Héctor Abad won WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award

Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s leading writers, does not answer calls that come from unknown cellphone numbers. One day, earlier this year, his phone rang once, twice, and continued ringing. He finally resigned himself to answering. A man told him he had won an award in the United States. He did not understand what the man was talking about and asked the person to send him an email with the information.

Abad had won the WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award for his book Oblivion: A Memoir. The prize, created in 2008 by the non-profit Washington Office of Latin America and Duke University, honors the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy and social justice in Latin America. Abad received the prize on November 28, at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C.

Oblivion, first published in Spanish in 2006, was a best-seller in Colombia. The book narrates the writer’s memories of his loving father, Hector Abad Gómez, a physician who developed public health programs in Medellín, Colombia, and who was assassinated in 1987 by paramilitary groups because of his condemnation of their actions.

In 2010, the British publishing house, Old Street Publishing, translated the book into English. Last year, a copy of Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey’s translation reached the desk of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’ editor, Jesse Coleman.

“I thought it was a beautiful book and that it deserved to have an audience [in the U.S.] because people here can relate to it,” Coleman says. “Even though it was a Latin American story, it is also a universal story. I thought it would appeal to literary readers and also to people who like memoirs.”

Abad says he wrote the book because he wanted his children to get to know their grandfather and to understand him within his circumstances. What was happening, who was doing the killing and who was being killed. He wanted to depict a family that was living in a troubled country.

“I wanted to combine the most intimate with the most public issue: the political assassination of my father. If I didn’t do a personal edition of the book, it was because I wanted others to read about this injustice,” explains Oblivion’s author.

Although it was the first time that Abad was published in the U.S., the book was reviewed by prominent American newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Michael Greenberg wrote in his New York Times review that “Oblivion is a searing memoir written with love and blood: both family blood, the kind that’s thicker than water, and the spilled blood of barbarism and murder. From the first pages we feel the internal necessity driving this story. It is obvious that Héctor Abad had no choice but to tell it.”

Roger Atwood, creator of the WOLA-Duke award and regular contributor for publications such as The Boston Globe, and The Times Literary Supplement, nominated the book after a review in a British newspaper prompted him to buy it.

“When the award was designed, this was the sort of book that I was thinking of,” he says.
The award’s objective is to direct Americans to recently published books that have real human rights content about Latin America, and that are accessible to any kinds of readers.

“Choosing Abad’s book this year was a unanimous decision for different reasons, but especially the emotional part of the book had a great effect on all of the judges,” explains Leonor Blum, chair of this year’s award.

“The book was very touching,” Atwood says. “The way Hector Abad depicts his father is so eloquent that he becomes a real person to the reader. I thought the global effect was to create a very reliable portrait of this doctor who believes very strongly in treating people decently, and who has humanitarian values.”

Abad Gómez is portrayed in the book as a person concerned about the health of Medellín’s population. “My sister says that he seemed almost like a madman, or a maniac, stopping in front of nearly every patient and asking: ‘What’s wrong with this child?’ Then he would answer his own question: ‘He’s hungry.’ And a bit farther on: ‘What’s wrong with this child?’ ‘She’s hungry.’ (…) ‘The only thing wrong with these children is that they’re hungry, and an egg and a glass of milk a day would be enough to keep them from being here. But we’re not capable of giving them this: an egg and a glass of milk! Not even that! It’s inhumane!’”

Atwood explains that even though the main purpose of the book was not to describe a human rights issue, Abad’s publication “shows the human consequences of injustice, and the lack of respect of human rights. It also describes the ways in which a society can deteriorate and become more and more violent.”

Coleman says he wasn’t surprised that Abad’s book won the award. “I didn’t read it as a human rights book, but that’s there. It makes a claim for human rights but I don’t think that’s the point of the book. The book is a love letter to his father.”

Abad explains that he never planned to write a human rights book but he remembers that one day Carlos Gaviria, Colombian presidential candidate in 2006 and one of the persons to whom the book is dedicated, told him that Oblivion had done more for human rights in Colombia than any academic research, activist’ speech or human rights manifesto.

“I didn’t write it with that purpose in mind, but literary works have their own life, their own journey. And it seems that’s how the WOLA-Duke judges read it,” Abad says. “I usually present Oblivion as a novel, but in the U.S, they classified it as non-fiction because everything that is narrated in it is real. These are situations that happened just as I told them or, at least, as I remember them.”

Both Blum and Atwood say the good intentions of books about human rights often outweigh their literary merits, with Atwood specifying that the emotional part sometimes does not come very naturally or that the result is insincere or even strange. But the two judges agree that this is not the case with Oblivion, which is so well-written and compelling that they both cried when they read it.

At the same time, according to Atwood, the book gives a sense of the loss of amazing people because of the conflict in Colombia, not only in the rural area but also in cities like Medellín. “The book describes how polarization leads to more conflict,” he says, “and how that process works in a human level, descends and touches human lives: people, families, and in particular Abad’s family.”

Abad says about his father in the book: “His case is not unique, and perhaps it’s not even the saddest. There are thousands and thousands of murdered fathers in this country whose ground is so fertile for death. Nevertheless, I believe my father’s case is a special one, and for me is the saddest, epitomizing the many, many unjust deaths we’ve suffered here.”

When he wrote the book, he was thinking of a sympathetic reader, someone who has read until the end of the book.

“His sex, age, religion, race, national identity or culture, didn’t interest me. I think that basically all human beings are very similar: I believe that if there are literary universals is because there are human universals that none culture can mold in a different way because they are our biological and psychical hardware,” Abad says.

Oblivion’s author certainly wasn’t expecting the award. He hadn’t even heard about it when he received the email with the information.

“I recognize my ignorance. I didn’t know anything about WOLA, I’m not a human rights activist, I am not an academic, and I don’t study the relationship between the United States and Colombia. That is why, when I received the news, I had to do some research.”

He asked about the award to an Italian friend who is familiar with human rights issues. Abad’s friend told him that WOLA was a serious and independent office, and that it was an honor for Oblivion to win that prize.

Given Abad’s subject matter, being recognized by a U.S. organization was a particularly fitting honor. His father got a master’s degree in University of Minnesota, worked at the Washington Office of the Pan American Health Organization, and traveled frequently to the United States in order to present his medical research.

“At home, I learned to appreciate American academy: its science, independence and reliability,” says Abad. “I think that my dad would have liked this award as much as I like it.”

 By Lucía Camargo Rojas