Canada’s humanitarian reach and Maggie Helwig’s Where She Was Standing

Abstract

Canada’s official rhetoric situates the nation as one capable of perceiving and arbitrating upon humanitarian need on a global scale. Unofficial discourses confirm this perception of Canada’s humanitarian credentials. One unofficial discourse that tends to question official rhetoric, however, is that of fiction. This article examines the representation of humanitarian concerns in Canadian Maggie Helwig’s novel Where She Was Standing. The novel’s portrayal of the nature of evidence, and of its own status as a type of evidence, are discussed, leading to the proposal of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” as a potentially appropriate conceptual tool with which to deal with the difficulties in the position of Western observers of humanitarian issues in distant cultures.

Canada’s global embrace

Canada claims nothing less than a global reach in the application of its response to humanitarian issues. According to the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada website, Canada possesses a commitment to promoting “democracy and respect for human rights, and contribut[ing] to effective global governance and international security” (Foreign Affairs, 2013: n.p.). The express desire to “[p]romote global institutions and partnerships that focus on results, accountability and effective burden sharing” (2013: n.p.) implicitly situates Canada as a state that is able to identify such things where many other states or entities might not, and as an entity which has the moral and institutional authority to arbitrate upon them. The lead article by historian Tina Loo in a special issue of the popular magazine Canada’s History dedicated to “Our Dramatic History of Helping the World” (2012: front cover) is entitled “We are the World”, appropriating the would-be non-nationalistic scope of Live Aid’s slogan to indicate Canada’s specific, even unique, global presence in the cause of humanitarian goals. Loo’s article begins in familiar comparison-with-the-U.S. mode but quickly makes the point that in this sphere Canada need not fear that the country is unknown or conflated with the United States. In Loo’s words, “we could easily have outed ourselves as Canucks, especially in Bhutan” (2012: 13). Such perceptions of Canada’s helpful presence in even the most distant corners of the world are probably so solidified as Canadian common knowledge to need much underlining; the “Canadian national imaginary”, for Gada Mahrouse, is one “in which we position ourselves as having an exceptional propensity for compassion as observers of global suffering” (2008: 98). And indeed, the larger context is that in which Canadians are supposedly “the planet’s leading experts in the quiet heroism of getting along”, according to Canadian opinion poll processor and statistician Michael Adams in Unlikely Utopia, his paean to Canada’s tolerance of difference (2008: 108).

While development and humanitarian programmes have not always been the beacons of altruism that some might claim, and continue to be subject to close and critical analysis on the part of various scholarly and media constituencies (Bornstein and Redfield, 2011; Curtis, 2001; Maren, 1997; Polman, 2010), it must be counted a positive achievement that Canada is associated internationally with aid and peacekeeping programmes (although the Omar Khadr case gives pause here, on which, see Williamson, 2012: n.p.). Implicitly, also, in the context of its avowed sensitivity towards global suffering, Canada must be the source not only of positive interventions but of thoughtful reflections upon them. Such reflections constitute part of the circuit of Canadian assessments of the rest of the world in which its humanitarian priorities are set and actions initiated. A great part of the circuit, however, occurs outside official discourses in texts that for the most part interrogate the supposed translation of Officialspeak into effective action. Indeed, even the official discourses are changing, as Asha Varadharajan has recently commented on in analysis of material which aspiring new citizens are enjoined to study. For Varadharajan, confirming the work of Julie Rak (2010), this material “shows how a nation of peacekeepers has been subtly altered to include potentially violent and violating international moral policing” (2013: 356).

While we expect that the interrogation of the success or failure of humanitarian initiatives will be carried out in various modes of non-fiction, from memoir to exposé to academic scrutiny (Dallaire, 2004; Razack, 2004; Rieff, 2002), one question that arises is why people might use fiction to represent issues involving human rights abuses and their attempted alleviation by outsiders. James Dawes reports in That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, that fiction in this area has “hope” as its “most basic narrative pull” (2007: 193). That is, the conventions of fiction respond to readerly expectations that crimes will be punished and normativity re-established, or at the very least that explanations can be provided and positive directions indicated. Dawes points out nevertheless that writers simultaneously strive “to resist one of the basic features built into not only the novelistic form but also human rights work itself: namely, the idea that individuals have stories that run to completion” (2007: 196). As the reference to “the novelistic form” implies, the supposed misrecognition of realities lived by actual human beings is not unique to fiction in this area. On one level, there is no theoretical difference in the mimetic deficit performed by fiction dealing with issues of human rights or, for example, by fiction dealing with teen crushes. While the desire to avoid representations of falsely satisfying closure clearly appears valid when dealing with the sufferings of others, theoretically it also remains valid in all types of narrative representations whose generic appeal is to realism. Arguments for the incommensurability of events such as the Holocaust implicitly assert that there are other events which are commensurable in narrative, when most thinking about texts since Modernism has repudiated the possibility not just of narratives, but of language in general being adequate to whatever it is signifying. Criticizing texts for not capturing the authentic experience of suffering is to ask something of them which they can never provide, even if it is an understandable response on the part of actual sufferers concerned that their experiences should not be travestied, slighted, aestheticized, or factually misrepresented. The truth that texts will always fail the test of mimetic transfer, if assessed in absolute terms, relocates arbitration on these forms of response to a less absolute ethical hierarchization, one which will always be messy, and this is why such arbitration must continually come back to the readings of specific texts and practices. Only a politics of affective intervention that enacts continual exemplification of its presuppositions, actions, and results offers the possibility of standards in this area, and they will be standards that are under notice, contentious, blurred, and in need of constant attention.

In a real sense, it is precisely the precondition of the failure of representation that underwrites the attempt to represent the putatively unrepresentable. That is, the alternative to imperfect representations is no representations at all, an unlikely alternative for almost all communities. The writers Dawes refers to are accordingly not naively imagining they are bringing an unmediated truth to the world. Rather, they are highly self-conscious about the unfulfilled contract they enter into when they write fiction. When they “manage to achieve an especially successful climax in an individual’s story […] they repeatedly, unfailingly, […] work to subvert the satisfaction of recompense and closure” (Dawes, 2007: 199). In the end, however, Dawes has difficulty making a case for why people would use fiction in this area as opposed to more documentary discourses, limiting himself to describing features of what he believes to be notable examples, such as Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost or Omar Rivabella’s Requiem for a Woman’s Soul.

Jill Bennett is firmer in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (2005) about the need not only for art to recognize that it is not operating on the level of defective mimesis, but for it to affirm the usefulness of its transformative discourses precisely because they are not attempting to reproduce the contours of any identifiable person’s specific pain realistically. Bennett claims that for a type of contemporary visual art, however, the transformative separation is easier to achieve than in writing (or, presumably, narrative film), in that the existence of characters in narrative calls forth empathetic response, where much contemporary visual art practice does not. At least in fiction’s refusal to portray verifiable individuals it simultaneously and importantly admits that it “cannot communicate the essence of a memory that is ‘owned’ by a [real] subject” while “it may nevertheless envisage a form of memory for more than one subject, inhabited in different modalities by different people”. This may provide “a jolt that does not so much reveal truth as thrust us involuntarily into a mode of critical enquiry” (Bennett, 2005: 11; emphasis in original). How this might work when produced by texts dealing with Western mediation of the suffering of others constitutes the exemplification provided by the rest of this article: a work of literary fiction which on the one hand asks questions about Canada’s role as a caring state, and on the other asks questions of its own representation of the issues.

Mediating care

Maggie Helwig’s work is characterized by a very contemporary focus on human beings who are subject to the violence or indifference of their cities, states, and the world in general. Her writing is at the same time an interrogation of responses to human rights violations and to the suffering of those who have slipped through the cracks, from the responses of socially-committed individuals and NGOs to those of official bodies. Given the centrality of these issues since the ethical turn in literary studies, it seems surprising that her work has not been more extensively commented upon. After publishing several volumes of poetry and a work of short stories, Gravity Lets You Down (1997; including material dealing with East Timor), Where She Was Standing (2001) was Helwig’s first novel, subsequently followed by Between Mountains (2004), and Girls Fall Down (2008).

Where She Was Standing was produced with the help of funding from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, but despite this support it is somewhat less than starry-eyed about official Canadian commitment to promoting humanitarian principles. In fact, the novel places the networks of humanitarian action in a supranational context. That is, it is not that people and processes flow outward from Canada and impact upon some distant zone of the world without further mediation. The novel begins and is largely set in London, although its central voice is that of Canadian Rachel, who works for a local association called the Rights Project. The refusal to place the state Canada as the originating source of humanitarian action is confirmed by such outbursts as Rachel’s saying she wished she had told the ignorant official at the Canadian Embassy, when trying to find out whether a Canadian had been murdered by the Indonesian military in East Timor, that “Indonesia is more civilized than Canada will ever be” (Helwig, 2001: 31). ¹ The official, nonetheless, is depicted as uninformed and ineffectual rather than anything more brutal or uncaring. And later, more senior consular officials do become involved in Rachel’s enquiry, but the fact that it is not official bodies that discover the murder or set the enquiry in motion foregrounds the need for unofficial organizations in this area.

Rachel’s job involves dealing with cases of human rights violations in Southeast Asia, but the novel is concerned to make clear that it is not that the West is a safe haven of respect for citizens while barbaric repression and violence occur in distant places. In Helwig’s Between Mountains (2004), focused on Bosnia and Serbia, but set also in the Hague and Paris, the central Canadian character once again has a base in London. It is as if to participate in humanitarian action and to be in touch with important players in world caring one has to be elsewhere than in Canada. As Rachel muses: “She came looking, she supposes, for context, drawn by the intricate webs of history and war that sketch the streets of the old world” (8). She is aware that her decision relates to the fact that “she comes from a peculiarly young, innocent culture, marked by a sort of faith and decency which may be unique in the world”, although the level of this decency is immediately bracketed by Rachel’s “vague childhood memories of troops on the streets of Ottawa” (8). ² Rachel, however, in some way needs to escape from a place whose reputation both at home and abroad has become so inflated as to become hyper-real. To tell people you are from Canada “produces an effect not unlike telling them you come from heaven […] last good place” (8). Rachel feels the need to remediate such discourse and the principal way in which the novel does this involves Rachel’s attempt to find out what has happened to Canadian student Lisa in East Timor in the early 1990s, at the time of the historical massacre by the Indonesian military of mourners and protestors in the Santa Cruz cemetery in the capital, Dili (in the novel changed into a protest outside the Governor’s palace).

Lisa’s story, nevertheless, is not the main story of Where She Was Standing. Her story is rather the point of mediation between what is happening in East Timor, occupied by Indonesia since 1975, and the rest of the world, a point construed through her status as a Westerner. The instrumentality of her own story’s becoming the type of evidence she was looking to mediate herself in her dissertation project on “Power and the Photographic Subject” operates as a type of sacrifice, so that the novel is partly investigating the potential of the Canadian (and Western) subject to be inserted into stories of the suffering of others through suffering themselves. A potential implication of her story, then, is that only in the extremity of death does the Western observer become legitimized to occupy story-space alongside peoples who are being oppressed and murdered.

A recurring issue in Helwig’s books is precisely the legitimacy of the stories of those Westerners who try to help others in extreme situations. In general, her work deals with the suffering of others through narratives in which Western characters constantly struggle with this process of mediation: “She is the bridge, the person who might reach out her hand from the safe place and pull others in” (60), says Rachel semi-sarcastically, anxious to justify her role but knowing that she does not perform it with conspicuous success. While what happened in East Timor in the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991 is transparently transmuted, along with sequences dealing with life under occupation and the constant threat of Indonesian violence, including Indonesians committing violence against other Indonesians, inevitably the dramas lived by the characters in London and Canada are set against the suffering of those distant others. One of these dramas is the very complicity of human rights observers in what they both despise and yet know they must use in the pursuit of their objectives: the vastly increased weight of stories featuring Westerners who get caught up in human rights struggles. In the novel this is seen in the effort to get official Canadian channels to follow up on what happened to Lisa James, to get them in the first instance to even believe that she was killed. The shame experienced over the attention given to the stories of Westerners is, however, compounded by the fact that Lisa James is black.

Lisa’s skin colour offers an implicit comment on Gada Mahrouse’s analysis of how “cross-racial solidarity activism is an anti-racist strategy based on a conscious and purposeful deployment of the dominant positioning that ‘whiteness’ inscribes on to some bodies” (2008: 88). Mahrouse outlines how people such as Lisa may be “known as ‘accompaniers’, ‘witness-observers’ or ‘human shields’” (2008: 88), going on to note that “the primary functions of these activists are to offer protection to those under threat of violence by drawing attention to their own ‘international’ presence, and to monitor, document and disseminate information on what they witness” (2008: 88). Although Lisa had not gone to East Timor in this role, the centrality of whiteness not just as a skin colour but as a signifier is bluntly clear to Rachel: “Of course if she had been white they wouldn’t have shot her” (43). Although the Santa Cruz massacre on 12 November 1991 was very real, a massacre in which Indonesian soldiers murdered around 270 East Timorese at the funeral of a man murdered in a church on an earlier occasion by local agents planted by the Indonesian military to stir up trouble, as far as is known only one foreigner was killed: a New Zealander of part-Malaysian descent, Kamal Bamadhaj. This appears to confirm Rachel’s suspicion that skin colour occasioned different responses from the occupying forces. That is, Indonesian forces possibly did not read Bamadhaj, or Lisa James, as foreigners, or as foreigners who counted, and were more ready to murder them. On the other hand, Indonesian soldiers had killed six white Western reporters at the beginning of the invasion in 1975 and had got away with it. White American journalists had been beaten severely by Indonesian forces at the Santa Cruz cemetery, but this time there was smuggled-out footage of the massacre, which transformed the event into a turning-point in the global attention paid to East Timor (see Kohen, 1999: 167−8; Fernandes, 2011: 87−106). A white Dutch journalist was murdered in 1999 by Indonesian army officers, during a period when the full glare of the world’s media was focused on East Timor, and several white Western journalists and activists are in no doubt that they would have been murdered over the years if the Indonesian armed forces had caught them.

In the novel, nevertheless, Lisa James’s skin colour forms a plausible reason for both her murder and the lack of attention to her by Indonesian authorities, for whom black people do not represent Canadians or anyone else worth concerning themselves over. Tacitly also, the discovery that Lisa James is black asks both Rachel and the novel’s readers retrospectively to examine why this new knowledge destabilizes what Lisa had signified until that point: that a Canadian might only be significant in part through her unconsciously having been constructed as a white subject, or, in contradistinction, how a Canadian might be more invisible to circuits of information by virtue of being black.

This sort of narrative surprise is one of the results of the fact that to a large extent the novel is about evidence: how it is produced, how it circulates against the forces that would suppress it, how it is verified, and ways in which it can be used. In this, the novel replicates many related fictions and memoirs, which are as much reflections upon the nature of representation when dealing with atrocities as they are stories about their putative subject matter. Lisa James is accordingly a photography student writing the aforementioned thesis on “Power and the Photographic Subject”. Her having placed herself in danger was a consequence of her intention to test how her position as a privileged Westerner might interact with the types of photographs she would take or be in a position to take. Although Lisa is not sent to East Timor by a humanitarian organization, she perceives her actions as contributing to a worthwhile cause: “I just feel like I shouldn’t waste my time”, she tells her boyfriend as she leaves Canada (213). And she is right to see that the links between whoever witnesses something and what happens to their evidence are politicized, and the evidence subject to myriad attempts to manipulate it. Indeed, what can be said about all types of evidence in the circuit is how suspicious everyone is of it: how difficult it is in fact to get evidence, to get it to the right people, to circulate it, and for it to mean what human rights people want it to mean to those in power. Evidence concerning the death of one person can also unwittingly hasten the death of other people, of anyone involved in the circulation of the evidence or whose identity is revealed by it. Evidence in the novel can mark all who touch it as future objects of surveillance and potentially worse, while all evidence of human rights violations is routinely mistrusted or suppressed by those in power.

The most useful circulators of evidence are in fact journalists, pointedly more useful than Lisa’s mother, who is a History professor; “a researcher, she is used to documents, she knows how they work”, she believes (99). Lisa’s mother’s profession is nonetheless of little use to her in the gathering of information about her daughter, and she has to rely for information upon clandestine couriers, particularly East Timorese Luis, Javanese Hasan and Australian Amanda. The informality of these voluntary circuits is what offers a limited guarantee that evidence will circulate at all. Without them, official channels would deny, suppress, and overlook what is presented to them. Little support is allocated in the novel to Canadian officialdom in this process, to the extent that in the second half of the novel Canadian officials are absent, as information is gathered by a mixture of activists and a British journalist. On the other hand, at least Canada suspends aid to Indonesia in the novel, while the United Kingdom and the U.S. do nothing, even though the information that emerges proves that the trucks used in the repression and murder were British, and the arms were American. “British fucking government. I hate them”, says Rachel (211).

With London as the location of most of the novel, the book is not a narrative largely set among realities geographically distant and foreign to those of Western observers. The way in which the book becomes principally the story of those whose lives are partly spent trying to publicize the oppression in East Timor might be said to embody the way in which “humanitarian narratives of suffering risk occupying the voice of the other by way of giving voice to the traumatized Western humanitarian aid worker or peacekeeper” (Härting, 2013: 333). Such narratives, however, can also be more charitably interpreted as the knowing instrumentalization of Western voices with the objective of making issues more visible to the Western media, as noted above by Gada Mahrouse. Moreover, this option can also be seen as striving to avoid telling others’ stories for them, as an attempt to circumvent the appearance of Western ownership of the stories of others.

Where She Was Standing accordingly contains a major sub-plot involving Edward, a doctor attached to the Human Rights Centre who spends his little spare time caring for the urban homeless. The people Edward attempts to care for are said to be “defeated” (111). It is clear that Western social systems also defeat people, albeit in different ways to those in more nakedly oppressive systems. Intercalating Edward’s activities with a scene in East Timor sets up a space for reflection on different sorts of aid in places where people are left to die, which includes London, and places where people are openly killed by those in power, as in East Timor. Just as we are reading of Lisa’s mother’s incipient arrival in East Timor with a covert reporter pretending to be Lisa’s fiancé, the narrative returns to the funeral in London of a drug addict who has overdosed, unable to be saved by Edward. In this case, even in London, evidence about the boy’s identity is missing (as it had been in Indonesia with respect to Lisa), but no socially-respected parent is following up the boy’s death. In an implicit comment on the exoticization of humanitarian causes, there is no media interest in the death of the boy. Self-sacrificing Edward is even mistakenly threatened by anti-abortionists, and eventually he is shot in the street. He survives, damaged, his future as a doctor uncertain. The conventional optimism signified by Rachel’s awkward return to him after their relationship had foundered, and his quoting of words which Dame Julian of Norwich reports Jesus as having said to her — “all manner of thing shall be well” (1902: 68) — nonetheless offer a hesitant statement in favour of the validity of solidarity and the value of caring. The physical suffering Edward undergoes licenses him, and the novel, to claim lives of pain on the part of the aid workers where this is generally a site of some ambivalence in narratives, fictional and non-fictional, generated by those who bear witness to or attempt to alleviate the suffering of others.

Evidence and “cruel optimism”

In the layers of evidence explored by the novel, the book itself constitutes a type of extra-diagetic evidence. The free indirect narration enacts the illusion of access to material that the media or human rights groups routinely do not have, such as acts that remain hidden, like the torture of Indonesian Hasan, for instance, or the actions of people while they are alone, or the thoughts of people. Given that the novel is largely about the procurement and exposure of non-fictional evidence, and that it chronicles the need to bring such evidence to light for positive steps to be taken, however small, where does it situate itself in the representational circuit? Can it be accused of using the dramatic and intense stories of a part of the world where crisis is ever present in order to raise the emotional dramas of its characters to some sort of greater affective plenitude? Even the biographical information that Helwig was highly active in movements advocating East Timor’s freedom does not obviate questions about the circulation of fiction dealing with human rights abuses and atrocities. One partial answer might point to the date of publication. When Where She Was Standing was published East Timor had been freed from Indonesian oppression and was under United Nations administration. This means that the book becomes a historical fiction, rather than an intervention in a current site of injustice. Although this does not remove it from the types of questions asked about the point of fiction dealing with human rights issues, it shifts it laterally to questions about the role of historical fiction produced in the West about events in other places, events of which there are still numerous witnesses available to give autobiographical reports on what happened.

Autobiographical reports by outsiders raise problems related to the appropriation of others’ suffering by observers who have the choice to walk away, along with the inevitable insufficiency of any account. The latter, as already mentioned, is something shared by all types of representation: the fear that the account will be in some way untrue, incomplete, or interested. Unfortunately, exactly the same observations can also be made by autobiographical reports generated by the actual people who have survived suffering. Gary Weissman’s (2004) penetrating analysis of the contradictions and strategic differences among different autobiographical texts dealing with the Holocaust by the same writer, Elie Wiesel, a writer of towering authority in the area, is a particularly illuminating closely-documented exposure of the instability and ever contestable nature of memory. Directly experiencing anything, no matter how intensely, does not guarantee that human beings will remember it clearly or consistently, let alone represent it in a way that convinces all readers. Reality never saturates anyone’s writing to the extent that absolutely everybody else agrees that “it was just like that and no different”. By extension, the same can be said of fiction written by people who experienced or observed the event they are fictionalizing as well as fiction written by those who did not. Authority in all of these instances is partly subordinated to extra-textual information about the writer’s relation to the events narrated. Moreover, this is not restricted to writing. As Ulrich Baer tells us in Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (2002) about a form of evidence that is commonly imagined to be much more direct: “No photograph, regardless of content, can portray another’s lived reality. Photographs show moments that were not necessarily ‘lived’ but that merely occurred: lived reality emerges in and as the connections among such events” (2002: 137). The key word here is “connections”, for while both fiction and non-fiction can describe or speculate upon connections, only the resources of fiction are generically licensed to enter a range of people’s thoughts or to see behind closed doors. This gives fiction the ability to build up explanatory speculations capable of developing connections between characters and events to a level of multi-layered density that may not appeal to our sense of the documentary, but rather to our sense of the plausible, more in the service of the organization of our general moralities than in that of record-providing. For Ruth Mayer, indeed:

Fictional texts get a better grip on rearrangements and transformations in public discourse than nonfictional accounts, because they map out the world in speculative terms and thus address dimensions of the political unconscious that more solution-oriented political and journalistic approaches to the same phenomena tend to reason away or repress. (2007: 2)

Thus it is that near the beginning of one of the key theorizations of these issues Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub assert that creative representations process “what we do not yet know of our lived historical relation to events of our times” (1992: xx; emphasis in original). More bluntly, in Molly Andrews’s summary of her study into what sustained left-wing social activism in Britain into old age, she reports one respondent as having explained his understanding of social processes: “you see by reading it fiction-wise, it’s much easier to understand” (Andrews, 2007).

Connection is in fact a key term in Helwig’s moral and narrative universe. Her novels mobilize an ideology of a world that needs to take its connectedness much more seriously. East Timor’s story is not just East Timor’s story, but part of radiating circles of connectedness in which we are all interpellated. More than a description of the social architecture within which everyone’s lives are lived, whether in a large, impersonal city such as London or anywhere else, Helwig’s fiction is also an attempt to reflect upon the responsibility and consequent fragmentation that connection brings. To have restricted the novel to East Timor would have left the West as some hypothetically secure zone whose responsibility, if it feels it, is to reach in from outside and help others, both in the form of characters coming from the West and in the form of a representation produced outside East Timor. In two principal ways the novel undermines such a disjunction. In the first place, Lisa’s death in East Timor certainly touches even “safe” Canada. Contact between people in an unequal world where only some of us have the economic freedom to travel at least ensures that stories from one part of the world leak out into other parts. More than this aleatory connection, however, human beings are connected in Helwig’s novel through the assumption by some of them of a continual duty of care, even when this is harmful to themselves.

Why human beings should care for people on the other side of the world has generated a vast literature whose arguments cannot be rehearsed here. Perhaps Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism” might offer another avenue into the debate. As she affirms at the outset of her book entitled Cruel Optimism: “All attachment is optimistic” (2011: 1). This is the state in which most of us live, to one degree or another: attached to desires whose complete realization is impossible; indeed “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant, 2011: 1). The desire in this case is for social justice and fairness in a world which historically has resisted gains in this area brutally and cynically. By nurturing a desire which the world will satisfy only intermittently at best, optimism becomes cruel, in Berlant’s terms. At the same time, she goes on, it is an affective state in which “the fear is that the loss of the promising object/scene itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything” (Berlant, 2011: 24). If the promising object or scene in the novel, and others related to it, is the dream that others can be helped and the world can thereby become more just, the connection between losing hope about this and losing hope about everything appears clear. The cruelty of the optimism is materialized narratively through everyone in the novel who cares for others being punished, wherever they live, as we may see in the death of Lisa, the shooting of Edward, the torture of Hasan, or the depressive burnout of Rachel: “She has done nothing, nothing that has worked, to stop people from being killed” (34). But in the end Rachel comes back from the brink of this burnout, Edward survives being shot, and even Hasan reaches the solicitude of a stranger.

Helwig looks into the abyss of the murder or the empathetic overload of everyone involved in caring for strangers, but cannot confirm the final victory of uncaring. One danger here is that danger registered by most Westerners who reflect upon their role as helpers of others. Gada Mahrouse tells the story of a Canadian photographer whose consciousness-raising sessions back in Canada after time spent in Palestine ran the risk that his audiences would transfer their sympathy away from the Palestinians toward the photographer (2008: 99). Indeed, the novel’s focus on the “cruelty” of generalized fantasies of the West helping oppressed others prevents the book from serving as a lofty Western explanation of East Timor (fantasy being used here to mean a set of organizing principles, coherently thought out or not, through which “people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world ‘add up to something’” [Berlant, 2011: 2]). The title, Where She Was Standing, references that moment of failed relationality when Canadian Lisa, attempting to enact her solidarity, misreads her location and is shot. Despite her photography project’s incorporating a self-conscious approach to evidence and its legibility from her position as a secure Canadian (her blackness gesturing to the reader that this is scarcely a stable category after all), in the end she is unable to relate to her East Timorese companions’ hermeneutics of risk, and the optimism of her attachment is repaid with her death: she stands up to take photographs of the atrocity when everyone else knows better and dives to hide. In one sense, this can be read as a metaphor for Canada’s efforts to reach in and represent the horrible things that are happening to others: something will go wrong; we are literally unable to get our relation to the scene right. And ironically, one of the things that can go very wrong is our very placement of ourselves at the scene, for we are drawing attention to ourselves when we should not be at the centre of the drama.

In Mahrouse’s exploration of the dangers, not to say the inevitability, of the Western well-wisher’s entering the spectacle as an object of sympathy, she writes of “how they inadvertently display themselves in the process” (2008: 100). In a work of fiction, the author may be said to displace this display onto the characters, but in Helwig’s case this is far from inadvertent. It is in fact one of the themes of the book, and its irresolvability is at the heart of Rachel’s burnout as of Helwig’s writing the book, for the alternative is to do nothing. In its irresolvability Where She Was Standing speaks of Canadian anthropologist Didier Fassin’s summary of contemporary modes of social analysis as attempting either to explain the truths which social actors are unable to see, or alternatively, to decode how social actors justify their actions but not to claim to own the explanation. As Fassin says, “It is an opposition initially stimulating which has become paralysing” (2011: 485). The answer is to sweep (or stumble) past the purity of the opposing positions and to occupy the messiness of a continual shuttling between them, a “borderline position” (2011: 485). While this may be messy for a social scientist, ostensibly committed to reducing complex social situations to forms of explanation, it well represents the resources available to the novelist in the form of the different voices of her characters. Fictional works and their characters are able to operate in configurations of inconsistency, ambivalence, and partiality that would be inappropriate in some academic discourses.

If efforts to care for others founder in all the perilous ways recorded by the novel, and yet the caring remains projected into the future of the characters, the cruelty of the optimism of attachment seems confirmed. The impossibility of ultimate success is better than refusing to work for it at all, and yet it obliges those who persist in their optimism to confront the possibility that, in Berlant’s words (glossing Žižek): “sustaining commitment to the work of undoing a world while making one requires fantasy to motor programs of action, to distort the present on behalf of what the present can become” (2011: 263; emphasis in original). Rachel’s apparently incipient breakdown is metonymic of the difficulty of sustaining this commitment, as of the danger that the overload of information about violence, repression, murder, and genocide will sunder the possibility of even cruel optimism. As James Dawes points out: “Attempts to measure the success or failure of humanitarian work are, by the very nature of the work, always an experience in loss” (2007: 18; emphasis in original). When the unofficial mediators to the rest of us cannot mediate, power has one of its dearest wishes. Some knowledge will emerge in the novel, thanks above all to the bravery of local people in East Timor, as to the resourcefulness of the English journalist telling a story which is a lie (that he is Lisa’s boyfriend) in order to procure evidence that will expose the lies and the acts of others. His information will make it as far as the BBC, but in the end there is little sense of having succeeded in any triumphant sense. Too many people have suffered, have been murdered or have been tortured, although the book’s last act of bravery and kindness comes from a Javanese farmer towards the dumped body of Hasan, still alive, in the Javanese countryside. Helwig has not wanted to accuse the Indonesian people as a whole, but rather the military, those in power, and those in the West who either collude with violence in other places or who are ineffective. Canada has officially done little for the rest of the world at the end. Unofficially, it has sacrificed a young, clever, and caring person, one implication being that Canada’s safety and the humanitarian impulses that exist within Canadian society have been major causes of Lisa’s having put herself in danger, an offering to the world of innocence and goodwill that only has impact when it becomes a spectacle.

Helwig’s Where She Was Standing agonizes over questions of the Western observer’s role in the circulation of actions and representations that speak to and about other parts of the world and their suffering. But it is much clearer and less conflicted about Canada’s official role with respect to the issues. The novel does not share the self-congratulatory register of either the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or of Tina Loo, or even the signalling of the unalloyed honourableness of Canada’s humanitarian efforts in Answered by Fire (2006), an Australian–Canadian miniseries dealing with Australian and Canadian United Nations observers in East Timor. In Helwig’s vision, no state, not even supposedly benign Canada, can be counted on. States of all types are damned, mistrusted, or at most occasionally made use of when needed, albeit without any belief that they really care. As David Webster tells us at length in Fire and the Full Moon: Canada and Indonesia in a Decolonizing World (2010), Canada has historically shown little interest in Southeast Asia, and, when it has, it has been in terms of contexts that have characterized broader Western interests, and specifically U.S. interests, in preferred types of political regimes and access to trading possibilities. Official institutions in the novel are thus sometimes forced to go through the motions by their part in the spectacle of responsibility towards citizens, but if this spectacle cannot be invoked then, in Nathalie des Rosiers’s synthesis of Canada’s official investment in its citizens abroad: “it will not provide legal advice; it will not post bail; it will not rescue. Canadians travelling should essentially look after themselves” (2012: 370). Who really gets things done in Helwig’s fictional world are activists on the ground (most importantly in East Timor in the first instance; later, outside of East Timor), individuals, unofficial organizations, and the media (albeit not including the internet, which scarcely features in the circulation of evidence or the involvement of unofficial individuals). This is a vision which is profoundly popular throughout many social movements, even sentimentalized, and of which Helwig, both in this novel and in all of her work, offers one of the most thoughtful and disabused representations of the actors of varying types which give the vision traction. If, as Berlant says, “in liberal societies, freedom includes freedom from the obligation to pay attention to much” (2011: 227), luckily there are writers the cruelty of whose optimism extends to the attempt at combatting and exposing realpolitik, despite the unavoidable representational and ethical problems that surround writing about humanitarian attention to the suffering of others, and despite the best efforts of governments to ensure we leave the fantasizing to them.