*
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida argues that forgiveness is often confused with other things. With excuses, politics, normality, economics. Because only the unforgivable can be forgiven, as he writes in On Forgiveness. This sounds like a catch-22, but in fact it offers an opening. And it is logical. For if we are prepared to forgive only what appears forgivable, forgiveness would lose its meaning. Forgiveness can only ever extend to the unforgivable, or in other words something immense, something that breaks a person irreversibly. And for that reason, forgiveness is always an impossibility, a paradox, a madness, a dream.
In his novel The Stripes, Swedish writer Magnus Florin gives form to Derrida’s thinking in an imaginary meeting with his dead mother, who drowned herself when he was a child and left him alone in the world. They meet now in a toyshop.
“Should I feel remorse?” she says. “I feel no remorse. You managed fine, didn’t you? Maybe better than if I’d been alive. But I feel I should ask if you can forgive me.”
“Do you want to ask?”
“No. Do I sound hard? I don’t mean to. But it seems pointless to ask questions like: ‘Can you forgive me?’ That’s the sort of thing you say if you step on someone’s toe on the bus, isn’t it? What I did was unforgivable. How could anyone forgive something like that? Those left behind have to live with it anyway, don’t they? The unforgivable is unforgivable all the time, but it’s bearable, isn’t it? And in the end, isn’t the unforgivable the only thing worth forgiving?”
And because it is only the unforgivable that can be forgiven, the matter of forgiveness can never be settled, it must always be kept up in the air, remain unfinished, a perpetual open question and an open wound. Or, to put it another way, you can never decide once and for all on non-forgiveness, because it is still only the unforgivable that is the very thing it is possible to forgive.
The question of the unforgivable and forgiveness is an arrow in perpetual flight.
“And even if I forgive, it’s still not forgiven,” says Marie, the mad-house daughter in A Kind of Hades, a play by the Swedish dramatist Lars Norén.
*
I consider the unforgivable in terms of magnitude, scope, and proportion. The unforgivable is the immense, the immeasurable, a thing so great, there is no room for it, physically or mentally, an act that gouges a wound so deep in the world, ripping everything apart. And perhaps some of the problem is that the unforgivable is outside our thought process, it lacks measure and human proportions, it lies in acts we cannot imagine, so unfathomable they are hard to remember. We all know someone who has suffered something terrible, but none of us knows the culprits. Where are they? Are they somewhere beyond our mind’s reach, looking at us?
In The Woman Who Fed the Dogs by the Belgian writer Kristien Hemmerechts, the main character has committed the unforgivable sin: she is an accomplice to a paedophile and murderer, has let his crime happen in their shared home, has witnessed everything without intervening. Now she is in prison, without her children.
“I knelt beside my daughter and prayed. Always the same prayer. Don’t let anyone take revenge on my children. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a child for a child. I said to her: I would do anything for it to be undone, but I can’t. Promise never to tell anyone who your parents are. There’s no one you can trust. You mustn’t tell anyone who you are. Not even for money. Not even if you get an iPad.”
The offender in this novel doesn’t hope to receive forgiveness for herself but for her children.
*
It could be that within us we have something that is always prepared to forgive, and at the same time something equally strong, utterly unreasonable and merciless. Ultimately you have the choice between forgiving or killing a person. The state has a monopoly on the use of force, so it is not a genuine possibility, but you can always keep your imaginary weapon and your resentment, and reject a truce and reconciliation. Jurisprudence is something other than forgiveness. The law is cold as a sword, it doesn’t care that it is only the poor who need to steal bread and sleep under bridges, it doesn’t care whether or not the person who has been raped drank coffee or travelled to Paris or the world’s end with the perpetrator in pursuit. It is only interested in the criminal act, and in that respect, it is scientific and not moral; it is only interested in the hand that snatches what it doesn’t own, in the arm that pins down a head and doesn’t let go. The law is not the heart, not morality, not the whole world. And you don’t need to forgive someone because punishment has been given or served, even if, conversely, you can forgive someone despite the fact the person has not been punished. But the only thing you can forgive is the unforgivable.
Nor does it matter whether the guilty party has confessed or begged for forgiveness, Derrida says. Because if confession were a condition for forgiveness, we might end up at the mercy of the offender again. And Derrida goes one step further when he considers that forgiveness cannot be based on the guilty party having changed and become a better person, one who never intends to do ill again, for in practice we would be forgiving a different perpetrator and a different crime. True forgiveness is unconditional and has nothing to do with reason or rationality. It is huge, blind, beyond all bounds.
The US poet Claudia Rankine describes forgiveness for the one who forgives as “simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead.” A feeling of nothingness, an absence, a bottomless void, beyond all that is hated or loved. Jesus and Hannah Arendt both say that the grounds for forgiveness are that people know not what they do. Desmond Tutu said that there is no future without forgiveness. Genuine reconciliation wreaks fear—from the perspective of the Cross, it cost God his only son. In South Africa, a new society was built out of forgiveness after apartheid. But the big problem with reconciliation and forgiveness is that the victims are often already dead, and the only ones who could forgive cannot make that choice themselves. Can we forgive on behalf of others, of the dead, or should we insist on the possible irreconcilability of the dead, simply because the dead have no voice?
Forgiveness demands a kind of sovereignty in the one who is going to forgive, but sometimes vulnerability itself takes away from the vulnerable not just life, but the ability to speak; it wipes out the freedom, strength, and power that give the authority to say: “I forgive.” And this is how Derrida finally reaches some kind of definition of the unforgivable. The unforgivable is that which robs people of that very sovereignty, in other words the ability to speak, and, ripped apart inside, they cannot even consider forgiving the unforgivable. Rape is just such an act, destroying the freedom, strength, and power to say: “I accuse.” Or, “I forgive.” Rape takes its place amongst the unforgivable and the only too commonplace.
But Derrida imagines a forgiveness without this kind of sovereignty. A Philomela with her tongue cut out who speaks nonetheless. An impossibility, a utopia, a madness, a wild hope for a different world. Literature is the only place where the dead can speak, not with tongues in their mouths, but with earth. In my latest novel, The Antarctica of Love, the main character is dead.
“It is very fortunate birds exist, and maggots, and decay,” she says. “If we corpses didn’t lie in the earth and decompose, we would be piled to the sky, high-rise blocks and towers of the deceased. I often reflect on how many we are, those of us who have already taken our leave, so infinitely more than you who are left. And yet we can’t do anything to you. You can do what you want with us, say what you want, throw black earth on top of us and tell whatever stories you like. No one can check the facts with us, that is what is so nice about the dead. A perfect friend, someone who never argues, and we never change, we stay the same as we have always been, frozen in tableaux. A person is forgotten in two generations; that is the extent of human memory.”
*
One problem for the forgiveness process in South Africa was the grotesque difference between the rich, who were primarily white, and the poor, who were primarily black. A difference that was in itself a result of the racism and violence called apartheid. And it was the poor who were the victims and they were meant to forgive, even though the power structure, namely the unjust property laws, endured. “I give you my heaven as possibly the single element of consistency in my political life: my distrust of reconciliation. For me, reconciliation demands my annihilation,” writes the South African author Njabulo S. Ndebele in The Cry of Winnie Mandela. The South African poet Koleka Putuma writes in her collection of poems Collective Amnesia:
Sin will not be the acts that will send black folks to hell. Sin will be the acts we will commit in the name of the revolution. Hell will be the graves of our forefathers turned inside-out to revenge the truth. What did you expect? Living in a haunted house and calling yourself free or pardoned? Tell them Hallelujah sounds like black people burping: JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE!
Literary voices dissenting from those who talk of reconciliation and the future.
South Africa has the highest rate of sexual violence against women and children in the entire world. Testimony about rape presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission also exposed women to a different kind of violence: the violent shadow cast over the raped woman, of mistrust and guilt. The moment she speaks about it, she seems to be dragged into an invisible mire. And since rapes have continued after the reconciliation processes, but in the form of private, non-political incidents, rape has in some ways fallen outside the great process of forgiveness, according to the philosopher Louise du Toit. It is only possible to raise the question of rape after a period of non-violence, after power relations have been redefined, not while the violence continues.
*
When Governor George W. Bush sanctioned the execution of Karla Faye Tucker in Texas in 1998, he did so on the grounds that he was handing over to God the job of judging her, or to put it another way, the decision about forgiving her or doing the opposite. But it could be that the death penalty is a manifestation of the unforgivable. In any event, in the room where Karla Faye Tucker is to die, the unheard-of occurs: this is where the victim’s brother, Ron Carlson, crosses a historical line. For the first time in US history, a relative chose to witness an execution on the offender’s side, instead of the victim’s, when in this case the victim was his sister.
It has something to do with time, or gravity, or maybe it is grammar and the laws of language, something to do with the alphabet itself. When I try to think about the unforgivable, I fall helplessly into forgiveness.
Perhaps because forgiveness sits right beside the unforgivable. Perhaps because it is actually the same thing.
*
Essayist and survivor of the Holocaust Jean Améry couldn’t accept that Nietzsche should always have the last word on forgiveness. Because, after all, everything Nietzsche had ever written appeared before 1900, and the philosopher had no idea what twentieth-century crimes against humanity would look like. And where Nietzsche made reference to morality when it came to forgiveness, today we often turn to psychology. You shouldn’t be a prisoner of the past, with your wings still clipped, etcetera. But, as Améry writes, what if sickness (the personal, psychological, deviant, the vicious pain) and its symptoms are in fact a moral truth that says something about the world we live in, and to be cured from this disease would be wholly immoral? He writes: “I am not traumatised, but rather my spiritual and psychic condition corresponds completely to reality.”
Améry would say that forgiveness is submerging your individuality in society and becoming a mere function of the social. “My mean irreconcilability”, as he calls it. He considers himself one of a small minority who doesn’t wish to forgive as long as the generation of gas-chamber builders demands that he be reconciled. As for him, he demands that what has been done be undone, that time be turned back—no more, no less. And whereas Desmond Tutu contends that there is no future without forgiveness, Améry asks why tomorrow should be valued more highly than yesterday. What was twelve years for the non-victims in Nazi Germany was a thousand years for the victims, he writes. “The world which forgives and forgets has sentenced me, not those who murdered or allowed the murder to occur.” He insists on holding onto the unforgivable in order to save himself and to save Germany: “Nothing can again lull me into the slumber from which I awoke in 1935.” He goes on:
In accordance with the ruthless immoral age, we will soon be dead, and until then Germans must be patient with our irreconcilability. And don’t say you didn’t understand what was happening, don’t say you were too young. Don’t make the excuse that you weren’t even born. You should have seen it anyway. And if you weren’t born—then break with your fathers!
The cruel part is that time is on the culprits’ side. Time is on the side of the living; the dead have no chance against them. Améry seeks a way out of the loneliness that persecution drove him into. He wants to reach a point where the perpetrator is with him and, for one moment is united with his victim, wanting to undo what has been done as vehemently as he does; a point at which time is turned back and the offender is chained firmly to his crime. To demand the impossible may be madness of a kind, and the victims who refuse to be reconciled will always be some sort of quarrelsome maniacs, dangling from old ropes over reality. And perhaps a wild action of this sort is what Derrida calls true forgiveness, when the wrongdoer and the victimized move back in time and meet. When we all swim in the direction of history, against the laws of gravity and time, and try to defeat the invincible by doing the impossible. It is not about the future, but about the past, being bent to the mind’s absolute limit, back to the unforgivable, and staying right there, enduring, hanging between heaven and earth. Perhaps literature at its greatest is always there, at the mind’s limit. Perhaps literature is about enduring the unforgivable. I have always sought a language that sides with madness. Madness is simply refusing to accept reality as it is, rebelling against it.
*
I love the work of a German artist called Anna Schuleit, who filled old psychiatric hospitals in the USA with flowers and music. When I wrote my novel The Gravity of Love about a girl, similar to me, who visits her father in Beckomberga Psychiatric Hospital, I found Schuleit’s art spiritually significant. In Bloom, she installed 28,000 potted flowers in the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, one for every patient who had never received a visitor. It’s an unwritten rule: whenever you visit someone in a medical facility, you take flowers. But not when it’s psychiatric, and especially not to patients in the old asylums. In another work, Schuleit installed 102 loudspeakers in the long-abandoned Northampton State Hospital in Massachusetts, just before its demolition, and brought Bach’s Magnificat flooding out of the building. She said she wanted the building to sing. I have seen photographs of that occasion, when people in the city heard the sound booming from the old hospital and started walking in its direction. The hospital was like all old mental hospitals, situated a short distance outside a large town (though with time the towns crept closer), cast out of the community to some extent as if being in there was a crime. People whose only mistake was being too fragile for this world, for the increasingly fast pace of the twentieth century, for existence itself. But in the eyes of the outside world, they were not just the fallen, they were also condemned, monsters, unwanted. How will they be able to forgive the world for that?
Perhaps it is a forgiveness that is impossible, because guilt and innocence have changed places; like prostitution, for example, where the world lays the guilt and shame for sex on the woman, instead of on the purchasing male. Even though she must be the most innocent person on earth, with no sexual expression of her own, no presence in the moment, no feelings of desire or means of release, letting herself be used to satisfy the urges of others. And yet she will be the one who harbors the shame, she will be the guilty one. And it is the guilty one who asks for forgiveness.
The vulnerable get the blame for their vulnerability. The one asserting the rights of the weak is nailed on a cross. The refugee gets the blame for having nowhere to go with their hurt. The world doesn’t stop its cover-up, its empty words. Collective lies and deceptions, illusions. I would say that the question of forgiveness is only possible when the grand narratives correspond with the reality they are supposed to reflect. The same goes for the beautiful grey sharks in the oceans, here long before us, before the dinosaurs. In shark stories, it is always they who pose a risk to man, even though we know they only kill a few of us, while every year, man kills a hundred million sharks.
Destroying Planet Earth, and life for other species as well as our own will be our last unforgivable act, and our most extreme. You might say that the truly unforgivable is that the victims of this catastrophe will not have the sovereignty required to even consider the question of forgiving the unforgivable this time. Because they are children, and because they will be dead when the question of forgiving our unforgivable way of life might be raised, as will we, who would have been the recipients of this potential forgiveness. A dead world in which the question of forgiveness is finally over. Just the faint pounding of an empty ocean in the distance.
*
If forgiveness demands that time be turned back, that what has been done be undone, perhaps literature is the place where the unforgivable and forgiveness can exist side by side. In literature there is no predetermined time, everything has already happened whilst at the same time nothing has yet occurred. I am still standing there in the light with my dad’s hand in mine. I have gone with him to the hospital so that he won’t be on his own, because no madman should be alone. And perhaps true forgiveness—the dreamlike act of madness beyond the limits of our imagination—is to leap back in time, seek out your parents, in their impossible beginnings, and try to protect them from the darkness that will sweep over them, even if that means you may never have existed. To stop the curses that can rest upon a family and stop those curses leading to acts that are unforgivable.
