This book may contain language, sexual content, and themes of grief and loss, which may be challenging for some readers. Reader caution advised.
Foley In the Bardos
by Chris Hudson
Hi, my name is Chris Hudson and I’m an English professor at Amarillo College.
Welcome to the Fall Radio Readers Book Club. I’ll be talking today about American Mother by Colum McCann with Diane Foley.
While reading American Mother I couldn’t help thinking about George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. In fact, on the title page of American Mother I wrote: Foley in the Bardo, because Diane Foley, the mother of the American journalist, James Foley, who was executed by ISIS in Syria. Like Saunders’ characters, Diane Foley is trapped, but in multiple bardos. She is in a bardo as she waits for information about her son; she is in a bureaucratic bardo as she deals with the U.S. government agencies that go as far as to tell her she’ll be prosecuted if she interferes; and then there is the bardo of the trials as she relives the terrible stories.
While American Mother does not have Saunders’ ghosts, it is ghost written by award-winning novelist Colum McCann. There clearly is a fiction writer’s sense of organization as the book begins with Foley meeting with Alexanda Kotey, one of her son’s captors (and possibly his killer) and returns to the third and final of those meetings at the end of the book. In between we learn of James Foley’s life and education, and the development of his desire to tell the stories of the innocents who are caught up in the chaos of violence and are often written off as collateral damage. It is those collateral stories, let’s call them, that I would have liked to read more of. I think I can feel more about another person if I can read how they write, how they focus on detail, and the emotions that their words evoke.
As it is, we are one or more layers removed from Jim Foley. I found it difficult not to wonder whose words I was reading. How much of McCann’s artistry are we reading as we are exposed to Diane Foley’s emotions—anger, love, empathy, etc.? Whose lens are we looking through? Foley’s meetings with Alexanda Kotey are written in 3rd person, exactly where you’d think the 1st Person, I, would be most effective. The majority of the book is about James Foley’s story and the efforts to save him, but that is narrated in 1st Person from Diane Foley’s point of view, where I would have expected the more objective 3rd Person. But the book, of course, is really about what she endured.
I found it interesting that the most unabashed criticism in the book is directed at the U.S. government and its no-negotiating-with-terrorists policy. The harshest words are saved for the Obama administration which she calls hypocritical, ignorant, unsympathetic, and reckless. She even notes President Obama did not offer her tea when he met with her in the Oval Office (though I imagine he isn’t the tea-server-in-chief) and that he played golf following his announcement of James Foley’s execution. Instead, she praises European government’s willingness to pay ransoms.
She does note that President Obama authorized a Delta strike force to free Foley and the others. That secret mission failed because of stale intelligence, and Foley suggests the money spent on that would have been better spent on ransom in the way, say, Spain paid for the release of its hostages. She implies something similar about the Justice Department’s careful and successful handling of the ISIS prisoners, reasonably wishing her son had been treated as kindly.
Her empathy is described almost as an act of grace to Alexanda Kotey, who, at the end of their final meeting rises and accepts her handshake, despite his religion’s injunction to not touch a woman who is not his wife, sister, or mother.
Why did he do it, he is asked. Because, he replies, “She’s like a mother to us all.”
For HPPR’s Radio Readers Book Club, I’m Chris Hudson. Thanks for listening!
