The Weight of a Mustard Seed
By Wendell Steavenson (Atlantic Books, £14.99)
Those with loud opinions, especially in Britain and America, like to believe that evil is done by evil people. When this is shown to be an unreliable rule, they panic. Recent examples abound. The film The Lives of Others, picturing a Stasi officer who grows complicit with those he spies on, was denounced on the grounds that only pinko “Ostalgiacs” could imagine a Stasi man with a human streak. Another film, The Reader—along with the bleak novel by Bernhard Schlink that inspired it—is desperately assailed for suggesting that a female SS guard who shares responsibility for killing Jewish prisoners could be seen as a complicated person, even a sort of victim.
Wendell Steavenson, who has written this extraordinary book about some of those who served, fought for and killed for Saddam Hussein, says simply: “These are people after all, and what person does not deserve to be listened to? None, I maintain, if we strive to understand ourselves in the other, which is the only and original reason to tell stories in the first place: none.” Her first book (Stories I Stole, about Georgia) reminded me of the late Ryszard Kapuscinski in its penetrating curiosity. And, interestingly enough, Kapuscinski himself could have written those sentences about listening to The Other—the title of his last book. In it, he explained what he learned from the religious philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas: “He says you must not only meet the Other, accept him and converse with him, but you must also take responsibility for him.”
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