Session 2: Panel – Tales of Torture

Session 2: Panel – Tales of Torture
Chair: Jean-Philippe Imbert

Torture and loss of faith in Le Perchoir du Perroquet by Michel Rio
Brigitte Le Juez
Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

Le Perchoir du perroquet by Michel Rio was published in 1983. The novel reflects on themes such as life, death, faith, truth and deceit, through the experience of a South American priest, Joaquín Fillo, also known as Joachim, who has been submitted to a form of torture known as “the parrot’s perch” (the title of the novel). This torture consists of hanging naked victims head down in order to ensure that the body’s weight is put on their forearms. The victims feel as if their fingers are about to burst and their arms about to fall off. It is generally the starting point for other, worse, forms of torture.
This experience totally changes Joachim’s perception of existence. The trauma of torture makes it impossible for him to go on living as he used to. Because he stood on the side of the poor, and not on the side of the Church which supported the political power of his country, he was arrested and had extreme physical pain inflicted on him to break his resistance. Joachim has now lost all that he once believed in. The religion of which he once was a minister (and in whose name his torturers claimed to act) seems to him now to be cruelly founded on man’s suffering, intensifying the latter rather than alleviating it. He sees the central Christian idea of the perpetuation of sacrifice, to which is attached the notion of martyrdom, as the deep and destructive contradiction of Christianity — a religion which for him, whilst promoting the cult of love, is actually based on the cult of pain.
I will analyse how this change of perspective makes it impossible for Joachim to keep on believing in the values which had previously guided his life. And in order to underline the importance of Rio’s reflection on language, I will also demonstrate the symbolism of the parrot (as it is found in art, religious representations and folk tales). Language, for Joachim, has indeed become in itself an instrument of deceit and torture, possibly the most dangerous of all: because the religious message is repeated and passed on, it imposes an established order and an undisputed discourse, both of which make the unacceptable unavoidable and even tolerable since there is a utopian reward in sight. This, in turn, is used for political ends. Whoever dares challenge this established order with a different discourse will be punished in the most brutal way.
The evil of torture reveals to Joachim the nature of human wickedness. Rio’s protagonist feels dominated by different (paternal) figures, all of whom manipulate speech to achieve their aims and repress any form of individual thought or expression. Joachim’s life has become aimless, and the broken man finally opts for nothingness, for suicide.

Hervé Guibert: The AIDS Trilogy and the Aesthetics of Torture
Jean-Philippe Imbert
Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

On December 27 1991, Hervé Guibert committed suicide, unable to fight against Aids, as can be read in his “Aids trilogy” (“A l’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie” 1990, “Le Protocole Compassionnel” (1991), “L’Homme au Chapeau Rouge” (1992). We will see how the theme of torture grew into being the main theme as well as the pharmakôs of his literary medium.
The intentions of this paper are to look more specifically at the representation and role of torture in his overall production, be it in his early fictional biographies and fictional novels, in his photograph books as well as in his later Aids-related writings.

Paramilitary Activity: From the Torture of Individuals to the Coercion of Communities
Agnes Maillot
Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

If the Good Friday Agreement succeeded in containing political violence, and if the main paramilitary organisations have been observing a ceasefire for most of the last decade, paramilitary activity continues unabated. In fact, the statistics produced by the PSNI would tend to show that punishment beatings and other crimes committed by paramilitaries increased in the years following the signing of the Agreement.
Punishment beating are nothing new to the political landscape of Northern Ireland. But the fact that they persist would tend to show that paramilitaries are reluctant to give up the power and influence that they have over their respective communities. Their activities range from rackets and hold ups (the Northern Bank raid of December 2005 being but the latest manifestation of this phenomenon) to intimidation and in some instances murders.
This paper will examine the phenomenon of paramilitary activity, first by placing it within its social and political context. I will then look at the manner in which paramilitary activity has been used by organisations such as the IRA, the UDA or the UVF to exercise some form of control over their respective communities and how this is linked to a strong sense of territorial identity. Finally, I will look at the manner in which paramilitary activity has been dealt with within the context of the peace process, and the future prospects for the province after the Northern Bank raid.