Better Than Superman: An Interview with Terese Svoboda
by Neil de la Flor
In the original story Superman is jettisoned and plunked down in a cornfield somewhere in Kansas where he is raised by a human farmer and his wife. His social activism would benefit all humanity as he stamped out crime and tyranny all across the land. In Terese Svoboda's latest book, a new superhero emerges, but this one was born and raised in Nebraska. Instead of taking a posh job at the Daily Planet Terese Svoboda writes a book and dares to call it Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. Why? Well, just take a look at her uncle: "With black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps, lots of brilliantined thick dark hair and a solid jaw, six-four and as handsome as all get-out, he's the perfect match for Kryptonite."
In this far-reaching book Svoboda is all get-out as well. She bears witness for her uncle who was a "silent witness to the unqualified punishment of American prisoners, many of them African American" by the U.S. military. His severe depression and suicide at nearly 80 compelled Svoboda to investigate the mystery surrounding those atrocities. From the Midwest to Japan to the National Archives in Washington D.C., Svoboda tracks down clues and builds a fascinating narrative that questions the 'just' in military justice. Black Glasses Like Clark Kent is the perfect match for Kryptonite. And, it is pure patriotism.
Neil de la Flor: For those who have not read Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, who is Clark Kent and what is the story that unfolded from the audiotapes he sent you?
Terese Svoboda: Like many published writers, when my uncle approached me to write the story about his time in the Army, I suggested he first record it on tape. I was hoping that the effort would discourage him. How could a wild romp as an MP in postwar Japan guarding a bunch of convicted GIs be as movie-worthy as he boasted? A few years later, around the time of the Abu Ghraib revelations, he fell into a deep depression. My father suggested that working with him on his story might help him, or at least distract him. So my uncle began to send me tapes. After listening to the first one, I became quite enthusiastic. His stories were so full of anecdote and detail and humor! A few months later, I became very busy, I didn't call him with more encouragement, and he committed suicide. Certainly guilt impelled me to drop everything else and start the book. But then I also finally listened to his last tape, the one in which his captain tells him they are going to build a gallows and execute the prisoners because of overcrowding. Black Glasses Like Clark Kent became a story about trying to discover what my Superman look-alike uncle witnessed in that stockade that made recording these tapes the last thing he did. (Click the play button on the images below.)
ND: Family holds power over us. Tell us more about the Grandma who "had more than a whiff of German in her Czech fierceness" and how that fierceness is represented in your book?
TS: Sweet Grandma ruled her three children with the ferociousness of an immigrant which she was not, she was second generation Bohemian. The trauma (PTSD?) of being an immigrant on that part of the plains, where land was more about drought and wind than soil, did not disappear in the Dust Bowl.
How was the book made fierce? I didn't have to write it. Like the other nine books I've published, nobody gave me an advance and said I look forward to reading it. I also didn't have to write traditionally made sentences with quotation marks and semi-colons, for godsake, but I forced myself to because the material needed to be known beyond the audience I have earned for my more challenging work. Above all, guilt can make you fierce--mine, my uncle's a nation's. You want to shake off guilt at any cost, you want to share it.
ND: Your father and son/sons play important roles in the development of this book. Can you discuss their place in your world and how they helped/tricked you into 'strategizing' the narrative's trajectory?
TS: Dad definitely wanted me to write the book. But why? To get even with my uncle for being the favorite? to grieve his brother? to glamorize him? to help him with his memories? or just because he admired his stories? "I don't know; he doesn't know." I have two sons. I didn't want them to bear close public scrutiny that being in a memoir invites, so in the book it's a composite character. I guess that's being unfair but that's what I did. Their generation's views on what's going on, especially about killing and torture, was important to the book.
ND: What if your son is drafted to fight in Iraq?
TS: I would try to convince him to flee, that any other life would be preferable to living with the trauma of war. I was just interviewed by a woman whose husband wasn't even in combat but suffered severe PTSD from sorting limbs after a crash in the DMZ in Korea. Being in the military exposes you to the military ethos, basically about being called on to kill or give your life for your country. Some things aren't worth that. After all, the whole concept of the nation-state was developed only a few centuries ago. I'm not sure that we would have nation-states anymore except for the convenience of multi-national corporations.
ND: Is post-traumatic stress the kryptonite of American soldiers and veterans?
TS: Nicely put. Vets may appear strong and seasoned when they return from saving the country but the experience marks them irreparably.
ND: At what point did you realize your uncle's struggle with depression would turn into a mystery of this scale and end without a clear resolution?
TS: After my uncle committed suicide and I listened to his last tape that ended on his captain's horrendous revelation, I knew there was more to his story than just a series of reminiscences. By the time I encountered all the discrepancies in the figures offered as a total for the number of men executed in the U.S., I realized the story was a nation's.
The book was written as a mystery that opened itself up to larger questions than its own, until the answer to the mystery was not as important as asking the questions.
ND: Krypton was destroyed but from that--Superman. What needs to be destroyed in order for something better to emerge?
TS: According to the new science of killology, up until the Vietnam war soldiers instinctively refused to kill other soldiers. Now scientists know how to suppress that instinct. The Iraq vets come back not knowing how to return to normal, who must live knowing that what they did was wrong. Pandora's box has been opened, the scientific knowledge can't be erased. Another something must be created in order to manipulate men's souls back to human. I don't think it's Zoloft.
ND: In the preface to Night, Elie Wiesel's memoir of his experience as a holocaust survivor, he speaks of responsibility. He writes that there "is response in responsibility. When we speak of this era of evil and darkness [WW II], so close and yet so distant, responsibility is the key word." What do you feel responsible for?
TS: Americans dont' see World War II as "evil and dark". We were made to feel like heroes and we haven't felt like heroes since. That's what Bush's posturing on the aircraft carrier was all about. Our responsibility then is to avoid the valorization of killing and torture that happens during war, during an occupation, which is surely part of war.
ND: Is it our/your duty to bear witness for the dead and for the living: to testify on behalf of your uncle and those who were unjustly punished?
TS: We can bear bear witness because we don't carry these marks of trauma and we must, in order to show the world its victims, to emphasize that it could happen to anyone.
ND: Black Glasses Like Clark Kent is also about race and gender, the color-codified world meets the brothels of Japan. Talk a little about this confluence of race and gender in the book and where you think race and/or gender relations in the U.S. are today. (Hint: Not so subtle reference to the current race for the democratic presidential nominee.)
TS: Black soldiers made up 8.5 percent of the armed forces during WWII, and they were held responsible for committing 79 percent of all capital crimes. This is ludicrous. Racism was rampant. Most of the fighting in postwar Japan was between black and white troops and some of it was over the Japanese women who worked as government (and U.S.) sponsored prostitutes, Japanese women who had no other way to survive. Their work is often attributed to having saved their country economically, rather than the textile or automotive industries. Of course they had mixed feelings about servicing other races--including whites--because they wanted theirs to remain pure. I don't think there was so much conflict from the black soldiers perspective. With regard to our current 'race', the country would elect a Martian if he or she or it showed promise.
ND: Is it possible to make the best better?
TS: In writing, it usually is. Adequate sentences can be rethought, tunneled into and amended but usually such radical revision requires distance and time, items that remain in short supply to all of us.
ND: In the book you quote the oral historian Luisa Passerini: "all autobiographical memory is true; it is up to the interpreter to discover in which sense, where [and] for which purpose." Why?
TS: All memories have consequences for the person who remembers them, even recovered memories that may not be based in fact. The interpreter finds the confluences, the reason why this memory and not that one. The one who remembers may object to the interpretation but he himself is also untrustworthy, as it is impossible not to distort one's own memories out of fear or regret or anger.
ND: Was Superman really the perfect match for Kryptonite?
TS: Forget Lois Lane. Ms. Kryptonite was always very cute. Even today, those black glasses of Clark Kent's are officially known as BCGs--"basic corrective glasses"--but as "birth control glasses" to the GIs because they are so ugly. Clark had to keep them on to prevent the world from being overrun by little Kryptons.
Alas, my uncle took his off and so the book contains sex and sad Madame Butterfly moments.
