Does It Work?

Rare is the opportunity, as we seem to have now, for the torturer to plot out methods in advance and in public. Should a person be strapped to a board and have water poured down his nose? Should she be forced to stand for long periods of time in the cold without being allowed to sleep? Should he be slapped in the chest, face or belly? These are almost novelistic questions with no more rational answers than some haywire plot or dark verse.

After first reading it as a young girl newly escaped from Jean-Claude Duvalier's dictatorship in Haiti, I recently rediscovered a poem called "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché. The narrator describes dining with a dictator who, after the luxurious meal, empties a bag full of human ears on the table.

"I am tired of fooling around," he tells his visitor. "As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go [expletive] themselves."

He lifts his glass of wine, and with one sweep of his arm, brushes the ears to the floor.

When the ears hit the ground -- like those of all my disappeared neighbors, I imagine -- the narrator notices that some of them are pressed to the floor while others are catching "this scrap of his voice." My fear is that when it is most needed, none of our ears will bother to catch any voices at all. Then will the tortured see any reason to live on? And if they live, whom will they tell?

Haiti1791@aol.com

Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian American writer, is the author of "The Dew Breaker" (Knopf).