Browsing Tag

Chris Shorne

Guest Posts, Current Events

Ending a Culture: Kavanaugh, #MeToo, and the Guatemala Genocide Trial

November 13, 2018
guatamala

Photo: Outside the courthouse in Guatemala City, survivors await the verdict in the Ixil genocide case. September 26, 2018. Credit: NISGUA, Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala.

By Chris Shorne

I watched the hearings live. Not for Supreme Court Justice Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but for José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, the man accused of genocide in Guatemala. In a split decision, the court acquitted Sánchez, ruling that as head of military intelligence under dictator Ríos Montt, he did not give the orders. The next morning, my face sticky from crying the night before, I get a text from a friend: “The news is a mindf*ck.” For a split-second (before I realize the text refers to the Kavanaugh hearings only and not also to the genocide verdict), I feel that small relief that comes when someone you love recognizes with you the awfulness of something awful.

In 2000, survivors of Guatemala’s Internal Armed Conflict (1960-1996), formed the Association for Justice and Reconciliation and filed charges of genocide against Rodriguez Sánchez and Ríos Montt (Montt died during the trial). Over eighteen years, more than one hundred survivors of the Maya Ixil genocide testified. It is with these survivors that I spent last year as an international human rights accompanier in Guatemala.

While waiting for the judges to arrive to give the genocide verdict, I looked online at every picture I could find of the hundreds of survivors gathered outside the courthouse in Guatemala City. I smiled each time I found a familiar face: a woman who made me coffee or sent her kid to the nearest tiendita to buy two eggs and a tomato to cook me lunch or gave me extra blankets at night because she knew I wasn’t expecting the mountains’ cold. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Sexuality

Celebrating Pride: An Open Letter to my High School Biology Teacher

June 29, 2018
gay

By Chris Shorne

Dearest Paul:

Well. This is all very strange. For starters, me addressing you—Mr. Witt—as Paul. A first name implies life outside of being my high school teacher, which you were for four years, in ninth grade Biology, eleventh grade Health, and senior year Advanced Biology (Honors). I graduated twenty-one years ago and I’ve seen you half a dozen times since then, but in my imagination, you mostly stayed static, a known quantity. I’m not sure why it feels different now, after seeing you last week for brunch. Maybe because I haven’t been back in the country long or because I’m sorting through my files, reading poems and school reports I wrote as a teenager.

I remember the first article I read for extra credit. From your biology classroom, I followed you through a door to the science office that I hadn’t realized was there. You opened a storage closet: metal racks floor to ceiling, file boxes wall-to-wall, each box full of photocopied articles and newspaper clippings. You flipped, quickly, to the one for me: “Disabled Doesn’t Mean No Sex.” In the article, a guy talks about people not seeing him as sexual because he uses a wheelchair; on top of that, he explains, he’s bisexual and people think bisexuality isn’t even a real thing. Continue Reading…

Activism, Guest Posts

Interdependence Day: A Letter on the Occasion of my 37th Birthday

April 12, 2017
independent

By Chris Shorne

I have been loved from the time I was small. Before my sight was unblurred I was seen and touched. Someone picked me up. Then another. Lips kissed my forehead. Before I knew what was forehead what was mouth. Before I knew there was a body and its inextricable parts and that this part was mine, I felt the sensation. Something new, something already. All the organic wires of a body were firing and firing together when eating came with touching, with the warmth of another human body spreading through this that I would come to know as my own, separate, human body.

It is not my mother who is the writer, but me. Still, she writes some abstract things in the form of dark lines on a white page and it aches me. That center spot of my chest—what is that?—grips. And so, compelled, I write. And I’m not sure it is me who is the author here. I’m not sure there has ever been a singular author. It hurts a little, to be loved like this. I don’t know why. Everything I’ve ever learned has led me up to this: I don’t know why it is I who have been so blessed. But I’ll take it.

Here I go. Yes, this is the biggest thing I’ve done. Being an international human rights accompanier in Guatemala. Standing alongside people walking into harassment and threats and jails, walking anyway, to maintain their land, to claim their culture. It is my big and it is so much less than the work the Guatemalans are doing. But I get to stand with them, walk alongside them for a little while. And, for me, it is big. “This is huge, Chris,” my ex-girlfriend used to say. I loved that. Even when it wasn’t huge, I loved it, because it meant what was happening with me was important. It meant she saw me as important. Continue Reading…