Refugees, Asylum, Victims, and Criminals - Danish Style

Last night I watched episode 3 of the second season of the Danish crime show, The Eagle: A Crime Odyssey.  I've mentioned this show here before, so I'll just briefly say it's a procedural centered around a Danish policeman named Hallgrim who is part of an investigative team based out of Copenhagen.  The team handles criminal cases that cross borders - terrorism, money laundering, child trafficking, and so on.  The show ran for three seasons, from 2004 to 2006.

The reason I bring the show up again is because of how striking episode 3 season 2 is in light of all the stuff going on now in the US at the Mexican border.  The episode picks ups with the team trying to find and catch the person who so far this season has been their prime nemesis - an Israeli, with a Swedish mother, who while serving in the Israeli military years ago was brought up on charges, and then convicted, for killing a civilian child.  He has since become a free man again and gone totally bad, helping to run a child prostitution ring with connections to Russia.  Through his Israeli military contacts, he has also arranged for the selling of weapons to different warring factions in the Congo War.  The Eagle doesn't go into too much detail about this war, so it may help to know a little background about it.

This is the Second Congo War, or the African World War as it's been called, that took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1998 to 2003.  The war went virtually unnoticed in the United States, but it's a conflict in which about five million Africans died and a couple more million at least were displaced.  It was a complex war that, besides the Congo, involved Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Nambiba, Chad, Libya, Angola, and Sudan.  In The Eagle, the Israeli, Benjamin Stern, has been instrumental in getting Israeli weapons to a particular warlord in the Congo in return for blood diamonds, and at the point the episode picks up, the warlord is paying him to get rid of two people who've sought asylum in Denmark.

The two people are the mother and teenage daughter of a journalist who back in the Congo managed to write articles critical of the warlord. For his efforts, the journalist was imprisoned and tortured.  He was lucky to leave prison alive, and he managed to find safety in Sweden.  His daughter, who grew up without knowing him, was raped during the war. Over a 24 hour period, a unit of 40 soldiers raped her.  Besides the emotional trauma, she has suffered internal injuries that require surgery if she's ever to fully heal.  The mother and daughter, under the organized watch of the Danish authorities, are being housed in a livable facility while the asylum process goes forward, but Hallgrim's team finds out that Stern and a pair he hired have located them. The pair almost kill the mother and daughter but are stopped at the last minute by two members of the team.  

In the meantime, the mother's husband, the journalist, remains in Sweden.  He is essentially hiding there because he's supposed to testify at a coming war crimes tribunal against the warlord.  The mother hasn't seen her husband in years and is trying to find him so they can reunite.  But then comes the twist.  Something the journalist does not say when interviewed by Hallgrim makes Hallgrim suspicious of him, and we understand that the journalist is the warlord masquerading as the journalist.  He is trying to evade justice that way, and if his masquerade works, he will get into Europe and obtain asylum.

That's where the episode ends, and I'll soon get to watching episode four.  I should add that Stern, having failed to eliminate the wife and daughter as the warlord paid him to do, ends the episode dead.  It appears the warlord paid someone to eliminate him and shut him up for good.

Now I'll assume that The Eagle gets into issues that Denmark had to deal with when the show came out - African refugees specifically and people fleeing the Second Congo War.  But does any of this sound familiar?  I found myself straightening up on my couch when the story became one about a parent and her child (in this case a teenager) who are fleeing a country where they aren't safe.  More than unsafe really: they've been brutalized.  They are being held in a facility for refugees, though the facility does look halfway decent (no bars anywhere) and the Danish policy regarding them clearly is not zero tolerance.  But the show does have a character who represents the very danger we are told is supposed to be prevalent down at the Mexican border: the person pretending to be a victim when in fact he's a terrible criminal.  Based on what he did to the Israeli (who got what he deserved, true), I suspect that even if he gets asylum in Europe, the warlord won't become an upstanding citizen.

Different time and different continent, but it's noteworthy how this particular show uses a crime narrative to look at the subject of human migration.  From south to north.  From a very dangerous place to a place that can provide a measure of refuge.  It's a subject, unfortunately, that seems all too timeless and universal. 

Watching Our Words

By Sandra Ruttan

Believe it or not, there was a point in my life when I didn't swear much. One of the hardest adjustments was understanding for myself that if certain words came from a character's mouth in a story I wrote, they still weren't my words.

I got over the swearing. 

It's been much harder dealing with other language.

Remarks made against women or racist comments are the hardest thing to put in a character's mouth. You'd think I might be used to it because The Spying Moon has a lot of it, but making Moreau be female and half Native were deliberate choices to multiply the number of ways she's alienated in the story. 

I still find myself worrying. Worrying someone will take a character's remark personally or think their sentiments are my own. When I wrote it initially that wasn't something I thought about as much, but so much has changed in the last two years that it's clear we aren't moving past racism as a society. Discrimination, on multiple levels, seems to be more rampant than ever. And in some circles it's even acceptable, if not encouraged.

Having a character tell a woman to get in the kitchen or make an assumption about someone based on their race while the POV character and others recognize that as wrong is different from writing something based on your experiences, with a POV character who shares your name and expresses racist sentiments. 

In the wake of the ALA decision to rename an award there's been good reason to think about our racial language in what we write. I think that first, the ALA can call their award whatever they want. Second, no books are being banned. They changed an award's name to make it more inclusive and in line with their mission as an organization.

The fall-out was far and wide, with uproars on Twitter and Facebook, and in organizations like Sisters in Crime. 

Backlash over the name change shows that people can be reactive. Some may be racist and others may just be insensitive.

It has heightened my awareness. My friend count recently went down on Facebook when I asked people who support putting babies in cages to unfriend me. I consider that the best kind of housecleaning possible. I don't need to engage with blatant racists to know how they think.

But what it shows is that this type of thinking is far more prevalent than some of us realized. And that, for me, is the definition of white privilege. I don't always think about how people are treated based on race because I am white.

In order to address prejudices we have to acknowledge they exist and that will come into what we write sometimes. I trust readers to see that treating a person differently based on gender or skin color or sexual orientation or anything else is wrong. 

But I will still think carefully about racial language in every work I produce. We send messages with our words. The subtext of any work worth reading shouldn't be that it was just an excuse to make crude or derogatory remarks.

The ALA's decision, particularly given the current climate, has heightened our awareness of how far there is to go to really change attitudes and embrace equality. I'm thinking about the nuances of language more than ever and, while I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, the reason for it is. Hopefully the future will see a more inclusive writing community, as well as a more inclusive world.

Lose Yourself in a Book

By ClaireBooth

It seems like there are bad things going on everywhere right now, so this Sunday I thought I’d show a good thing.

Have a seat. It’s a fully functional bench – but if you’re like me, you’d rather look at it than sit on it. It’s part of the Writers’ Garden at 916 Ink, a creative writing nonprofit that provides workshops for Sacramento area youth in grades 3-12, including many who are at-risk or vulnerable. Students go through workshops that transform them into confident writers and published authors. They have their stories or poems published in anthologies (complete with ISBN numbers) and participate in book readings for their family, friends and the public. These workshops instill a love of reading and a healthy dose of self-confidence in kids and teens.

Part of what 916 Ink offers is inspirational space. And that’s where this book bench sits. The artist who created this thing of beauty is Kerri Warner, a Sacramento-area mixed-media specialist who works a lot with local non-profits. She did several pieces for 916 Ink’s location, most of them book-related. If only every kid could have a chance to sit on something created by someone who obviously loves the written word.

*You’ll be hearing a lot more about 916 Ink later on. It’s one of the organizations chosen by the Sacramento Bouchercon 2020 committee. At the Bouchercon crime fiction convention in October 2020, held here in California's capital, we’ll be raising funds to help out this great cause.