My Life as a Fabricator by Somaly Mam

Here is a brief section from the recently released "as told to," Somaly Mam: My Life as a Fabricator, soon to be a major motion picture. “Even my claim that I unionized all the sex workers and then went on to steal from the pension fund was a fabrication. And now everyone has read Melissa Gira Grant’s Times Op-Ed piece, “The Price of a Sex-Slave Rescue Fantasy,” NYT, 5/29/14)  Ms. Grant said that, 'A Newsweek cover story last week found inconsistencies and flat-out fraud in Ms. Mam’s story of being abducted and forced to work in a brothel as a child-- instead, former neighbors said she came to their village with her parents and graduated from high school, later sitting for a teacher’s exam—and in the stories of women she said she had rescued by the thousands. Ms. Mam even said traffickers had kidnapped her teenage daughter—but the girl’s father said she ran away with her boyfriend.’ Why would I perpetuate such inaccuracies which as Ms. Grant goes on to point out caused even further hardships for those who actually suffered the maladies my foundation had set out to address?  The answer is quite simple. I’m one of the people who had seen the Kony 2012 video on You Tube about The Lord’s Resistance Army. The video was loaded with distortions. But it demonstrated how the ends can justify the means. That video got over 99 million hits. If Jason Russell, the flaky maker of the film, could do it so could I. In addition I wanted to be a bestselling author and if you think it’s difficult to sell books in the United States, you can imagine what it’s like in Pnomh Penh. Do you think for one minute anyone was going to buy a fictionalized account of sex slavery, when you could see the real thing on every street corner? Well, at the end of the day, I’ve concluded that what I did is not so bad. Look at Newsweek. They were the ones who got the goods on me, but everyone knows what they’re after. The magazine just restarted its print edition and the new investors who bringing it back to life are simply trying to scoop their old rival, Time.”

Sewage Lagoon

Martha Nussbaum begins her recent review/essay on Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity and Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (“Sewage Lagoon," TLS, 10/12/12 by enlisting Dickens to speculate on the difference between data and narrative in describing human suffering. “It is said of Louisa Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times that she learned of the poor of Coketown as if they were so many ants and beetles, ‘passing to and from their nests.’” Nussbaum, who teaches philosophy and law at the University of Chicago, then goes on to brilliantly link Dickens to groundbreaking work in social psychology. “What Dickens knew intuitively has now been confirmed experimentally. C. Daniel Batson’s magisterial work on empathy and altruism shows that a particularized narrative of suffering has unique power to produce motives for constructive action.” In his essay “Human Rights, Storytelling and Narrative,” (The Journal of Human Rights, Vol l0, No. 1), Titus Levy delineates literary techniques of both empathy and alienation in the context of a more modern British novel, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Human suffering is so ubiquitous. The connoisseur has so many choices and vantage points from which to view it (genocide, apartheid, famines and earthquakes) that there is literally a Darwinian struggle in which the varying catastrophes with which mankind is afflicted or which he afflicts upon himself compete for our attention. Just opening the mailings of human rights organizations like Medicins Sans Frontieres and Amnesty International can be mind numbing. Kony 2012, about the exploitation of children by the Lord’s Resistance Army, received over 93 million hits. But there were all kinds of problems with subsequent calls to action, not the least of which was that the creator of the film, Jason Russell, had a mental breakdown in which he was found wandering naked and incoherent in the streets. Kony 2012 was sui generis and unless you are a Bono, the odds are not high that your story will be heard. This is where literature and genius come in handy. “The English novel was a social protest movement from the start,” Nussbaum remarks, “and its aim (like that of many of its American descendants) was frequently to acquaint middle-class people with the reality of various social ills, in a way that would involve real vision and feeling.” Another aspect of empathy that Nussbaum doesn’t discuss in her essay is the fact of its curative effect on those who might otherwise have perished from self-absorption.