Monday morning; I have a law assessment in the afternoon (where I have to present my case to an actual lawyer). I best prepare for exams by just relaxing and taking my time. This means breakfast and book (and tea, but that doesn't fit with the alliteration). Curl up on the sofa in the office, in my bed clothes and just read. Which is how I finished Dark Waters: Chronicle of a Story Untold by Magda Allani. I had nearly a quarter of the book left and I'd not had much chance to really sit down and indulge in the written word due to university commitments, so I took the morning to resolve both issues.
University doesn't mean I read less. It just means I read less of what I'd like to. (But I'm not reviewing every single journal article or book chapter I ever analyse.)
It was actually in my law module that it was recommended that my cohort read Dark Waters, despite not being an academic text. It was suggested we read it, not so much to explain why we operate the way we do from a science perspective, but to explain why we operate the way we do from an emotional or humanitarian perspective. (To clarify, I am studying Forensic Anthropology and the law module focuses on DVI or disaster victim identification.) That's the sort of knowledge you can't find in academic texts. Even in my own papers, that have got me emotional away from the books and journals, don't reflect the passion felt by the author; academia has no place for feelings. Academia wants ideas and notions, not from the heart, but backed up with facts and figures.
For this reason, although not this reason alone, I am glad to have read Dark Waters. I, like I suspect the majority of you reading this, have never been in a mass disaster. I've never known anyone in a mass disaster. For me, mass disasters are just part of the six o'clock news. They're just part of my degree. It happens to other people. And, if there's one thing I've learnt through studying forensics over the past three years, it's that there's no point freaking out over a corpse. They're dead now; the sights and smells might be unpleasant, but they cannot be hurt any more. My studies (and, to and extent, the culture I live in that revels in 'torture porn' films and streams the real time horrors of the Four Horsemen, war, pestilence, famine and death in to our living rooms via TVs and computers) have somewhat desensitised me to death.
Which is why reading books like this is so important. Being desensitised to death is one thing, but being desensitised to the dead is very much a different ball park. Victims of mass disasters might only be numbers to us, media consumers, but each one is a human being. Each one has a mother, a father. Possibly siblings, almost certainly friends. Lovers. It is so easy to forget this and so vital to not. Every death is a broken heart. We need to hear these stories from the survivors, from the people who knew the victims.
I am digressing. Dark Waters is about the Marchioness disaster of 1989. In the early hours of the 20th of August, the Marchioness, a small party boat, was hit and sunk by a sand dredger, the Bowbelle. Apparently, it took thirty seconds to be fully submerged. Of the 130 passengers, 51 were killed.
The book is written by Magda Allani, one of the survivors; she had been close friends with Antonio Vasconcellos, whose birthday the passengers had been celebrating. The first half of the book focuses on the accident itself and the following few weeks. The emotion is intense and raw, yet Magda manages to convey it all so poetically. It is somewhat reminiscent of the old gothic writers; the content is dark and genuinely morbid, yet somehow beautifully written. It's interesting to read about the media response; how it was all over the news for days, weeks and then... It tailed off. Survivors and family were still grieving, hurting and confused but the nation had moved on before October rolled around. As the nation forgot, it appears that, so too, the survivors were expected to. But the didn't. They couldn't.
The second half of the book is the years following. Although the first half is heart wrenching, I felt the second half was actually more poignant. A few years later, ten years later, twenty years later, and people are still hurting. Surprising? No, not when you really consider what happened. Yet I think it really just brings home the reality; there are some things in life you never, truly leave behind you. Fortunately, Magda does end the book on a positive note; she explains how she feels she is in control of her life again and is able to stop her past affecting her future but it still took twenty-two years to reach that point.
Strangely, the book mostly glosses over the controversy that I knew the Marchioness for. I suspect that this is because it did not affect Magda per se. She was a survivor; it was her friends, not family, who she lost that night (not to deny the power of friendship, only that in legal terms, friends have little involvement with an individual post death, e.g., in funerary arrangements). She did, however, question the officials's identification and feared that some of her friends were buried in incorrect plots. Although this is only briefly mentioned, she does raise the intrigued of a deeper conspiracy. This is something I genuinely did not anticipate and, I confess, that having not heard of any conspiracy surrounding the disaster in my brief research, I assumed it was just the need for an explanation formed by someone suffering PTSD.
The more I read, the more was revealed. Admittedly, the 'big, dirty secret' is... Not quite so, but what she hints at early on is not false either. There were some shady goings on and, yes, her friend had become aware of them. An assassination attempt was not, however, the reason for the collision. More shockingly, perhaps, is that it appears that most of the disaster was swept under the carpet by the Thatcherite government. It seems that it took a lot of fighting (mostly by the MAG, or Marchioness Action Group) to get even a semblance of justice for both the dead and the living. Certainly, the latter half of the book details the trial of the crew of the Bowbelle; it really is shocking. Not only had most of the crew imbibed alcohol, they did not stop to assist after they hit the Marchioness. Despite this, the Captain received very little in terms of punishment.
Over all, I felt it was a very well written book about a pretty heavy topic. Yet it did not come across as a sorrowful book; I think this was intentional on behalf of the author. Although a genuinely horrific thing to have to experience, Magda shows how it is not what defines her. It hurt, but there is a future beyond all the pain. She seems happy in the conclusion and that's quite heart warming to read. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who has a desire to understand disasters from a human perspective, or anyone who enjoys reading autobiographies of the the exceptional rather than the famous.
On a mostly unrelated note, this is the first book I've properly read on my Kindle. I won't expand on the experience, as I've mostly covered that my previous post. I am, however, very much enjoying the use of a real paper and ink book as my reading device.
This book in facts and figures;
My rating: 7/10 (on Goodreads I gave it 3 stars out of 5, as that is the rating for 'I liked this book'. Originally I was going to give it 4, which was 'I really liked this book'. Although I feel this book was important for me to read as outlined above, I do not 'really like' reading autobiographies, the way I do fiction novels. That and, the more I read, the harsher I get with ratings.)
Pages: 250
My Format: e-Book
Published: 2011
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