Samantha Power Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Writing

Let's talk a minute about writing. What is it that you learned that's important? Because one of the amazing things about your book is the clarity, the lucidity, and the power of the narrative in drawing the reader into human rights issues.

I've certainly learned a lot more over the course of the seven years writing the book than I did either as a journalist or in school, but I definitely have heeded Orwell's maxims about simplicity: always avoid the long sentence when the short sentence will do, always avoid the big word when the short word will do; think of what it is that you're seeing in your mind, and try to find the words that describe it, rather than resorting to clichés or metaphors, just think about what you've seen. So I worked very hard. I edited this book for probably as long as I wrote it, just to try to get that narrative flowing, knowing that the only hope that a book like this could actually make a difference over time -- not to suggest that it will, but one can always hope -- is that it becomes an accessible book. So I was very self-conscious. I think that's what learning about writing really is, it's learning about being self-conscious about writing, learning about thinking about the snap, and the climaxes, the cadences, and things like that. Once you're self-conscious, then you become your own critic, and then you're your own editor, and then if you've read a fair amount, you can build on what you've read and what you like, which has been internalized without you even realizing it.

And how do you write? Do the words just flow?

I'm a spewer. I spew like sculpting; I create a big, amorphous mass, and then I carve it and then I work it down. I've gathered so much data, in a sense, so much color, both from traveling to the places where genocide has happened, and then also through interviewing so many people, that I'd say there's a book three times this size on the cutting room floor. I wouldn't recommend that to young writers, by any means. What it does is it eases the pressure of writing because you never have a blank screen; but it probably makes you feel a little more chaotic, a little more all over the place as you're doing it. But I always know that I won't settle for something that doesn't feel readable to me, and that I'm probably my own worst critic. Nobody knows the flaws in the book, even to this day, better than I do. I just, at some point, have to stop caressing out the message.

Where did you get this relentless focus, which I attribute to you after reading the book -- an ability to stay with the problem, grapple with it?

I don't know. Whatever I would have done, I would have gotten this from my mother, for sure. She's completely single-minded. She was the Irish squash champ, and played in Wimbledon for tennis, and meanwhile got a Ph.D. in biochemistry and a medical degree, and is just an extraordinary woman.

The hardest part about this, or the important moment in this book, was simply thinking up the question. I mean -- that actually wasn't hard; it was an obvious question. I was in Bosnia; Bosnian Muslims were being allowed to die. I came back to America; everywhere I went there were Holocaust memorials and remembrances and a lot of talk of "never again" -- the museum on the [Washington] Mall -- and no sense of dissonance between these two events. So the question was initially, how can it be that the Bosnian Muslims fall outside this universe of obligation, and how do they differ from past victims of genocide, who presumably, somewhere along the line, must have been aided for us to say "never again," as if we've meant it? It took about thirty seconds to realize that we had actually never aided the victims of genocide, never owned it as a foreign policy priority. And then it became the real question: why? Not only why does this happen, because all the time there are gaps between promise and practice, but what are the stories that we're telling ourselves such that we're living with this dissonance without experiencing it as dissonance?

So that was the question. And once you have the question, then you're, for lack of a better word, screwed.

You have a place to take that focus.

Exactly. I mean, if it's not going to be the Boston Red Sox, better for the world, hopefully, that it be trying to figure out that puzzle. And then the harder issues were decisions of inclusion and exclusion. What cases are you exploring? What victims are you negating by not telling their stories? It gets very complicated because you're choosing to remember, and remembrance is so important for the victims themselves, and for getting their history validated, and so on.

So, even having the question didn't help me go all the way to knowing how it was that I was going to answer, what the form would be. But it gave me a substantive pursuit, which ensured that I didn't look up for the last six years. And then when I looked up, I realized that the world had changed ...

Six years had passed.

Next page: The Problem of Genocide

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