The moral complexity of accusation
Novelist looks at the emotional terrain of our judgments about guilt and innocence
Explicit accusations, played out in print or social media make such gripping stories that the matter of innocence or guilt is often just a footnote, a debatable one at that. The highprofile accused like Amanda Knox and Woody Allen live in our imaginations as stories, not people. We only know what is said about them, what is suspected, what might have happened.
An implicit accusation — the mistrust of a lover, the cold stare of a customs official, a person who no longer sees you, but only sees the possibility of guilt — and you are cast into a grey area. Innocent? Maybe. Accused? Definitely.
What happens when an implicit accusation escapes the confines of a private or procedural exchange, becomes explicit, blows up on social media, among co- workers, legally or in a family? Something that, once said, broadcast or printed, can’t be pulled back?
It’s a question that has fascinated Catherine Bush, author of Accusation, a compelling novel that is an exploration of the complex ethical arena of accusations — what an accusation means to the accused, to the accuser and to observers outside the arena who may or may not be making judgments.
The book’s protagonist, Sara, is a journalist, who becomes fascinated by a charismatic Canadian who has founded a children’s circus in Ethiopia. When several child performers in his charge defect in Australia, and make a public accusation of abuse, Sara becomes obsessed with finding out the truth. Sara too is haunted by the echo of an accusation that landed like a blow in her own life: some years before she endured a trial after being accused of stealing a stranger’s wallet in a gym.
“Accusation is a legal state, but it’s also a state of mind. A state of feeling,” said Bush on a recent visit to Vancouver. “The emotional terrain of accusation fascinated me.”
Bush drew from real- life incidents that had perplexed her. “I went with my then- partner to visit my sister who was living in Addis Ababa. We spent some time with a children’s circus, which, as in the novel, was founded by an incredibly charismatic Canadian man. He had built this circus into a worldwide phenomena, a fabulous success story. Some years later he was accused by some of the older performers that had fled in Australia, made an asylum claim and accused him of sexual and physical abuse.”
Inevitably, Bush said, having borne witness to something that later, in the context of new information, appears
“There was one kind of horror if he had done what he was accused of, and another if he had not.”
– Accusation, Catherine Bush
different, you ask yourself questions. “What didn’t I notice? Was there something I didn’t notice?”
The novel came to life for Bush when she wove in the narrative of Sara, who had been falsely accused. Sara harbours the emotional reality of what it’s like to be falsely accused of something. There is a helplessness, a voicelessness to being accused, and the act of investigation carries a stigma, a whiff of substantiation.
“All you can say is ‘ I didn’t do it,’ which never has the same kind of force as someone saying ‘ You did it.’ You are always fighting against the accusation,” said Bush.
Since writing the book, Bush has become a kind of mother-confessor to friends and acquaintances who feel compelled to share with her their stories of being accused.
Often it’s the smallest things that haunt people, she says, and leave deep impressions: the long- age accusation of a sibling or a parent that lives on within the adult as a wound.
“False accusation leaves the sense that there is another version of you, a kind of doppelgänger that others see and in a way you turn the question back on yourself, the accusation, and ask what did I do to make this person suspect me?”
The emotional terrain around accusations is often a mirror for moral interpretation. When discussing the original case that was the inspiration for some of the novel’s events, Bush said some people would react automatically: “Of course he’s guilty. Others would read the same set of events in a completely different way.”
Bush was fascinated by the moral complexity of the terrain in which guilt or innocence is not clear. “What do the rest of us do when we can’t know for certain?”
“I wanted to leave a space in the novel for the reader to have to figure out how to read the evidence, and I hope the reader will consider their own judgments and the way they are judging others, and turn that back on themselves to look at their own preconceptions.”
A novel, Bush says, isn’t a place to answer questions, but to ask them. Accusation — rich with questions and complexity — is also an homage to the transformative powers of the circus, the beauty and possibility of beginning again.