You write a book like this out of historical research, but you also write it out of emotional experience. I was compelled once I began to feel these different layers ...
Author Kim Echlin on her new novel Speak, Silence
Women were creating, in this court, some of the newest jurisprudence that has happened around war crimes against women since The Iliad, really. Author Kim Echlin
Speak, Silence Kim Echlin Penguin
There came a point during Kim Echlin's extensive research for her new novel when it felt like she was literally hearing voices of the women crying out from the warcrimes testimonies she read.
The author was working on Speak, Silence, the followup to 2015's Under the Visible Life. It tells the story of a journalist, Gota, who journeys to Sarajevo to cover the fallout from the Bosnian war in 1999, but eventually finds herself witnessing a landmark international tribunal at The Hague. The Foca case, which took place in 2000, was in response to thousands of atrocities against women during the Yugoslav wars from 1992 to 1999 when centres were set up as rape camps. Women witnesses came from all over the world for a trial that lasted nine months.
It produced many documents, which Echlin pored over in the 10 years she spent working on the novel. There were court transcripts and endless reports from psychologists, the United Nations, women's groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOS).
“When you are in the middle of it, it is really powerful,” says Echlin from her home in Toronto. “There were a couple of moments where the intellectual experience, the absorbing of materials through paper, starts to resonate differently.”
While in Sarajevo, for instance, she went to the offices of The Association of Women Victims of War, an NGO that works on prosecuting perpetrators in Bosnia and gives information to international courts. She met the organization's founder, Bakira Hasecic, who was raped by soldiers during the Bosnian War. She showed the author walls and walls of files: each one representing the testimony of a woman; each one holding unbelievable horrors.
“You look at these walls and think this whole place is resounding with women's stories if you open these vast packages of paper,” says Echlin. “She was really interesting. She was very, very powerful and generous (sharing) her experience with me. Because there is this element of reliving each time you tell ... She said, and this is what powerfully affected me, `I need people not to forget. I need the world not to forget.' So all that work she's done collecting those stories, documenting, putting them in files, trying to get them out to the world is really the most important thing for her. As a writer, as a storyteller, when you hear that you think, `How can I turn from this?'”
The Foca case was groundbreaking because, for the first time, an international legal body declared that rape in war is a crime against humanity. Echlin felt a responsibility to history and to the brave women who broke their silence even though it often led to them being ostracized from their cultures and community.
But Speak, Silence is not a history book. While perhaps meticulously researched, it's still a work of fiction. For Echlin, that means it represents a different way of remembering these women and their experiences than through documents or non-fiction writing.
“What you do in fiction is much different from what you do in non-fiction,” Echlin says. “You are asking the reader to let the material flow through their bodies and their emotions. The memorializing is different because it then becomes universal. When we carve a particular name on a particular gravestone, that is firmly rooted in history. But when you transmute that experience into a fictional character, you are letting it be a more broadly shared emotional experience.”
In the novel, Gota initially goes to Sarajevo to reconnect with a former lover named Kosmos. He introduces her to Edina, a lawyer determined to expose the sexual violence that she and thousands of others endured. Gota becomes fascinated with the woman and travels to The Hague to witness the tribunal.
While Echlin spent years examining documents and reports, her research went beyond reading. She also travelled to Sarajevo and enlisted the help of a guide named Salam, a former soldier who fought in the siege of Sarajevo. A version of Salam appears in the novel as Mak, who Gota hires to drive her around Sarajevo.
“He created a fantastic tour company that he called Sarajevo Funky Tours: Breaking Prejudice,” she says. “There were a lot of times when I would ask him if he would take me here or there or to this particular crime site. But he also impressed his own personality. The very first thing we did was visit his brother's grave. He did not say `We're going to visit my brother's grave.' He just drove us to a graveyard. We went and looked at it and I said `Why are we here?' He said `That's where my brother is.' This is the kind of feeling tone that you can't get just through paper research and internet research.”
Echlin's best-known work is probably 2009's Giller shortlisted The Disappeared. It was her third novel and also dealt with war, setting a love story between a Canadian woman and exiled Cambodian musician against the backdrop of the Khmer Rouge's brutal purge.
Speak, Silence also sprang from her interest in a conflict on the other side of the world. Echlin says it was the visceral, heartbreaking news reports from Sarajevo during the war that first caught her attention before she narrowed her focus.
“At the time, I was just amazed that we were watching a war unfold live,” she says. “But then, the particular case that I became interested in for this story was all dominated by women: Women witnesses, women prosecutors, researchers. Women were creating, in this court, some of the newest jurisprudence that has happened around war crimes against women since The Iliad, really. These courageous women were coming to the court and they were speaking up and they were testifying in courts of law. They were doing that because they could. It was one of those stories I couldn't put aside.
“Then I realized the longer I worked on this material there was a second layer going on that was deeply personal. It was a more generalized silencing of women that I was carrying inside. It was the silencing of women's importance in war, but also their sexuality, their motherhood, their nurturing. You write a book like this out of historical research, but you also write it out of emotional experience. I was compelled once I began to feel these different layers vibrating together. I really had to work on this story.”