In March 2008 Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, denounced 'shocking evidence of social selection in faith schools nationwide': asking parents for hundreds of pounds, weeding out poor or difficult children, and refusing to give places to children in local authority care.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams do not wait for the barbarians – they go right into their midst and disturb their world with humanity. 118 Days tells the story of a small international delegation to Iraq that was being hosted by the CPT in 2005.
Norman Kember from London, Harmeet Sooden from New Zealand and Jim Loney from Canada were kidnapped during their visit to Baghdad, along with Tom Fox their American guide who was a Christian Peacemaker working in Iraq. For 118 days they were kept chained together. Two weeks before their release Tom Fox was separated from the group and subsequently murdered.
The book is a collection of writings by people touched by the kidnapping of these men. The editor, Tricia Gates Brown, has paced the contents so that you are drawn to read the same story again and again. One event in the life of four men has so many ramifications. The room with the cold floor and too few blankets becomes the calm centre of a huge explosion in many lives. The story reaches San Quentin jail where during CPT imprisonment three American prisoners debate the meaning of courage.
The author of this piece, Watani Stiner, was a black activist convicted of conspiracy to murder Black Panthers. One of his jail friends has ‘life’ for trying to cash a $250 stolen cheque, and the other is inside for murder. Watani’s tracing of the intellectual journey in the prison yard is beautiful and rigorous. It starts with the news of the kidnap on the radio and the presumption by the listeners that the hostages are religious zealots. The debate then shifts to compare the hostages to Rachel Corrie and the lunacy of risking one’s life for peacemaking. During the walks around the prison yard they ponder the question: ‘Is there anything in this world that you would have the courage to sacrifice your life for?’ The news also reaches other communities touched by CPT. In the village of At-Tuwani, Christian Peacemakers have accompanied the subsistence farmers to their fields and pastures, protected their children on their way to school and provided witness to attacks by Israeli settlers. When the villagers hear of the kidnapping they begin organising a demonstration. This expression of solidarity spreads chapter by chapter through Palestine and the Muslim world. This insistence by a powerful range of voices – from the clerics of Baghdad to Abu Qatada in prison in Britain – that the CPT works for good in communities under attack, is broadcast to the hostage takers in Baghdad.
The consciousness in the Arab world of the actions of the CPT stands in unhappy contrast to the media experience in the West. Simon Barrow of the Ekklesia news service describes his struggle to counter the soap opera story of ‘naïve fools, a warning to others’, and of the ferocious media assault on Norman Kember on his release. This chapter provides a small insight into the fury that CPT provoked in the Establishment. 118 Days starts with the preface Why We are Self- publishing, which lays a deep seam of disquiet to the whole story. 118 Days was taken on by two consecutive publishers and dropped because the CPT refused to remove paragraphs by Jim Loney’s partner, Dan Hunt, about their courtship. Dealing with the reality of homophobia is an important part of this book because it was vital in keeping Jim Loney alive.
As soon as Jim was kidnapped it was decided that any indication that Jim was gay had to be erased from the public record. Since 2003 the murder of gay men has soared in Iraq. Through Dan Hunt’s words the book records the shattering experience of crawling back into the closet and being shut away from any public declaration of love or grief for his partner.
After Jim’s release, as his sexual orientation became public, four bishops in Canada, previously supportive of the hostages, banned Jim from being invited to speak in their dioceses. This book spans a world of religiously-inspired love and hate.
The North American skew of the material in this book could be balanced by reading Norman Kember’s Hostage in Iraq, but this does not detract from the value of 118 Days. It is a profound book that reflects the compassion, dignity and intelligence of people around the world in facing war and terror.
Emily Johns is an artist and the Editor of Peace News.
Emily Johns reviews 118 Days edited by Trisha Gates Brown CreateSpace (2008). 242 pages. £12.99 ISBN: 978-1438202433 reviews ‘Unsung’, ‘underrated’ – strangely these descriptions appear on the book-jacket of this collection, the judgement of reviewers who are actually praising the author to the skies for her witty-but-serious take on life. If these reviews – from the heavy newspapers (Fay Weldon: ‘I am her greatest fan’) and The Tablet to boot – are sincere, then Wendy Perriam is being both ‘rated’ and ‘sung’, and with good reason. ‘She writes beautifully about relationships,’ says the Sunday Telegraph correctly, ‘and hilariously about sex’ – though that aspect other readers might find heart-rending, hardly hilarious.
118 Days edited by Tricia Gates Brown (CreateSpace, 2008). 242 pages. £12.99. ISBN: 978-1438202433