oyceter. Helwig, Maggie - Where She Was Standing

Rachel, a harried human-rights worker in London, learns that a Canadian student may have been killed in a protest in East Timor. What follows is the story of how she died and how the information about the protest is uncovered and disseminated. (As Helwig notes, the events are loosely based on the Santa Cruz massacre but definitely not a historical retelling.)

While Rachel (white) is the main POV, we also get snippets from the student herself, her mother, her boyfriend, Rachel's sort-of love interest Edward the doctor, and Clementino and Hasan, both members of the East Timorese resistance. We do get some of Clementino and Hasan's stories, but not nearly as much as we get of everyone else's, particularly Rachel's -- their narratives are fragmented and short, unlike the long, lyrical passages for Rachel that deftly establish not only who she is and what she does, but also where she works and lives and a sense of history to her life. I'd normally protest the lack of that for Clementino and Hasan (we get a few looks, but not nearly as many), but there's a very interesting thing Helwig does in the book.

I'm not quite sure how to describe it, but much like how the book's title is about a formerly occupied space, much like how the book is about disappearances and people disappearing, but it feels like there are giant holes in the book. And not in the sense of gaping logic or missing pieces, but rather, very deliberate holes that call attention to precisely what we don't know. It very much echoes how information is passed from inside East Timor to the western world, how the human-rights workers in London simply cannot know exactly what it is like to live in Dili. Empty spaces have significance -- empty graves with headstones that lie, people outside of the camera's frame, faces in videos blurred over.

Helwig is also very good at building a picture of how many forces are implicated in the massacre and in the Indonesia takeover, from the Indonesian government, military and people to the western world, particularly the US and the UK. She doesn't look away from the role white privilege and western privilege play. I also like how Edward's plot line about a bomb threat to his clinic made by anti-abortionists contributed to the themes of disappearances and violence.

I know this now sounds like the kind of Problem Novel no one wants to read, but it's also a very effective thriller -- I read it in two days because I couldn't put it down. I didn't anticipate any of the reveals or twists in the book, even though they made perfect sense (one in particular).

Spoilers

The revelation about Lisa being black -- of course black, of course that's why she's dead and not sent home, of course that's why they lost her body -- was excellent and also a good slap for me re: my own preconceptions.

I also wasn't sure how the book would tie up, since it clearly wasn't going to cover East Timor's independence, and anything too optimistic on the international front just wouldn't fit. But the resolution provided by the dissemination of the video and Melissa finally learning the truth about her daughter, that worked. And of course, Melissa and Rachel and Edward survive, even Hasan survives though he's much, much worse off, but Clementino, the East Timorese one, the one who doesn't even have being Indonesian to protect him, dies. That's not a critique of the ending, by the way; much like the comparative absence of voice, it feels like a commentary.

I didn't quite buy the romance between Edward and Rachel, particularly in the end, but YMMV. I think I ended up wanting to get back to the Lisa storyline so much that I begrudged some of the time spent on Edward and Cal, even though Cal was connected to Lisa.

Highly recommended.

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