Humanity and Violence
In Sarah Beckwith’s gripping essay about her experience of being raped at knifepoint, in 1984, she writes about another victim of a violent assault who escaped death seemingly because a chance event led her attacker to see her as a vulnerable person—and, by extension, to see himself not as a rapist but as a “savior” (“By the Canal,” June 2nd). A similar scene takes place in Gina DePaulo’s searing memoir, “Unopened Doors,” in which DePaulo recounts instinctively stroking her attacker’s neck while he was raping and strangling her. Nearly forty years later, DePaulo, with the help of a cold-case investigator, learned that her attacker had ended up on death row after raping another woman and murdering her. DePaulo attributes her own survival to her instinctive act—when she began to touch him tenderly, he stopped strangling her—and speculates that it made her attacker feel like he was recognized as a human being.
It is a sad reality that women go through life collecting ideas of what might save their lives in situations like these. We often hear that we should “humanize” ourselves to assailants. But perhaps acknowledging the humanity of an assailant is an even more powerful survival tactic.
Nelle Engoron
Nevada City, Calif.
The Spread of Influence
The saga that Lauren Collins so engagingly examines in her report on the Algerian hazelnut spread El Mordjene is far from the first instance of France or the European Union intervening in Algeria’s culinary export business (“Schmear Campaign,” June 9th). When the European Economic Community, a precursor to the E.U., was created, in 1957, French administrators successfully lobbied to include Algeria—still a part of the empire—in the organization’s geographic reach. Accordingly, Algeria’s land and resources fell within the bounds of integrated Europe. After Algeria won independence, in 1962, its economic relationship with Europe’s markets was unclear, but E.E.C. member states used Common Market regulations, which protected European producers, to limit the import of some Algerian goods. Most notably, France and Italy collaborated to crush Algeria’s wine industry, whose affordable offerings had been popular in West Germany and elsewhere. At the time, an Algerian newspaper called wine “a clear legacy of foreign colonization, an excrescence of the French economy on our soil,” but the industry’s fate was nonetheless a blow to Algeria’s economy. As with this wine, El Mordjene may be sweet, but the E.U.’s attempts to elide its colonial past leave a bitter taste.
Megan Brown
Associate Professor of History
Swarthmore College
Philadelphia, Penn.
Cemetery of Splendor
While reading Paige Williams’s piece about Green-Wood Cemetery, I was struck with gratitude for the vision and the leadership of Richard Moylan, who served as the cemetery’s president for the past four decades (“Still Life,” June 9th). I’ve lived in New York City since 1997, and I still can’t believe that a place like Green-Wood exists. People visit the cemetery for different reasons—to honor the dead, to see a performance, to admire the architecture, to commune with nature—and we all get what we need. Every time I step onto the grounds, I feel a deep sense of peace, and it’s not lost on me that this is largely because of the efforts of a man I don’t know and will likely never meet.
Michael Quinn
Brooklyn, N.Y.
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