When Butterflies Cry by Ninie Hammon

When Butterflies Cry is the second book I have read by Ninie Hammon and it will not be the last. Ninie Hammon has an incredible gift with language. For example, a line from the second page says, “But the smile that started on Andy’s face melted like wax beneath a candle flame.”  Can’t you just see that smile disappear?

The book When Butterflies Cry is based in Wales, Vietnam and West Virginia. An event in time pulls them all together.  An unknown girl shows up at the door. She has been badly beaten by someone but no one reports her missing. A few days later a shell-shocked soldier comes home from the war in Vietnam to find his brother making moves on his wife. Meanwhile, above their home the dam built to hold back toxic waste from coal mining is about to let go.

In Ninie’s book she talks about the United States Bureau of Mines, the agency that is supposed to exercise regulatory control over the mining industry. She says that in practice, the USBM was more of an extension of the industry than a watchdog. I found this particularly interesting because in the Canadian province I live in we have recently had a dam give way that contained toxic sludge from the Mount Polley mine.  One of the reasons why this happened was poor government oversight.  The buzz-word here is self-regulating, The Mount Polley mine spill was  an example of where that policy leads. There were no towns beneath the massive spill that happened in BC, but there was a pristine wilderness which up until now has boasted the largest run of sockeye salmon.

I would highly recommend Ninie’s book.  It is not so much a social commentary as a wonderful story of love and loss and what it means to be family. There is enough drama in this book to keep a reader missing sleep to keep on turning pages until they have finished a remarkable book.

Night by Elie Wiesel

The book Night by Elie Wiesel has been on my to-read list for a very long time. Elie Wiesel tells of a desperate struggle for survival and how far people will go to keep on living for another day.  Elie Wiesel writes from his own experience as a 15 year old boy who survives the brutality of a Nazi concentration camp.  What makes this story so powerful is that Elie does not just talk about what happened, but tells you how it felt to be there with such raw intensity that you stand appalled in the midst of the story. 

A theme throughout the book is relationships between fathers and sons. Elie enters the concentration camp with a grim determination to stay near his father on whom he feels his life depends.  Near the end of the book he struggles with a sense of wanting to distance himself from his father who has become a detriment to his own survival. In spite of these feelings he continues to fight for his father's life.  One very stark story that Elie shares  which is particularly gut wrenching is of an old man clutching a crust of bread to his chest. The man’s son comes and violently rips it away.  The old man says, “Don’t you remember me. I am your father.”  Others come and violently take the bread away from the son. Both father and son end up dead.   

A very haunting part of the story for me as a person of faith is the death of God.  When an angelic looking boy is hanged someone asks, “Where is God?”  Elie responds by saying, “Where is he? Here he is – he is hanging on the gallows.  What I think Elie means is that his faith in a God of love dies on the gallows with that boy.  This question resonates for me as a Christian. We all ask ourselves where God is in the face of suffering. I too would say that God was hanging on the gallows, but when I say that I would mean that God suffers with everyone who is a victim of the world’s brokenness.  I am reminded of a prayer, “Crucified savior, naked God, you hang disgraced and powerless.  Grieving, we dare to hope, as we wait at the cross with your mother and your friend.”   

There is an important question that arises when we read a book like this.  The question being what we would do to survive.  The history of the world suggests most of us would let go of our humanity in a bid for survival.  The studies done by Milgram on obedience suggest that there may not be as much separating us from the Nazi prison guards as we like to think.  We need to ponder this question.   There are some things worse than death.  Becoming a person you detest is one of those things.