The Sin Eater: a play in one act (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

The play centres around memories of interviews and material from interviews – some (semi) fabricated, some factual. The factual accounts have not been attributed and the torturer remains nameless deliberately to emphasise how he can be any one of us, that his monstrous capacity does not give him a monstrous appearance and that he could easily be the person standing next to us waiting for the bus or sitting next to us in a café, a neighbour, someone we work beside, even a member of our own family. Described by the press as 'harrowing', 'a shocking venture into a world we would prefer to pretend does not exist', 'disturbing and compassionate, we are left looking inwards instead of outwards', 'a perspective too often ignored', 'brave and bold', 'Hartley dares to go where other writers wouldn't', 'a sensitive piece of writing'.Introduction From Jennifer S. HartleyInterviewing and working with 'torturers' was a complex and emotional period of my life – as was working with those who had been tortured and their families. My generation, and being brought up in the western world ensured that all these were experiences I could only ever have envisaged through a film-screen or literature. When it became a part of my life I was forced to revisit so many of my so called 'certainties' and re-evaluate all my assumptions. This play has drawn from the interviews and work, but at the same time has drawn on so many others' experience – experiences that many were willing to share and allow to be reworked into what was to become 'The Sin Eater'.During the time of the interviews I was forced to confront a lot of my own demons, forced to see that little in life is black and white. At the same time I had to fight to hold on to my own sense of right at wrong despite what I heard around me. But in order to do so I had to come to terms with the fact that right and wrong is not as straightforward as I had grown up believing; that good and bad are rarely in separate entities; that all of us have the torturer and the victim within us.When I started writing this play I rejected it on many occasions. I broke with my intent because I found it so hard to openly put all these things in written form. It was a long time before I was able to see that this was not about me. This has been a difficult journey both for those I worked with and myself. It seems simple to write or say those words, but to take them in with all their implications is terrifying.A political prisoner I worked with, a man whose story affected me deeply, warned me that whether I interviewed the victims or the torturers or both, I would be contaminated by their hatred, their guilt, their need to justify their actions or lack of them. He said my struggle would be to fight that contamination. At the time this made little sense to me, although I soon came to understand what he had been talking about. And to this day my struggle goes on.Proust said that 'the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes', so for now that is my journey.