, as I had. The
    schools I attended were run by the Christian Brothers and, later, by
    diocesan priests. It helped to be good at one's lessons, for then one
    evaded the more severe punishments which teachers reserved for the
    ?duffers` in the class. I remember one such duffer in particular. I
    shall call him Duffy. We were, I suppose, 9 or 10 at the time, and
    most of us by then had learned to read and write. Not Duffy, who was
    isolated from the rest of us and put to sit at a desk by himself,
    where he labored hour after hour transcribing the alphabet and simple
    words into his copybook.


    Now and then our teacher would lift up Duffy's work by one corner and
    display it to the class, inviting us in a tone of amused irony to
    admire ?Duffy's blots`. I have never forgotten Duffy's expression
    on these occasions, a mingling of shame, sorrow and inarticulate
    rage. Often on the way home from school Duffy would waylay me and
    punch me and knock me down. Why would he not? I was top of the class,
    he was bottom; I was teacher's pet, he was teacher's victim and
    plaything. I did not tell my parents about Duffy, about the
    humiliations that were piled on him daily in class or how he regularly
    vented his anger on me afterward. In the same way, I did not tell them
    of the beatings we were all subjected to by some of our teachers, with
    leather strap, cane or even fists. One did not bring home tales out of
    school. If we had, they would probably not have been listened to. The
    times were harsh, money was scarce and had to be worked hard for, and
    our task as children was to bear up and keep our mouths shut.


    In time there grew up between Duffy and me a kind of awful intimacy, a
    very pale version of that which is said frequently to develop between
    a torture victim and the torturer. I saw the logic of Duffy's
    position: his daily torments at the hands of his teacher must be
    avenged somehow. W.H. Auden, that wise old owl, puts it perfectly, as
    so often:

    What all schoolchildren learn,

    Those to whom evil is done

    Do evil in return.

    Well, not evil, not really. That was being done elsewhere, in places
    like the one that Duffy ended up in, Letterfrack Industrial School in
    Connemara, a far-off and isolated place where, according to the
    commission's report, ?those people who chose to abuse boys
    physically and sexually were able to do so for longer periods of time,
    because they could escape detection and punishment` and where violence
    ?was practically a means of communication.`

    One wants to believe that the abusers were those to whom evil had been
    done, which would go some way to accounting for their deeds. But then,
    one wants to believe, and disbelieve, all sorts of things, and so did
    our parents.


    When I read the newspaperaccounts of the commission's findings ` the
    report itself is more than 2,000 pages long ` I found myself thinking
    again of Duffy, and the sweaty pact of silence that developed between
    us. It was an echo of that silence which, like the snow in Joyce's
    story ?The Dead`, was general all over Ireland, in those
    days. Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken
    watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.

    Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no
    one address the question of what it means, in this context, to
    know. Human beings ` human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland `
    have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of
    contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing
    and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at
    the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in
    the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.

    Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990swas a closed state, ruled ` the
    word is not too strong ` by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the
    connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with
    some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained
    in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the
    concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to
    orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because
    they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to
    them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.

    We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today.

    ("Die Presse", Print-Ausgabe, 31.05.2009)

    http://diepresse.com/home/meinung/deb atte/483474/index.do?_vl_backlink=/home/meinung/de batte/index.do

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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