Without forgiveness there can be no future for a relationship between individuals or within and between nations.
—DESMOND TUTU
South Asia’s Kingdom of Bhutan is known as the last Shangri-La. This patchwork of nine-thousand-foot mountain peaks, rushing rivers and lush watersheds, forests of cedar and hemlock, rocky highlands, plains of savannah grasslands in the shadow of the Himalayas, and freshwater springs is home to roughly a million people. In 2006 a BusinessWeek global survey rated the kingdom among the happiest countries in Asia and the eighth-happiest on the planet.
In the southwest region, just miles from the border of India, is the tiny farming village of Relukha. Bhutan is characterized by hundreds of individual settlements populated by the Ngalongs in the northwest, the dominant Sharchops in the east, and Lhotshampas in the south. Relukha was part of a group of about a dozen Lhotshampa villages like it. Aaron Acharya’s father, Devi, was their leader.
“I wasn’t close to my father. I was in awe of him. He was a disciplinarian,” says Aaron. Devi was a tough, resourceful man and the highly esteemed patriarch of his fellow villagers. Aaron could show no weakness in front of him. “I couldn’t look him in the eye. He was quite respected, was always providing support to people who asked it of him. He spent very little time with us at home. But I always knew he cared about me.” Once, when Aaron was eight, Devi took him to visit a village in the forested region of Gaylegphug, three days’ journey from home. They were traveling by foot when they came to the yellow mud bank of the mighty Mau River. Devi hoisted Aaron onto his shoulders and waded across. “I think about that river when I think about my father,” Aaron recalls. “I’m reminded how he cared for me even while I was fearful of him.”
Two years later, when he was only twelve years old, Aaron traveled for five days to Samchi, on the way to boarding school. After walking for nearly two days, he got on three buses and eventually arrived in Khaling, where he would spend the next five years in secondary school. Aaron excelled academically. He learned English and two other languages. His knowledge of history and the sciences put him at the top of his class. He passed the countrywide exam his final year and scored the second-highest grade in all of Bhutan. Each year, he returned to Relukha for vacation having fallen more and more in love with learning. This put him a bit at odds with the predominant ethos of the village, largely the home of rice, corn, cardamom, and fruit farmers. His family, resourceful by nature, had for generations raised cattle and crops on this land. But Devi envisioned Aaron with a different future that only education could provide. In 1992, Aaron received a college scholarship from the government of Bhutan; with Devi’s blessing and high hopes behind him, Aaron left for India to get a degree in civil engineering. Devi believed his son was going to be a different sort of resource to his people, learning to design public works and build roads, bridges, and flood protection systems.
The true significance of that resource was something the people of Relukha could not yet imagine.
Aaron is a smiley fellow with a short, square chin and neat dark hair. He wears frameless rectangular glasses that match his conservative and measured demeanor. He dresses in slacks and sweaters and carries himself with an air of properness. It’s hard to imagine how he maintained this demeanor when the Bhutanese government began enacting discriminatory citizenship laws against his people in the name of maintaining the country’s Tibetan Mahˉayˉana Buddhist character. While he was away at school in India, security forces arrived in Relukha to evict the population from their homes and seize their lands. Making these actions legal required the locals, including Devi, to sign a so-called voluntary migration form. But the soldiers didn’t count on Devi’s strength of spirit. He refused to sign. In response, officials launched an operation of harassment and arrests.
Aaron returned for a holiday and learned of his father’s incarceration. “A war had begun in my absence,” Aaron explains. “It wasn’t a war you ran from, but a war you were forced into at gunpoint.” Aaron was determined to get his father back. The local agent of the central government had turned a small post office five hours from the village into a makeshift prison, where Devi was now being held. Aaron demanded that officials let his father go. Instead, they incarcerated Aaron, too. For five days and nights Aaron heard the jailers thrashing Devi and three of his friends in a neighboring cell. “He shouted and cried out,” Aaron says of his father. “They hung him upside down. They beat him. They wanted me to hear. They probably wanted him to know I could hear.”
On the fifth day of Aaron’s arrest, two officers brought Aaron and Devi into an office. There, a menacing officer walked around his desk, glaring first at Aaron and then at Devi. “You’re a troublemaker,” the officer said to Devi. “Sign, and you can both leave tonight. Don’t sign, and I’ll kill you.” To show he meant it, the officer fondled the pistol he had strapped to himself.
Devi shook his head. The officer crossed the room and punched Aaron’s father hard in his belly.
“Dad, just sign,” Aaron said. “We’ll come back one day and get everything back.”
The officer turned and leveled his gaze at Aaron. “What did you say?” He pushed the barrel of his pistol against Aaron’s temple.
Another officer put a pen in Devi’s hand. Aaron watched his father sign the documents. The eviction papers gave Devi and his family twelve days to leave the country. Another twenty-three families faced the same edict. Aaron’s family had land, three houses, cattle, and crops they were now forced to leave behind.
The ancestral families of Relukha would caravan for three days to a tiny camp near the border of India. From there, they would travel toward another series of camps set up in neighboring Nepal by the Nepali government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. These camps, Aaron knew, were dangerous and lawless places filled with disease, violence, and squalor. But there was no choice.
It was a silent journey, on foot, back to Relukha from the jail. In Bhutan, Aaron explains, men do not cry, so Aaron hid his rage and despair. Devi had been beaten so savagely that he couldn’t walk straight. If Devi had permitted him, Aaron would have carried him home. But Devi was a proud man. He would walk on his own. These crimes, Aaron thought, were unforgiveable.
Trauma happens to most people. We expect it to happen to people living in troubled parts of the world: war-torn nations and poverty-stricken regions. We expect it to happen to people in risky careers: cops, firefighters, rescue workers, and soldiers. Though it might not surprise you that people such as Aaron and his family were targeted, as we allude to in chapter 1, trauma also happens to somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of people in the developed world at some point in their lives. In 1990, Harvard Medical School professor of health care policy Ronald Kessler, along with the U.S. government and a large team of investigators, undertook the first large-scale field study of mental health in the nation’s history. As part of the study, called the National Comorbidity Survey, researchers interviewed a representative sample of almost six thousand Americans ranging in age from fifteen to fifty-four, asking them detailed questions about their exposure to traumatic events. According to the results, a whopping 61 percent of men and 51 percent of women had experienced a traumatic event sometime in their lives. And these numbers are lower than some estimates, because the researchers didn’t count as traumas such things as severe medical illness or the loss of loved ones.
The really sad thing is that many of these traumas are man-made. As Aaron and the villagers of Relukha experienced, many traumas are the result of people’s cruelty and inhumanity to one another. Although it’s difficult, because of variance between regions, to estimate exactly what percentage of trauma worldwide is man-made, it’s clear that it’s large. In the National Comorbidity Survey, for instance, if you add up the percentages of traumas involving rape, molestation, physical attack, combat, threat with a weapon, neglect, or physical abuse, the total comes to 45 percent in men and 43 percent in women. The figure for natural disasters is only about a third of that.
To make matters worse, the very people we love and are close to are often the ones who perpetrate crimes and injustices against us. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that about one in six women in the United States is raped during her lifetime. Contrary to popular belief, most people know their rapists. According to the National Violence Against Women Survey, a study of eight thousand women across the United States published by the National Institute of Justice in 2000, only about 17 percent of adult female victims were raped by strangers. The rest were victimized by people they at the very least were acquainted with. But a shocking 62 percent were raped by someone they knew pretty well—a spouse or ex-spouse, current or former live-in partner, date, or boyfriend.
These forms of victimization, sometimes called interpersonal traumas, are the most traumatizing of all. In the late 1990s, the World Health Organization launched its World Mental Health Surveys Initiative, an ongoing program to review mental health across the globe. In 2010, Dan Stein, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a team of colleagues used data from the initiative to find out what sorts of traumatic events were most associated with suicidal ideation, plans, and attempts. They read more than a hundred thousand interviews related to trauma in twenty-one countries, and topping the list was sexual and interpersonal violence.
Given these depressing statistics, it’s tempting to become angry and resentful, to view other people as threats and little more. That’s what some victims of interpersonal trauma do, of course. They may hold grudges, harbor lifelong resentment, and even seek retribution. Who could blame them? A long review of history reveals no shortage of violent examples—whether we’re talking about the generations of Jews and Muslims in the Middle East or classic conflicts among Serbs and Croats, Protestant and Catholic Irish, or northern and southern Sudanese.
From a safe distance, it’s easy to see that grudges aren’t healthy on a societal scale. But what about on an individual level? Technically, psychologists refer to grudge-holding and revenge-seeking as unforgiveness. It seems obvious that unforgiveness is bad for mental health—it’s highly unpleasant to harbor anger, hostility, and hurt for prolonged periods of time. But science also is beginning to show that unforgiveness also may contribute to poor physical health. Psychologists Charlotte Witvliet, Thomas Ludwig, and Kelly Vander Laan asked seventy-one students at Michigan’s Hope College to call to mind a person in their lives who had mistreated or offended them. While fitted with instruments to monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and sympathetic nervous system activity, students imagined both what it would be like to forgive the transgressor and what it would be like to harbor a grudge. The results were simple and to the point. When imagining harboring unforgiveness, the participants felt stronger negative emotions and experienced higher heart rate, blood pressure, and sympathetic nervous system activity than when imagining offering forgiveness.
These results dovetail with the findings of a 2010 replication of the National Comorbidity Survey mentioned earlier. Among the many questions in this extensive survey, ten thousand U.S. residents were asked, “Would you say this is true or false? ‘I’ve held grudges against people for years.’ ” Writing in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, researchers Erick Messias, Anil Saini, Philip Sinato, and Stephen Welch from the Medical College of Georgia find that people who said they tended to hold grudges reported higher rates of heart disease and cardiac arrest, elevated blood pressure, stomach ulcers, arthritis, back problems, headaches, and chronic pain than those who didn’t share this tendency. Though most scientists note that much more research is needed on the subject, it’s possible that the physiological agitation experienced by the Hope College students may actually erode health over the long term.
Unforgiveness certainly appears to be unhealthy. But aren’t some truly horrible things simply unforgiveable?
Growing up in the city of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, Clemantine Wamariya was an inquisitive little girl. In fact, her unending wonder at the world around her caused even her endlessly loving parents to want to put tape over her mouth. “I remember driving through the city and the whole way asking my mother, ‘Who lives here? What about here?’ My mother made up stories from one house to another. I wanted to know everything.”
With a short nose, high cheekbones, and a slender physique, Clemantine at twenty-four is striking. The first thing people often notice is her distinctive wide-eyed smile. She wears her hair in dozens of long Rwandan braids tied behind her head. Her skin is the color of a dust storm. She speaks with a yearning cadence that infuses wonder and horror as she talks about the events that began in 1994, only shortly after that drive through the city with her mother.
She was six when the mass killings started in Kigali. “The first thing they do is rape the girls,” Clemantine says, drawn back to the memory of the genocide.
Ethnic tensions were brimming in Rwanda when a government assassination sparked the start of Hutu-conducted mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace sympathizers. Trying to protect her and her sixteen-year-old sister, Claire, their parents placed them in hiding at their grandparents’ home. But Clemantine’s grandparents couldn’t protect the girls from the violence for long.
She remembers the beginning of the massacre in snippets. The house was cold. The darkness was impenetrable. The night ushered in the sounds of annihilation, howling, and bawling, from the street. “There was lots of noise and banging outside. There was singing—actual singing—from the mob coming down the avenue as they broke into the houses. I heard crying in the dark. From inside or outside, I’m not sure. Then screaming. I was in a corner, shaking near my grandmother’s bedroom. Claire and I scrambled in the dark, trying to find places in the house to hide. We didn’t know where to go.”
The sisters crept through an airless hallway to the far side of the house. Claire stopped short of the kitchen and opened a tiny window. From there, the sisters escaped to the yard and slipped into the darkness of a field of banana trees. Then Clemantine had a sudden horrible thought. She turned back to the house, but Claire yanked her deeper into the forest, seemingly incapable of stopping to consider the family they’d left behind. Claire lifted her sister up the trunk of a tall tree and ordered her to climb. Up in the yawning branches, time atrophied. Clemantine imagined transforming herself into a boulder, an inanimate piece of earth whose elements were frozen in time, anonymous and impermeable. All around them, far below, deafening shrieks and cries split the darkness as roaming death squads slaughtered neighbors with laser-like exactitude, much as they did all over the capital city that night and throughout the country. “Far away, I could see fire and smoke rising above the trees and rooftops,” Clemantine says. “I didn’t know if my house was on fire, too. We waited for my grandparents to get out.” She pauses to find her next words. “This will never make sense to me. Not ever. What we saw. So much death. What we ran from . . . If I think about it too much it will make me crazy. My grandparents never came out.”
In the morning, Clemantine and Claire emerged from the trees. They walked roads clogged with people lying motionless in the gutters. Needing a place to store the dead, houses of worship were converted to storerooms, where bodies were piled floor to ceiling. Across the city, houses smoldered. Clemantine and Claire joined other displaced victims of the ongoing assaults and walked many days to a refugee camp in Burundi. “We’d found ourselves in a place neither of us had ever imagined, surrounded by thousands of others, all wounded, lost, screaming, crying, and hungry; all in shock; all in disbelief,” Clemantine says. Together, she and Claire stood in a long line for a tent, blankets, and sacks for their belongings. She and her sister stayed in the camp for roughly a year, during which time the Hutu massacred an additional eight hundred thousand Tutsi.
“Most of us usually then want to get our own back, but an eye for an eye ends up with everyone blind, as Gandhi noted,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells us from his home in South Africa. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient rose to worldwide prominence as a vocal opponent of apartheid and a defender of human rights not long before the government of Bhutan began its campaign of ethnic discrimination. Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on political forgiveness, Archbishop Tutu had presided over the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which determined whether to grant amnesty to those who had committed abuses during the apartheid era.
“No one has the right to tell someone who has suffered that he must forgive,” Tutu continues. “No, we have to enter into the anguish of the one who has been made to suffer, to ameliorate and understand and sympathize with their suffering.”
Tutu is giving voice to what many survivors and experts agree is true. There should never be an obligation to forgive. Victims do not owe their victimizer forgiveness. To forgive is something highly personal that people do when and if they are ready. It’s not something that anyone can or should force anyone to do. To apply such force further wrongs the victim. However, science seems to show that for people who naturally come to the point where they are ready to move beyond unforgiveness, to forgive is generally a healthy decision for them. It helps them to move forward in their lives, and indeed may help them to become supersurvivors.
But Aaron Acharya of Bhutan had a lot of reasons for harboring unforgiveness, had experienced a lot of wrongs that nobody could make him forgive. His scholarship to study engineering in India, awarded by the very government that was now persecuting him, had been revoked. Instead of returning to finish his degree, he had settled into temporary shelter in a refugee camp in Nepal with thousands of other refugees from Bhutan, many from his own village. Aaron’s family, unlike other refugees who were registered in the camps before him, was given no living supplies, no cooking oil, no firewood, no vegetables, and no kerosene. Despite the shame it brought upon them, they foraged for firewood in the deep jungle so they could cook the meager rations they collected from the UN. Their new home was an overpopulated mix of tiny dark shanties, dense expanses of bamboo huts without sanitation. Many there died of malnutrition. Over time, conditions deteriorated, ushering in scurvy, malaria, cholera, and measles.
Aaron’s father, Devi, tried to remain a strong leader among his people in the camp. It was clear to Aaron, though, that Devi was a shell of the man he’d been before the torture. “I don’t know if my father blames himself,” Aaron says. “He always thought he was the provider, not only to our family but to our neighbors, too. In the village, people looked to him. His understanding of his family, his village, was lost, along with that intangible sense of responsibility you can measure only in kind acts. He lost his home and his self-worth. He was dehumanized.”
“I spent a lot of time wondering what I would do if I saw these people who did this to him on the street, in another life or situation,” Aaron recalls.
One night, he was offered that chance.
A group of men came to see Aaron in his hut claiming they had found one of the people responsible for the family’s eviction from the village. “We have no doubt it’s him,” they said. “Let’s teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget!” Aaron and a few others who had been victims of this man’s brutality arrived at his hut in the new camp. The man who lived in this hut was once a member of the District Planning Committee and had worked alongside Aaron’s father. During the purge, Bhutanese security forces had recruited Lhotshampa foot soldiers. This so-called colleague of Devi’s became a low-level official who played a role in evicting his fellow villagers. “I was so angry at him and his collaborators,” Aaron says. “I couldn’t get over it. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I saw him. I wanted to understand what drives human beings to do what they do. The beating, jailing, and starving. Was it anger? Was it hatred? Because of the actions of this man, we’d lost everything. Is this what you do when evil gets into you?”
The man was not home, just his wife and children. Aaron pushed the door open and he and the other men let themselves inside. The children were sitting at a table in the middle of the hut. Not just any table, Aaron realized, but a table that the children’s father had appropriated, by force, when Aaron’s family had just a day to live in the village.
“Could I forgive this man? Could I move on without confronting him in some way? I did not know.”
Though Archbishop Tutu is resolute that no one should or even can be forced to forgive, he is quick to add: “We can only hope that the sufferer will realize that not forgiving affects them as a human being, and hope that they will see that nursing a grudge is bad for their health—it can give one stomach ulcers.”
We know from the research that what Tutu has realized through hard-lived experience is right. “Forgiving,” the archbishop says, “is good for our health.”
One intriguing research finding is a link between forgiveness and lower levels of depression. Psychologist Loren Toussaint at Luther College in Iowa, along with his colleagues David Williams, Marc Musick, and Susan Everson-Rose, analyzed more than fourteen hundred telephone interviews across the United States. These interviews allowed the researchers to assess a number of sensitive psychological issues. Depending on how participants answered a handful of screening questions, the interviewers would be prompted to ask in-depth follow-up questions. For instance, they asked participants if they had recently lost interest in things they used to enjoy, such as work or hobbies. If someone answered yes, follow-up questions tested for major depressive disorder. In addition to questions about mental illness, interviewers asked about people’s tendencies to forgive others and themselves. According to the results published in the journal Personality and Mental Health, people’s answers to the forgiveness questions were among the best predictors of their probability of having depression. It’s not surprising that people’s tendency to forgive themselves for wrongdoings they’ve perpetrated against others is associated with a lower probability of encountering depression. Guilt and shame can be pretty depressing. More surprisingly, however, people who tended to forgive others for wronging them also appeared to enjoy lowered probability of depression. This can’t be explained by appealing to decreased guilt or shame; after all, those who forgive are the wronged parties. So the question is: why?
“Without forgiveness there is no hope,” Archbishop Tutu famously said. He was referring to South Africa immediately following the abolition of apartheid, when resisting the tendency to seek revenge upon white leaders who formerly perpetrated human rights violations against the black majority seemed to be the only way to keep the nation from tearing itself apart. But he’s also pointing to something much more personal: forgiveness of others appears to fuel hope. Though research on the topic is still in its infancy, forgiveness may play a more important role in nurturing hope than anyone ever thought. Along with the findings already discussed, Toussaint and his colleagues found that hope may be the link between forgiveness and lowered risk of depression. They found that less willingness to forgive predicted greater hopelessness, which in turn predicted greater depression.
Toussaint’s study isn’t the only one linking forgiveness with hope. In fact, one of the world’s foremost researchers on hope, University of Kansas psychologist C. R. Snyder helped to develop a prominent theory of forgiveness. Along with psychologist Laura Yamhure Thompson and a team of researchers, he created a psychological test to measure forgiveness, called the Heartland Forgiveness Scale. In a 2005 study appearing in the Journal of Personality, they report strong correlations between this test, hope, and depression. To Snyder, who passed away just a few months after publication of that article, the link between forgiveness and hope seemed simple. “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different,” he was fond of saying. Forgiveness means breaking the psychological ties that bind you to the past, giving up the quest to change what has already happened. As discussed in chapter 2, sometimes giving up on impossible goals can free people to experience the true hope, the grounded hope, of changing the future. But what does that really look like for someone who has suffered like Clemantine?
Life as a refugee was nearly unbearable for Clemantine and her sister. Over the next six years, they relocated to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When war erupted there, they fled to Tanzania, then to camps in Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, and finally Zambia. The locations changed, but the same poverty, lawlessness, larceny, rape, and death followed them. Someday, Clemantine told herself, the people responsible for all this would be brought to justice so this would never happen again; someday she would search the continent to find her displaced family. The more time that passed, however, the more unlikely that reality seemed to become.
Clemantine shares these memories in language filled with metaphors and striking imagery. Rwanda during the massacre, for instance, was “noise and chaos.” The camps were “places where the mind and body were imprisoned, where your brain reverses and becomes your stomach. All you know is hunger and worry.” This is part of what makes her such an engaging person. She paints a beautiful picture of horror. But as you spend more time with her, a different picture emerges, one in which these perceptions, much like any defense, kept her moving and alive.
When Clemantine was a child, her nanny told her a story about a lost little girl. But this girl was different from all other girls. Born of a thunder god and a mortal woman, when this girl smiled, glass beads fell from her lips. And so the lost little girl smiled through her fear, knowing that her mother would follow a glimmering trail to find her again. “I saw myself as this little lost girl in the story,” Clemantine explains. In the refugee camps, she wrote her name on walls to mark her way, in the hope that her parents might follow the trail back to their daughter. As she moved from country to country, she walked the streets looking at people’s faces. “Maybe I’ll see someone that looks like me, and know it’s my parents.”
In 2000 Clemantine and her sister worked with the International Organization for Migration to obtain refugee status in the United States. That summer, they boarded a plane from Zambia to Zurich, where the passengers looked clean and well-dressed. From Zurich she flew to Washington, DC, feeling more lost than ever. The last leg of their journey brought them to Chicago. “I was filled with mixed emotions,” she says. “I was happy to leave the horror, but I worried I’d never see my mom and dad again. When I was traveling from camp to camp, I would count how many mountains I passed so I could find my way back home. In a plane, I couldn’t leave any trace behind to let my parents know where I’d gone. They were lost. I was lost.”
Her first host family had a fridge stocked with embarrassing amounts of food. “I’d open the refrigerator and just stare,” she remembers. “I thought I was dreaming this luxury. There was a drawer of green apples there that I just kept on staring at. There were so many people I’d left behind that didn’t have this food. How many months would we be able to make this one fridge last in Zambia?”
In 2001 there came two revelations. Clemantine’s sister, Claire, had recently met a Rwandan businesswoman in Chicago, and together they’d made a nearly impossible connection. The woman had a friend back in Rwanda who, oddly enough, knew a friend of their aunt—an aunt whom they thought had been murdered. The woman made a call and got a phone number. That night, Clemantine sat in the corner of the living room and watched Claire dial. “It was silent for a long time,” Clemantine says. “Then Claire started talking into the phone, and she smiled. I knew it was her. It was my aunt. She was alive. She thought Claire was lying about her identity. She thought we were dead.” Then her aunt said something that turned Claire’s face to stone.
Their parents were alive in Rwanda.
“It was like digging up the grave and watching them walk out,” Clemantine says. “They were still invisible to me and so far away. In some ways, it was harder to know they were alive, because I couldn’t get to them. We didn’t know what to do. I wanted to reach through time and space and pull them back to me.”
The second revelation came in the form of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, from which Clemantine first learned the word genocide. Wiesel’s survival in the Nazi concentration camps was revelatory to Clemantine. He was the first person to describe accurately the pain and confusion she herself had endured. Clemantine was so moved that she wrote an essay for a contest put on by The Oprah Winfrey Show, about the scar of genocide that marred both Germany and Rwanda. A few months later, she was shocked to learn that her essay was a finalist, earning her a seat at a taping of the program.
On the day of the taping, Clemantine put on a black pantsuit with wide lapels. She drove with her sister to Harpo Productions in the Near West Side of Chicago. The set was smaller than it looked on television.
Partway through the taping, Oprah did something, well . . . very Oprah. She invited Clemantine and her sister, Claire, to join her onstage. Oprah was holding an envelope. “This is from your family in Rwanda . . . and I wanted you to read it,” Oprah said. Clemantine took the envelope and slipped her finger along the opening. But Oprah put her hand on Clemantine’s and said, “You don’t have to read it right now in front of all these people because”—Clemantine laughed nervously—“your family is here.”
Clemantine’s breath disappeared. Claire reached her arms out into the air to try to brace herself from falling. Behind the sisters a panel slid open. Their parents rushed out to embrace them. Unbeknownst to the sisters, Oprah producers had worked weeks to locate Clemantine’s parents and had flown them back to their children.
“I fell on the floor,” Clemantine recalls. “I raised my hands up and said, ‘Thank you, God!’ I squeezed my father and held my mother. No one had seen that private pain in me that I’d been carrying for twelve years since they were torn from us.” The girl who smiled beads cried and mourned. “I let it go. The pain was gone. I could forgive,” she says. “I could forgive. I could forgive.”
Clemantine’s journey toward forgiveness had begun years before her appearance on Oprah, though. Shortly after arriving in the United States, she’d picked up a strange new hobby. Every day, she collected the newspaper and saved the obituaries of strangers. She amassed hundreds of names, folding the pages and keeping them safely in her bedroom closet.
Clemantine now recognizes this as one symptom of a general obsession with memory. She was disturbed by the fact that what had happened to her, her family, and hundreds of thousands of others in Rwanda might not be remembered, honored, or mourned. In stark contrast, the names in the obituaries “were being recorded and honored,” she says, her eyes pooling with tears. “They were not buried in unmarked holes in the dirt. Someone cared enough to write about the dead.”
Clemantine believes that acknowledging and grieving her own trauma was an important step on her road to forgiveness. Forgiveness researchers tend to agree. A number of researchers have developed so-called “process models” of how people ultimately arrive at forgiveness. Though these models differ in their details and terminology, almost all of them observe that victims must pass through a stage of acknowledging the suffering that the wrongdoing has caused, admitting that it may have forever changed their lives, and owning their feelings of sorrow, loss, resentment, and sometimes rage.
Psychologist Robert Enright and psychiatrist Richard Fitzgibbons developed one of the most influential therapeutic approaches for helping people forgive. “This can be an emotionally painful time,” they write in their book Helping Clients Forgive. “Yet, if the client or patient concludes that he or she is suffering emotionally because of another’s injustice, this can serve as a motivator to change. The emotional pain can be a motivator to think about and to try to forgive.” It was through this process, which Clemantine calls “mourning,” that she realized she’d already lost enough valuable time and energy to the trauma, and decided she needed to find a way to move beyond the hurt.
A second commonality among most process models of forgiveness is the idea that it is useful to understand why the perpetrators did what they did, taking their perspective. “We ask a series of questions to challenge the person’s view of the offender,” write Enright and Fitzgibbons. “The point of all questions is to help the patient see a person who is, in fact, a human being and not evil incarnate.” As distasteful as this may sound, this harkens back to an idea we began with: trauma often begets cycles of unforgiveness and revenge. Many perpetrators were once victims themselves. Understanding their pain may help victims move forward.
This is exactly what Clemantine naturally found herself doing. “I’m not just a girl who survived genocide and war,” she explains. “I have learned to love others, even the people who did the killing. Before, I saw people as either friendly or dangerous. I now see that we are all bound by a universal desire to live. Every human being strives for this. They would kill each other to live. Who was my persecutor? I have no idea. They killed, but most murderers, they knew that killing is wrong. But there was a campaign of fear and misinformation everywhere.
“I can’t be a part of that anymore,” Clemantine continues. “That wouldn’t have brought my parents back. Forgiveness allowed me to wash my burdened past away.” She came to a simple yet freeing conclusion: she could not change the past. Rather than dwelling on the past, she found herself asking the hopeful and forward-looking question “What now?”
In the past, Clemantine was fighting for her life, but that past was unfixable. In the present, Clemantine was alive. As for the future, Clemantine’s life could now go in any number of directions. Where would it go next?
Aaron Acharya wondered something similar as he waited in a hut at a refugee camp for the return of the man who had betrayed his father and helped force the eviction of his village. How could he possibly forgive this betrayal? What purpose would forgiveness serve? Forgiveness wasn’t going to save his people!
Aaron had every reason to want to spill this man’s blood as a proxy for all those responsible for the expulsion.
The man came home that night to find Aaron and his friends ready to teach him a lesson. “I wondered what he was thinking when he did this to my village. Did he regret what he’d done?” asks Aaron. “We told him, ‘We are angry. You are a horrible person.’ And it was very strange because [he] admitted what he did. ‘I made a horrible mistake. But look, they took away everything from me, too, and now I don’t have anything anymore. You can do what you want to me. Just make sure my wife and kids will be okay.’ ” At that moment, Aaron took his enemy’s perspective and understood what had happened.
“The foot soldiers in war, doing the prosecution, beating, jailing, and starving—these people don’t generally get to make the decisions,” Aaron says. “They are also doing what they do to stay alive. Nothing I could do to this man on this night would change what happened in Relukha. Here I am in his little hut in the camp, and I see his wife, who is dependent on him. I look at his children. They are hungry, naked, looking up to this father as a provider. I decided I would look after their father. If something were to happen to this man, what will happen to his children and wife? There is something deep inside each one of us that goes out to the underdog of the moment, no matter what that person has done before.”
“To forgive is to abandon one’s right to revenge,” comments Archbishop Tutu, reflecting on his own experience. “It is to give the other, the offender, the chance to make a new beginning. To forgive is to say, ‘I refuse to be a victim.’ ” Whether or not this man who had betrayed Devi’s village deserved to pay for what he had done, Aaron recognized that to exact revenge would be to continue the cycle of violence, to stoke the fires of anger, and to victimize others.
Aaron had gone to the hut, he says, to teach his neighbor a lesson. But teaching someone a lesson has multiple meanings. “I started out wanting to teach him a lesson through revenge, but left teaching him a lesson through education, how to reform. I probably taught myself a lesson that day, a lesson in forgiveness,” Aarons says. “Over time we worked with him. We talked about what he had gone through in his life. He visited my father and me a lot after that. Our relationship eventually returned to normal. We patched things up. We taught him that there was potential in him to still do good.”
But this process wasn’t easy. Aaron was still plenty angry. It was virtually impossible for him to see anything but loss all around. “But I realized I had to forgive to push forward, otherwise I’d be lost in my anger,” he says, and then pauses before making a persuasive distinction. “There’s a difference, by the way, between forgiving and forgetting.”
Though the science may show that forgiving is healthy, virtually all psychologists also make this important distinction, observing that forgetting is at best impossible and at worse unhealthy. As we’ve seen, remembering and expressing the pain of the wrongdoing seem to be important parts of the process of forgiving. But Aaron doesn’t see forgetting as the least bit desirable. Tutu agrees. “Forgiving is not pretending you have not been wronged. This must be acknowledged,” he asserts.
Aaron had seen far too much awfulness to forget. He would make certain that others remembered the injustices toward his disenfranchised people. Beginning in 1992, the United Nations Refugee Agency and other NGOs, at the request of the government of Nepal, started providing food, shelter, and nonfood assistance to the Bhutanese refugees. Aaron was the highest-educated person from his village and at the new camp his family had been transferred to, so he volunteered to document the human rights abuses of his people. Collecting these stories of torture and survival acted as a sort of catharsis—the kind of acknowledgment and expression of feelings observed in many process models of forgiveness. In the beginning of his documenting, he wanted to promise justice to every victim of torture. But he realized that this was an impossible goal. Over time, he began to train his focus on the future more than the past. The United Nations High Commission and the German embassy arranged for him and many others like him to receive a college scholarship. There was still a chance at reclaiming his old life. The scholarship didn’t cover the high cost of an engineering degree, but Aaron had a different plan now. The refugee camps needed journalists. As a reporter, he could bring the refugees’ stories to the world.
In 1998 he graduated from the University of North Bengal, in Darjeeling, India, with a degree in English literature—the closest thing the university offered to a journalism degree. He continued to be involved in Bhutanese human rights organizations and traveled throughout India for the Youth Organization of Bhutan, raising awareness and support for the Bhutanese refugees.
“I saw a need to speak about what I’d seen to whoever would listen,” Aaron says. “The world needed to hear that my story was typical of the one hundred thousand refugees who required help to restart their lives.” He had given up the false hope that he could somehow correct the past. Now it was time to make the future better, and for as many people as possible.
In late 1999, Aaron arrived in San Francisco to attend a conference on behalf of a Bhutanese refugee organization. He wanted to stay and raise awareness about the Bhutanese refugee crisis. So he applied for asylum. With the support of organizations such as Global Youth Connect, he relayed the plight of his people to anyone who would listen. He waited tables, slept in strangers’ living rooms. He thought about what had happened that fateful year back in Relukha. But he had to move on. In 2013 he transferred to Manhattan for a job working for the survivors of torture like his father. There, continents removed from the turmoil of Bhutan, he believed there was an opportunity to promote change. He managed the Human Rights Clinic for the global health organization HealthRight International, then known as Doctors of the World USA. He oversaw the forensic evaluations, affidavits, and testimony of more than three thousand torture survivors seeking asylum in the United States. Invigorated by this work, he steeped himself in the nuances of asylum law and immigration court practices. Within a year of immigrating to America, he became an expert on human rights violations and developments in the field of torture treatment. He also raised grant money for the program.
Due to the hard work of many international organizations, leaders in the refugee camps in Nepal, and activists such as Aaron, an opportunity arose to resettle Bhutanese refugees in the United States. Enthusiastic, Aaron visited the refugee camps in Nepal soon after this decision.
It was during this visit that he was met with some surprising opposition. “There was an uproar in the refugee camps when I came back,” he says. “Many people wanted to come to the U.S., but they wanted justice more. For them, justice was returning to their homes.” While Aaron didn’t agree, he understood; he’d held that view once himself. Hoping to return to how things once were, his father remained in the refugee camps and refused to leave for these same reasons.
Eventually, however, people relented. They started arriving in the United States in large numbers. Their arrival sparked a new great need. “For the uninitiated, the U.S. is a very strange and unnerving country,” Aaron says. “Refugees don’t know how to immediately fend for themselves. They come here without legal representation, with no understanding of the laws, no access to medical care, and without any resources or finances. When they get here, they are really quite alone.” Using his knowledge of the law, immigration courts, asylum offices, mental health providers, medical clinics, and resources, Aaron had a big new goal.
The idea was to establish a charitable cultural, social, and advocacy program for the needs of the Bhutanese people in the United States. In 2007 he and a number of his friends founded the Association of Bhutanese in America. The organization hoped to become the portal to a new life for thousands of Bhutanese American families, providing counseling services, job networking opportunities, and other resources to help the refugees integrate into American society. “If old ladies can tailor,” Aaron says, “we would get them needle and thread.”
Today, the organization is a resource specifically for Bhutanese exiles in the United States. It also serves a unique role as America’s largest carrier of Bhutanese cultural identity, with programs to maintain ties to a country that betrayed its refugees, a country they once called home and might someday forgive.
As for Clemantine, she and her sister survived six years in seven refugee camps, witnessed the unspeakable, and found their long-lost family with the help of arguably the most powerful woman in the history of American show business. Although there was more than a bit of luck involved, Clemantine is also sure she made it happen herself. “I felt strength to take steps out into the world for the first time,” she says. “I would no longer be a victim. I wasn’t going to take what life gave me. I was going to go after things.” We’ve called this broad belief in one’s ability to go after goals grounded hope, and it’s what led Clemantine to send her essay to The Oprah Winfrey Show. Marshal Goldsmith, from chapter 3, called it trying many different things. Clemantine calls it growing into knowledge.
During her junior year at Yale University studying comparative literature, Clemantine joined Oprah to travel to South Africa to speak at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. In a letter home to friends, Clemantine later wrote, “I am not as afraid of the future as I used to be because some places, like that school, are creating leaders who listen. I cannot wait to see [the students] in action once they have built a strong intellectual foundation. My journey here has left me hopeful and inspired.”
Clemantine writes that forgiveness is a journey—and not necessarily one she has fully completed. That journey, however, continues to teach her how to be a whole person again. Today, she brings this message to people all over the world. When she lectures before audiences at the United Nations, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, human rights law conferences, and high school assemblies, they don’t hear a story of vengeance. “It’s a story about hope,” she says with a smile that could only come from wisdom.
On October 28, 2011, President Barack Obama appointed Clemantine to a key post as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, alongside her hero Elie Wiesel. “These fine public servants both bring a depth of experience and tremendous dedication to their new roles. Our nation will be well-served,” the president announced.
Yet no accomplishment, title, or feat of supersurvival has made the past fade from Clemantine’s memory. On quiet nights in her dorm room, she still thinks about the screaming in the forest. But she is not bound to that past. She has found ways to channel that tragedy into great accomplishments, hopeful forays into a future she is determined will be better. Besides accumulating obituaries, Clemantine collects vintage buttons. Buttons are remarkably simple and beautiful objects of metals, glass, pearl, and bead. More than just fashion trimmings, they serve the specialized purpose of fastening and keeping things together. Today, when bad memories come flooding back, Clemantine calms her mind in the act of sewing the buttons into bracelets of tight piles on six-inch strips of heavy fabric. She wears these button bracelets on her arms. “Can you see the anger behind the bracelets when you look at them? See, I’ve transformed the anger into something beautiful,” she says.
The girl who smiled beads now wears them on her wrist.