New York Times
May 23 2009
A Century of Looking the Other Way
By JOHN BANVILLE: the author, most recently, of the novel ”The Sea.”
Dublin
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 newspaper accounts 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 1990s was 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.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
