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The Current Transcript for November 15, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

ISIS is making a tremendous amount of money because they have certain oil caps, right? I would bomb the s*** out of them.

[Sound: Crowd cheering]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, if he wants to do it with drones, Donald Trump will have all the executive power he needs when he enters the Oval Office—inheriting the ability to act in secret and target suspected enemies from the Obama White House. In an administrative and legal sleight of hand, Barack Obama held on to the ability to order things such as targeted killings and drone strikes. The Obama White House created guidelines to control those things but they're not binding, they're not enforceable and they're not open to judicial review. In a moment, how Obama's anti-terror track record feeds into Trump's anti-terror inheritance. Also today, in the township of Khayelitsha outside Cape Town, simply walking to community toilets is linked to as many as 635 sexual assaults every year.

SOUNDCLIP

So I, sometimes I limit my food because I don't want to go to the toilet at night. I’m scared. So we just live in fear.

AMT: That woman is pregnant, afraid to walk in the dark to relieve herself after her sister-in-law was murdered visiting community toilets at dusk. In an hour, the troubling link between sanitation and sexual assaults in South Africa. And does this story sound familiar? Best friends as little girls, Lila and Lenu are raised in poverty and as they grow, the friendship evolves and chafes. They love, they hate. Their connection is undeniable, it is also uncomfortable. And you are entwined in their lives as you follow them into their sixties. So yes, we are getting as close as we can to Elena Ferrante today, the author of the wildly popular Neapolitan quartet of novels. In half an hour I'll be joined by Ann Goldstein, the woman who’s translated all of Elena Ferrante’s work into English. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

U.S. drone warfare needs more oversight and controls, says lawyer

Guests: Jameel Jaffer

SOUNDCLIP

I want to make sure that people understand actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. I think that there is this perception somehow that we're just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly. This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans and so on.

AMT: Well, in his eight years in office, US President Barack Obama has expanded the US drone program and vigorously defended it in the face of growing criticism. To the US government, a drone is a precise and crucial tool in the war on terror. To critics, drone hits are secretive, extra-judicial killings that too often lead to the deaths of civilians whose names rarely make headlines. US drone strikes have taken aims at targets in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Waziristan. President Obama has exclusive executive powers over the program, which allows the president to circumvent Congress and the courts. That is the system President-elect Donald Trump now inherits. Jameel Jaffer is a former deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He has led a long effort to expose the extent of the drone program under the Obama administration. He has compiled his findings into the new book, The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy and the Law and Jameel Jaffer joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello. Welcome back.

JAMEEL JAFFER: Thank you.

AMT: It's very telling when you look at a book like yours and you start to flip through it and you find pages of black, of redacted—information that had to be redacted.

JAMEEL JAFFER: That’s right.

AMT: You have very important memos in there.

JAMEEL JAFFER: No, that’s right. I mean the truth is that the veil of secrecy on this program has been lifted only partially. The book is possible because it's been lifted partially but there's still a lot that isn't known. The memos that are in the book are the result largely of litigation conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times, a small number of other journalists over the last five or six years. And through that litigation, the government has released some of the Justice Department memos that provide the basis for the program. They've released something called a presidential policy guidance which is a document that President Obama signed in 2013 to bureaucratize the drone campaign. So some of those documents have been released at least partially, but there's a lot that still remains secret including information relating to civilian casualties.

AMT: So the Obama White House calls its combat drone program “targeted killings.” What does that mean?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, it's not a great term for it because part of the problem with the program is that it's not so targeted. The story that the administration has told in the beginning is that this program is about committed terrorists who are about to attack the United States and they present an imminent threat to the country. There's no means other than the use of lethal force to prevent them from carrying out those threats. That's the story that the administration has told. If that description makes sense at all, it makes sense only with respect to a very small number of people. The vast majority of people killed in these drone strikes don't fit that description. They are not people who present an imminent threat to the country or even a continuing and imminent threat—which is a phrase that the administration has invented. Instead they are low-level foot soldiers or in hundreds of cases, they are bystanders, civilian bystanders.

AMT: And so, George Bush first approved drone strikes when he was the president but the program grew under Obama. Why is that?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, so yeah, you're right that President Bush approved about 50 drone strikes, mostly during his last year in office and most of those were in Pakistan. President Obama expanded the program both geographically and in terms of the number of strikes. You know I think there are a few different reasons for that. One is that President Obama came into office after having committed during the campaign to winding down the United States involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans were wary of large-scale commitment of ground forces. President Obama didn't want to have to commit more troops to those battlefields or to new battlefields and drones were a very appealing alternative because drones don't require you to put your own soldiers at risk. There's a distance, a geographic distance associated with drones which is useful both because it doesn't require you to put soldiers at risk, but also because it helps you hide the consequences of the violence that you're carrying out. And so for most Americans, this was invisible or visible—as I say in the book—visible only through a fog. But I think that was one big reason. One big reason that President Obama turned to drones is that he didn't want to commit more ground troops and another was that the secrecy that was possible with the drone program was appealing for multiple reasons.

AMT: And you make the point that he's been killing more foot soldiers than leaders. It was originally supposed to be targeted killing of big leaders, a way to get to them.

JAMEEL JAFFER: That's right. That’s right.

AMT: Now it really has become a way to replace soldiers on the ground.

JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, I think that's right. And this isn't really my point, this is the point that you know many other people have made, is that at the beginning the program was you know relatively—and relatively is an important word here—but relatively narrow, focused more on higher level leaders with the idea that those people couldn't easily be replaced now. Now, or you know especially in 2011, 2012, which was you know in some ways at least by some measures the height of the program, a lot of the people they were killing weren't high-level leaders or even mid-level leaders. They were just foot soldiers. And in fact, they adopted this strategy called signature strikes which were an effort to kill people whose identities they didn't even know. The idea was small groups of people may exhibit behaviours that we think are consistent with the behaviours of terrorist organizations or militants. And on the basis of those indicia of terrorist or militant activity, we'll carry out strikes that kill multiple, multiple people. Now it turns out that you know it's not true that the only people who ride in flatbed trucks in Waziristan are terrorists or that the only people who cross the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are terrorists. And so these strikes ended up killing many people other than militants and terrorists. And in fact signature strikes, I think you know my impression is that the Obama administration was sort of ambivalent about them from the beginning and they ended up approving them in Yemen reluctantly. And then those signature strikes caused hundreds of deaths in Yemen in 2012.

AMT: So how many civilian casualties have there been?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I'm not sure. There are multiple groups that track these strikes. They don't have for the most part official numbers to rely on. They're relying on reports from the field. But the estimates run to about 4,000 people. That's from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the UK and of those 4,000, about 1,000 are civilians or at least 1,000 are civilian bystanders.

AMT: Now three US citizens have been killed in US drone strikes famously. And you've actually worked on those cases. This is the story of Anwar al-Awlaki.

JAMEEL JAFFER: That's right. Actually seven US citizens have been killed now. Only one has been targeted: Anwar al-Awlaki. And you say three because there were three who were killed in Yemen in 2011. So there was Anwar al-Awlaki who had actually been targeted and whom the government announced in in early 2010 had been placed on a government kill list. So he was targeted and eventually killed in the fall of 2011 and Samir Khan was killed with him. And Abdulrahman al-Awlaki who was Anwar’s 16-year-old son was killed in a strike two weeks later. And we brought—I was at the American Civil Liberties Union at the time. We brought a suit before the strikes that killed those three Americans and another one after the strike that killed those three Americans in an effort to get the courts to evaluate the lawfulness of the strikes. And unfortunately both of those suits were unsuccessful. They were dismissed at the threshold, meaning before we reached the merits. The court didn't actually consider evidence or you know require the government to submit any explanation for its conduct. Instead, it dismissed the cases on procedural or jurisdictional grounds.

AMT: There are those who would argue Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia are countries with jihadists who the United States needs to, wants to fight. There are Americans who have gone over to be part of that fight and the US needs to be able to take them up.

JAMEEL JAFFER: Mhm. Yeah, I mean I think that there is a real issue that the United States has to address in some way. And you know from the beginning, even the ACLU and most human rights groups have acknowledged that in some relatively or some very rare circumstances, it's legitimate for a state to use lethal force against an individual who presents a truly imminent threat. You know the problem, I guess there are multiple problems here, but you know one problem with this program is that it's not limited to those kinds of threats. It's much, much broader than that and because it's much, much broader than that, it's not consistent with international law. Another problem is that you know when you have a program on this scale—this is a program that many people think is generating more threats against the United States than existed before. And it's very hard to measure that kind of thing because you're always trying to prove you know it's always counterfactual. But if you look at the number of people who were associated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is the Yemeni affiliate or a branch of al-Qaeda, when we filed those lawsuits back in 2010, there were about 200 people in Yemen who were associated with that group. A few months ago, there were 1,000 in a single city in southern Yemen. Now I can't trace that to the drone campaign but it's certainly suggestive that this strategy is not working.

AMT: So let's talk about what Barack Obama did because he left some stuff on the table after—he wanted to—he thought George Bush was overreaching. He wanted to change it but he changed it with executive order. He left it—I think the word is flexible?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah. So there are some constraints on the use of lethal force in this particular context. Those constraints have been imposed by the executive branch on itself. So what happened was when we filed these lawsuits, which were again an effort to get the courts to engage with the lawfulness of specific strikes, in some ways they were kind of the lowest hanging fruit for the courts because these were American citizens whom the government had you know acknowledged it had killed. But even then the courts you know the courts dismissed the cases. But because the Obama administration was successful in pushing the courts aside in those cases and because Congress was you know essentially standing on the sidelines, it became a program whose contours were determined solely by the executive branch. So it was only President Obama and his closest advisers who got to decide what the rules would be.

AMT: And they had this this idea that we are moral men. You can trust us, men and women. You can trust us.

JAMEEL JAFFER: Right. That was the case that they made to the public essentially. You know most of these policies were secret. And you know until very recently, virtually everything was secret and so when there were these you know sporadic reports from the field of drone strikes in Yemen or Somalia that had killed civilians, you know Obama and his advisers couldn't point to the policies because the policies hadn't yet been released. Instead, they reassured the public or they assured the public of their own good faith and their own integrity. They said you can trust us. We're the kinds of people who will you know who will think carefully before we use lethal force. We’re the kinds of people who care about civilian casualties. You can trust us to make those decisions.

AMT: At the same time, there was other legal action going on when it came to torture. Barack Obama did not want to see his government involved in torture. But he made sure that torture was not considered illegal under the law, am I correct? That's what they fought for.

JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, not quite. So basically when President Obama took office, he disavowed torture which the Bush administration had endorsed. He rescinded the Justice Department memos that had been the basis for the torture program. But when it came to prosecuting the people who had authorized torture, his Justice Department—Eric Holder's Justice Department—declined to do so. And in civil suits until very recently, the Obama administration invoked the State Secrets Privilege to ensure that those civil suits—usually brought by victims, people who had been tortured in US custody—to ensure that those kinds of cases would be dismissed.

AMT: We're talking about waterboarding, things like that.

JAMEEL JAFFER: That's right. That's right. Which this new administration has suggested it wants to revive.

AMT: Okay. So that's my next question. He basically has left some things on the table. And Donald Trump, he set a precedent. Donald Trump can now use what he wants to use because Obama did.

JAMEEL JAFFER: No, that's right. No, that’s exactly right. I mean you said earlier that you know correctly that the Obama administration emphasized its own trustworthiness and sort of developed. It was able to convince Americans to invest powers in the presidency because it was able to convince Americans that the president was trustworthy. But the powers that Americans have now invested in the presidency are available to the next administration and the administration after that. That was an argument that we at the ACLU and many others made you know from 2010, that you know you are accumulating all these powers because you think you're going to use them wisely. But even if you know we accept that you're going to use them wisely and you know we were certainly skeptical of that—

AMT: And you would argue that they did not use it wisely. You argue that they didn’t.

JAMEEL JAFFER: No, I don't think that they use them wisely. And now obviously there are degrees of not using them wisely and I think they could be used even more unwisely than they've been used until now. I think they've already been abused. Those powers have already been abused and I worry about how they'll be used by the next administration.

AMT: One of the reasons Barack Obama did this was he had an obstructionist Congress. This Congress might go along with Donald Trump, but would you expect them to put the brakes on him on the use of drone warfare?

JAMEEL JAFFER: You know Congress was obstructionist in many, many ways. On this particular issue, I think Congress was quite happy to let President Obama claim these powers and to use them aggressively and in fact, part of the reason President Obama didn't go back to Congress and ask for a new authorization for military force, so all of this has relied on this 2001 authorization that was passed in the days after the September 11th attacks. You know that was an authorization at the time that everybody thought it was about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But that authorization was what the administration ended up using, what the Bush administration and then the Obama administration ended up using for the global war on terror. And it's still the authorization. It's only 60 words long, it doesn't talk about geography at all. It's still the authorization that the Obama administration relies on. And many people thought well, it's time for the president to go back to Congress and ask Congress to authorize this global war. And the reason that Obama didn't go back was not because he thought Congress would stand in the way, but because Congress would give him too much power and that power would then be available to the next president. So there is a kind of irony in it because you know obviously on this other front, on drone warfare, President Obama has done exactly that. He's claimed all of this power that Donald Trump will now be able to rely on.

AMT: So Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has said that President Obama's failure to rein in George Bush's national security policies now hands Donald Trump a fully loaded weapon. What does he mean?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah. I mean I think that's true. I think of President Obama as having been a great president in many, many ways, including on human rights issues and civil liberties issues outside the national security context. But in this particular area, the Obama administration has entrenched many of the Bush administration's most far-reaching claims. To take just one example, the Bush administration claimed that the battlefield was borderless. It was that claim that allowed them to detain people in the United States as enemy combatants and hold them without charge, without access to counsel, without access to their families. Now the Obama administration has not detained anyone in the United States but it's relied on the same—as an enemy combatant, but it's relied on the same claim that the battlefield is borderless to justify this borderless drone campaign that now involves strikes in seven different countries.

AMT: And so we have to go but just—so the options are there and the ability for some kind of judicial review and oversight is not there.

JAMEEL JAFFER: That's right. That's right. President Trump is inheriting this power that's really not constrained at all by the other branches.

AMT: Jameel Jaffer, fascinating. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for your work.

JAMEEL JAFFER: Thanks again.

AMT: Jameel Jaffer is the author of The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy and the Law. He's the former deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is currently the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. He's in our Toronto studio because he's in Toronto today to talk about this at the Munk School of Global Affairs and at the Royal Ontario Museum. And stay with us. Right after the news I'll be talking to the woman who has translated Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet of novels: Ann Goldstein. This is The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Ann Goldstein on the art of translating for mysterious Elena Ferrante

Guests: Ann Goldstein

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, the fight for safe private toilets is underway in South Africa where a woman was murdered on her way to use a public bathroom. We'll talk about the link between sanitation and sexual assault in South Africa. But first, this is perhaps the closest you will come to hearing from Italy's great mysterious storyteller, Elena Ferrante.

SOUNDCLIP

I did it because I believed that she was very much a public figure. And when millions of books are bought by readers, in a way I think readers acquire the right to know something about the person who created the work. I personally think that. But most importantly, I believe that Ferrante and her publishers agreed with this point of view. Her self-declared autobiographical Writer's Journey, Frantumaglia, which is being published right now next month in the US, was presented to the public as her answer to the legitimate request of detailed information about her.

AMT: Italian journalist Claudio Gatti drew the wrath of literary fans when he sought to unmask the true identity of the best-selling Italian author who goes by the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. His findings pointed to Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator. Her editors deny it. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet of novels is wildly popular worldwide with what borders on a cult following. But Elena Ferrante has wanted no part of the limelight. She insists on remaining anonymous. Her true identity has mattered little to her readers, who say they've become addicted to her tales of the rich decades-long friendship of Lenu and Lila that begins in Naples of the 1950s. If you have read any of Ms. Ferrante’s work in translation, then you will be acquainted with the words of my next guest. Ann Goldstein is the English translator of all of Ms. Ferrante’s books. She is an editor at the New Yorker magazine. She is often the public face of the Neapolitan series. Elena Ferrante’s most recent work is Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey, a collection of letters by and interviews with the reclusive writer to give us a window into her thoughts on her characters and her writing process. And Ann Goldstein joins me in our Toronto studio. Welcome.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Thank you.

AMT: Are you as—you must be as in love with these books as the rest of us are.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I am. Yes, I love these books. All of her books, in fact.

AMT: I have to tell you by the time I came to the fourth of the Neapolitan quartet, I started to read it very slowly and even put it down for a while because I didn't want to let those girls go. They were just—you become entwined in their story.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, I was very worried when I was reading the fourth novel because I couldn't—well, working on the fourth novel because I was—I couldn't, I didn't, couldn't figure out how she was going to end it. I knew it was the last of the novels of the—originally actually she had planned it to be three and then she realized she couldn't do what she wanted to do and so it became four. But I just kept thinking how is she going to end this in a satisfying way? And I can't say that I slowed down because I was under pressure of time to get the translation done. But I thought it was beautifully and satisfyingly ended.

AMT: When did you first get introduced to the works of Elena Ferrante?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: In 2004, I think the Italian publisher, Sandro and Sandra Ferri who had this publishing company, E/O, Edizioni E/O in Rome, they were her Italian publishers and they had decided that they wanted to publish books in English and to open up essentially an American branch of their publishing company called Europa Additions. And The Days of Abandonment, which was actually Ferrante’s second novel, was the first book that they decided to publish and they looked for a translator and somehow they found me.

AMT: And how did they find you? You have a day job. [chuckles]

ANN GOLDSTEIN: [chuckles] Well, I had been translating for about 10 years and I think they got my name off the PEN website. They had asked about three or four translators to do samples and they chose me for which I was very grateful because as soon as I started reading The Days of Abandonment, I thought I have to translate this book.

AMT: And so when you got to the quartet—so you were translating it as she went along. You didn't like—

ANN GOLDSTEIN: The quartet. Yeah. More or less, yes, Well, she had—yes, that's true because she hadn't finished even when she—I think she says in probably in Frantumaglia, that she had this idea for the quartet. She originally thought it was just going to be a very short novel. Then she realized it was going to be a somewhat longer novel and she still thought it would be a single book, but her publishers dissuaded her. They said you can't. It was clearly going to be big. I mean long, that is to say. She said I think that she had ideas about certain points, certain plot points or certain things that she wanted to develop but she didn't really know the details. And so as she was writing, the details came to her or she made them up, whatever. But anyway, I forget where I was going with this.

AMT: When it comes to translating the novels, what kind of pressure do you feel?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, there's time pressure of course. I mean there was with the Neapolitan novels because she wanted to—the publisher wanted to bring them out one a year and they weren't really finished until they practically they were published in Italian. So there was time pressure. But yeah, I mean as readers became more in love with the books, there was pressure to do it well, to do it—I mean there's always pressure to do it well, to do the translation well. I'm not sure what else you mean by pressure.

AMT: Well, yeah, and you know there's so much talk of the masterful prose, of just the way the words just exist in our minds. I don't even want to say on the page because when I read things like that, they come into my mind. I mean maybe just help us understand your process because you see that in Italian and you must then move that into another language.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. I mean it's a interesting process. I mean it's—I usually—well, usually I've read the book first. In the case of the second, the last three of those novels, I actually was translating as I was reading. And so I felt that I was experiencing them sort of in real time. But usually I read things pretty quickly. I mean I translate the first draft very quickly and then I go back and I revise and I revise. And often I try to stay close to the text basically and sometimes I move away from it and then I—with these novels, I very often went back to the original translation because somehow I had captured something there, I thought, that was closer to the Italian. I mean the Italian, it's very dense. It's kind of a run-on language and actually English readers, many English readers have commented on that, on the sort of run-on sentences. I mean Italian sort of, it accommodates the run-on sentence more easily than English does. The prose is a little bit more—the syntax is a little bit more flexible. So capturing that, the intensity and the density of her sentences in English was sometimes a challenge.

AMT: So and you said you sometimes went back to the original, your original translation, almost like your visceral feeling as you translated first time around.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yes. And actually, Ferrante in the Frantumaglia, in some of these interviews, she talks about how she doesn't like beautiful writing. She likes ugly writing because the ugly writing is what conveys the intensity of what she wants to convey. And I think that sometimes that was the case with the translation too, that you know it didn't want it to be too smooth.

AMT: Well, I have more questions about the translation. But do you know her? Have you met her?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: No, no. As far as I know, the only people who know who she is are her publishers. And I would say that, just to go back to the Gatti that you played before, I mean she did not present Frantumaglia as an autobiography. I mean it wasn't meant to be an autobiography. It was meant to be sort of a collection of well, her letters, of sort of a window on to the writer's process, not into anything personal.

AMT: It's interesting because he's again trying to put motive and personality into the book and that's exactly what she's trying to keep away.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yes, exactly.

AMT: Like herself out of it.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah.

AMT: And that I guess explains why, that she wants us to just appreciate these stories.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: She talks about that a lot in Frantumaglia. You've probably read that. You know she does talk about how the book, once she's written the book and she wants that to be—the reader to have the relationship with purely with the book, not with the author.

AMT: So how do you work as a translator with an author that you cannot talk to?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, in fact I've translated a lot of dead authors so it's not that unusual for me. When I had questions, I would write to the publishers and they would get in touch with her. So that's sort of how I worked with the absent author.

AMT: And do we know that she's a she?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I feel pretty strongly that she's a she. And I think that that the more she's written—I mean I felt that very strongly with the first book that I read which was The Days of Abandonment. I think her other books, Troubling Love, The Lost Daughter, the three novels that she wrote before the Neapolitan quartet seem pretty strongly to have been written by a woman and certainly I felt that way even more with the Neapolitan quartet.

AMT: You know there are people who think you are Elena Ferrante.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yes, I know. [laughs]

AMT: So, on the record you just have to tell me.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I am not Elena Ferrante.

AMT: Okay. Well, and I guess I'll have to accept that. But it is unusual in this period in time to have an author who wants nothing of the limelight.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: It is. It is unusual, although I have heard other authors say they wish they had been able to do that or that they had been able to in any sense of the word. I mean I think the pressure from publishers is tremendous for an author to sell his or her book and you know I mean authors, they want to sell their books.

AMT: But it's interesting because this sells on the strength of the story and also the paradox—the more of a mystery you are, the more people want to kind of—

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I mean I guess. You know I sort of I'm not sure about that aspect. I mean that's also one of Gatti’s things, that you know that she's doing this, you know she's mysterious in order to sell books. I don't think that's the case at all. I mean certainly when she started out, she had some personal reasons I think, but she also felt that she didn't want to be part of the commercial world, the literary marketplace so to speak. And she told the publishers that right from the start and you know she said I'm not going to do anything for my books and you know you've agreed to that so let's go along with it. They did agree to it. So yeah. I mean when her first books came out in Italy particularly, there was a huge amount of speculation about who she was. Many writers were named, both men and women. There was the theory that she was a group. But I think that sort of died down a bit until the Gatti thing. And then of course all of this arose again.

AMT: Because he's arguing that it is a woman and her husband who have essentially written them kind of together or in influence.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I think he really thought it was the wife of this couple, both of whom have been named in the past as possible Ferrantes. But I think neither they nor the publishers have either confirmed or denied it. So you know and I think, I hope that that is sort of going away.

AMT: So where did you get your love of Italian?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I wanted to—I read Dante in college and I just was completely enthralled by Dante and I wanted to read Dante in Italian. And that's how I started. I mean that’s where I think my original love for Italian came.

AMT: And you work as an editor at the New Yorker and you do this around your other work.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I do.

AMT: So novels as complicated and like these novels of Ferrante’s, when would you do them?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Weekends, vacations, early mornings, nights. Yeah, I just… I work a lot. [chuckles]

AMT: Well, and you work well as well. So let's talk about the Neapolitan quartet just a little bit here. It is about the lifelong relationship of two girls, Lila and Lenu. What stands out for you about that relationship?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, I think that the complications of it are what are interesting or what stand out. I mean the way that they influence each other, that they don't influence each other, that they are constantly in touch with each other one way or another throughout their whole life. I think it's the lifelongness—if I can put it that way—of it. That's one of the things that stand out to me.

AMT: The friendship of two girls who become old women and yeah, sometimes it's a very troubling relationship and the power dynamic is—

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, I think what’s—I mean for example the titles of the four novels, I mean My Brilliant Friend, who is the brilliant friend? It really is both of them, I mean in a way or Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, I mean how do you interpret that? So I think that those are questions that in the relationship that remain through the whole course of the four novels.

AMT: She also writes unsentimentally about—with no sentimentality about mothers and daughters and that very fraught relationship, daughters who resent their mothers who have to come to some kind of, some peace with their mothers as they get older. It's so rich. It's so raw.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I know. It is, I mean in a way. And Lenu doesn't really come to any peace with her mother until her mother's dying. I mean there are moments where you think that they're going to—that there's this closeness and then there's this also well, almost hatred. But yes, I mean it is very raw and brutal really.

AMT: And not wanting to be like her mother.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Not wanting to be like her mother and then there are her daughters not wanting to be like their mother. I mean and she, in a sense, is like her mother with her daughters. But to see all that playing out through generations is really fascinating and gripping in a way and upsetting.

AMT: Yes. Yes. And well, and the sweep, right, because it takes us from fifties Italy through times of real political turmoil and terror attacks and you know police crackdowns, feminism.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I think that the way Ferrante does that is really wonderful, that you sort of experience the history of Italy in a way that a person living through it might experience. In other words, it's not—you don't hear about these events in the news kind of way or somebody recounting the history. It's more that you experience it the way you might something that happens to you. You know you're sort of on the edge of the crowd or in a group of women. I mean it's just—I just, I think it's really wonderful the way she does that.

AMT: And when you're translating something like that, how much do you have to go back and do research on that time to make sure that the characterization moves itself into the other language?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I did a fair amount. I mean not a huge amount. I mean I knew something about that period of Italian history. I read some bits. I asked people.

AMT: And there's a word—and I'm going to mispronounce it, me with the Italian name—smarginatura?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Smarginatura.

AMT: What is that?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: It's the loss—well, I think it's called dissolving margins, dissolving boundaries. It's actually—it's not a common word in Italian. I mean it has to do with printing, with bookbinding originally. That's the derivation of it. But it's applied to Lila when she feels that things are losing their boundaries and dissolving into one another. And it's really sort of like as if she was losing the sense of self, the sense of herself, the sense of the division between people, between people and things and the sort of more physical. Where she talks about it the most is in the fourth book, I think, tells about the earthquake of 1980, I think. And that's almost like a physical smarginatura, dissolving of margins and Lila and Lenu are together in this, they're both pregnant and they're watching this take place and experiencing it at the same time. And Lila talks at great length about the feeling of smarginatura and it's kind of in a way being physically demonstrated around them.

AMT: Yeah, it is a common occurrence throughout the book.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: It recurs, yeah.

AMT: Yeah. And it's again the characters who we think we know, we see their weaknesses and what they're struggling with underneath.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah.

AMT: It is real art, isn't it, to be able to help someone—it's almost you're growing up with them. You meet them when they're playing with their dolls and there's already that little, that little bit of backbiting going on between the two of them. Lila throws the dolls into a cellar.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yes.

AMT: But then you continue to watch them and you just, you almost grow organically with them.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. Yes. Yes, I think that's a very good way of putting it. You do because you see the tension between them, the competition, the love between them, really too. I mean it’s—and the sort of being unable to do without the—each being unable to do without the other. Of course we are hearing all this from the point of view of one of them. So people have, some people have talked about well, you know the unreliable narrator kind of thing but I don't know if that's true or not, but nevertheless, it is one person's view of this relationship.

AMT: Some people have called this women's fiction. How do you respond to that?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I mean people who say that seem to be I mean denigrating it in some way and saying it's only you know it's not universal in some way. It's not as good as, I don't know, male fiction. I don't know, I think it’s not women's fiction. I think it's people's fiction.

AMT: John Turturro, the actor, has said that more men should read Ferrante books.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: That's right. He said that he learned a lot about his mother and the women in his family from it.

AMT: Well, it's funny. When I meet women who aren't interested, like who start the books, not everybody likes them but most everybody I know does. And I said it's best friends, there's a relationship there that that a lot of people have with someone through the years and you let it go, it comes back, it gets uncomfortable. I'm saying too much about myself maybe.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: No, no, no.

AMT: But it's there, right?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: No, but I think one of the reasons for the popularity of these books is that people read themselves in it. Either you know they read them—they see the relationship that they've had or something similar to it but they see it examined in a way that they might not have wanted to examine it or to go into it. And I think that's one of the reasons that people are so, become so sort of engrossed in them.

AMT: Yes and I think that's one of the reasons people want to know who Elena Ferrante is too, Elena Ferrante, because it's that idea that oh, you understand this. Can we talk, you know?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, that’s true. [chuckles]

AMT: But we don't know who she is. We don't know where to find her. We don't know, you know and we see this with other authors, right, who have you know great Facebook followings because people just want to understand more about how they think. And we have to figure that out, although now Frantumaglia tells us a little bit about her process, right?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: It does. It does.

AMT: Or a lot about her process.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: I think a lot, in a way.

AMT: Yeah. What does frantumaglia mean?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, it comes from this word, frantumare, which is a verb that means to shatter or to fragment, and frantumaglia is both the process of shattering and the result of the shattering. And it's sort of, I mean loosely fragments, bits and pieces. She, in one of the pieces in the book, Frantumaglia, she talks at some length about the meaning of the word. She says it's a word that her mother, of her mother's dialect. Well, it's sort of a dialect word. And then she goes on and describes it at great length about, it’s about all the different things that it represents. She talks about you know a landscape of debris, a watery place full of bits and pieces of things. Anyway, I can't quote it exactly. But anyway that's sort of the idea, is that it's—and it's not always good things, in fact, it's very often bad things.

AMT: You know most—in some ways because we don't know who she is and we know who you are, you're the closest I'm going to get. Do you have—do you feel that you are getting celebrity status from this? And how do you react to that?

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, it's very peculiar. I mean translators usually are the silent partner in most books. So I mean I think it's great for translation. I mean I think people should recognize that translated books have translators. They didn't get there magically. So I think it's—you know I think it's good for translation that I'm being recognized in this way. But at the same time, I feel you know I'm not Elena Ferrante and I don't have her—I didn't grow up in Naples obviously and I shouldn't be confused with her in any way.

AMT: But we're glad that you are there to bring her work to us.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Thank you.

AMT: Thank you so much for your work and it's good to talk to you. Thank you for coming in.

ANN GOLDSTEIN: Thank you very much.

AMT: That is Ann Goldstein. She has translated Elena Ferrante’s books including the popular Neapolitan quartet. She is in Toronto for an event called Our Brilliant Friend, discussing Elena Ferrante through Hot Docs. If you have any thoughts as you listen to this, you want to share your view of the whole idea of Lila and Lenu, let us know. You can tweet us, we are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. If you're joining us partway through, download the podcast or listen right online. And stay with us. In our next half hour, one of the most basic needs is one you rarely worry about: access to safe private bathrooms. That access is woefully out of reach for hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa where for some, using a toilet has become a matter of life and death. We'll bring you a documentary report in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

'It's not safe': South Africans fear using public toilets after woman murdered

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you are listening to The Current. In this country, it's something most of us take for granted: being able to use a flush toilet in the privacy of our own homes. According to the United Nations, however, an estimated two and a half billion people around the world have no access to proper sanitation. That includes of course many in Canada, in First Nations community. Today we're focusing on a township just outside of Cape Town, South Africa where the battle over sanitation and safety is underway between residents and government. Disturbed by the murder of a 19-year-old woman on the way to a public bathroom this year, community activists are leading the charge to get safe private toilets. Vancouver journalist Lindsay Sample traveled to South Africa for this documentary. It is called When She Didn't Come Back. And just a warning: some of the details in this story will be disturbing.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Footsteps, women speaking in alternate language]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: So you walk through this lane?

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: Yeah.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Iminathi Mafevuka turns down the narrow lane outside of her home. I follow her for about two minutes until we reach a small concrete house with one individual toilet stall on the corner of the front lawn.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: I'm using the toilet from here but it's outside.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: These days, this is where she comes to use a bathroom.

SOUNDCLIP

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Hello.

[Sound: People chatting in alternate language]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Chatting with her neighbour in Xhosa—the most common language around here—she asks if I can take a look at his toilet.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Man speaking Xhosa]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: He says okay, but finds it funny.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Metal door]

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: Yeah, it's this one.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: And it's a metal building with a flush toilet?

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: Yeah, it's a flush toilet.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Nice. [laughs]

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: [laughs]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: So why do you come here?

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: It's the safest one. It's close.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Iminathi lives in a township just outside of Cape Town, South Africa.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: When I first moved here, I thought that I would have a house with a toilet. So it’s not really nice, but there's nothing we can do.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: She used to walk to the public toilets provided by the government. They're about a 15 minute walk from here. But she won't do it anymore, afraid of being robbed or worse.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: At first you would get mugged on the way and also raped. It's not safe.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: I'm here to talk to Iminathi because just this year, her sister-in-law was murdered while walking to the public toilets. But right now, we don't talk about that. Not yet.

[Sound: People chattering in alternate language]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Depending on who you ask, between 425,000 and about a million people live in Khayelitsha. Regardless, it's teeming with people. About half live in formal areas with brick houses, running water and flush toilets. The rest, like Iminathi, live in metal shacks packed tightly together—informal settlements where access to proper sanitation is a big problem. I meet an activist from Khayelitsha, a short drive from Iminathi's place.

[Sound: Car door slam]

NOSIPHELELE MSESIWE: My name is Nosiphelele Msesiwe. I'm staying in Enkanini informal settlement in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Toilet. It's my every day. That is my everyday work, my everyday talk. I'm talking about toilets every day.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Nosiphelele works for a local NGO, called the Social Justice Coalition. They keep track of what's happening in Khayelitsha so they can advocate for the community. She brings up the murder of Sinoxolo Mafevuka—Iminathi's sister-in-law.

NOSIPHELELE MSESIWE: We have a recent incident whereby a 19-year-old Sinoxolo being murdered when she was going to the toilet. Raped and murdered, then they put her inside the toilet.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: For Nosiphelele, her murder has become a rallying cry—the latest example of what can happen when people don't have safe access to proper sanitation. She insists it makes women in particular more vulnerable.

NOSIPHELELE MSESIWE: They targeted her because she was going to the toilet.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: As I'm talking to Nosiphelele, she's a bit distracted. She’s taking calls.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Phone ringing]

[Sound: Nosiphelele speaking on the phone in alternate language]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: In an hour, hundreds of people are planning to take a train from Khayelitsha to Cape Town, heading to the mayor's office to demand more money for sanitation. Nosiphelele's in charge of making sure people show up and make it onto the right train. It’s a feat of coordination and she keeps mobilizing people all the way to the train station.

SOUNDCLIP

NOSIPHELELE MSESIWE: Hello?

[Sound: Train screeching on tracks]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: An hour later, I'm on the platform, people milling all around me. The train car we climb into is full. There are men in business suits, vendors squeezing through selling small candies, and dozens of protesters from Khayelitsha.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: People chattering]

[Sound: Singing and snapping in unison]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: On the ride, I find out that singing and protesting go hand in hand. The protest songs are similar to those once heard at anti-apartheid rallies. People are wearing T-shirts with slogans like "21 years of freedom, no budget, no plan, no way,” frustrated that so many years after apartheid, people living in these predominantly black townships still don't have housing, water and sanitation.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Singing]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: The songs continue as we move from the train through to the streets of Cape Town's affluent downtown. When we arrive at the front of the steps to the civic centre where the mayor works, I ask Nosiphelele what the songs are about.

NOSIPHELELE MSESIWE: They are singing the songs that are sung on protests. What you're doing is not right, please stop it. What you are doing is not right.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Another activist, Axolile Notywala, grabs a white megaphone. He makes the NGO's perspective clear, even raising the murder of Sinoxolo.

SOUNDCLIP

AXOLILE NOTYWALA: These communities bear the overwhelming burden of crime. Using a toilet in many informal settlements is one of the most dangerous activities for residents. This is an emergency and in many cases it has become a matter of life and death. As you might know, the story of Sinoxolo Mafevuka.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: This home, with its bright turquoise walls and its tin roof, is where Iminathi, her husband and Sinoxolo used to live together.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: She was my sister-in-law. I'm married to her brother.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Iminathi shows me around.

SOUNDCLIP

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: This was her room but now I’m using it as my kitchen.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Then she tells me about what happened. The details are disturbing.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: Yeah, it was a regular day because she was here at home during the whole day. She first went to the mall and then came and stay inside our house. And then at later that day, she went to the toilet. That's when she didn't come back.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: At first, Iminathi wasn't worried for one simple reason.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: She left her phones here.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Like most 19 year olds, Sinoxolo wouldn't leave her phone for long. The family wasn't too worried, thinking maybe…

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: After she went to the toilet, she went to one of her friends. So we just slept without her.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: You can't sleep sometimes if you think about her because she was a very, very quiet, nice lady. Very quiet nice lady.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Asake Holiday lives across the lane from Iminathi. The night Sinoxolo died, they had a BBQ. A nice night together. But the next day…

ASAKE HOLIDAY: The next day, it was very terrible. Very painful. It is still painful even now.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: It was early the following morning when Asake learned something was wrong.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: Someone came to my house in the morning. I think it was half past eight.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Asake is one of the community leaders. The person at her door told her to rush to the toilets. When she arrived, police were putting up yellow tape.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: Then we stand there. There was police and a lot of people, community people. Then Iminathi came and stand behind me. She was on the way to the toilet. She said to me that is Sinoxolo that is on that toilet. I said to her no, we don't know who is that in the toilet there.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: I didn't say for sure that something bad had happened to her until I saw one of her clothes. Her shirt, the shirt she was wearing the previous day.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: She said to me can't you see the clothes? You remember what was she wearing yesterday? I said yes. She said look there at the clothes that they were taking out from the seat.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: When the police took the clothes that were in the toilet outside, that's when I recognized the clothes and thought that yeah, she is the one who is inside.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: I saw the clothes and now it is Sinoxolo. Then I have to take her home because she was crying then come back and identify the body.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: She was raped, strangled and strangled to death. That’s all I know.

[Sound: Drums]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: In 2015, economists from Yale studied sanitation and security, specifically in Khayelitsha. They wanted to figure out what made more financial sense: spending money on building toilets or spending money on treating the health and social consequences caused by not having them. They estimated that walking to the toilet is linked to 635 sexual assaults every year in Khayelitsha. Bottom line, they say adding toilets doesn't just make sense on a social level, it makes financial sense too. The researchers faced some criticism when they published their findings. The biggest question is one I find myself asking: in a place with high rates of crime, unemployment and poverty, would having more toilets actually make a difference?

JOEL BREGMAN: Well, the thing is I mean, we all know sexual assault is from a much more deeper, complicated place, so obviously it wouldn’t disappear.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: That's Joel Bregman. He's the communications coordinator for the Social Justice Coalition. We're standing in front of a small shop in Khayelitsha as workers in coveralls throw bag after bag into a garbage truck. Apparently, residents have been piling their waste here for weeks.

JOEL BREGMAN: It's not going to change the deep-rooted societal issues which lead people to assaulting other people but it will shut down certain spaces where that's possible.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: I am trying to get an interview with the mayor of Cape Town. I want to ask her about the Yale study, about Sinoxolo's case, about the risks people face when they walk to the toilet.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: People speaking in background]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Okay. Go this way?

LINDSAY SAMPLE: It doesn't prove easy and she doesn't make herself available for an interview. But I do go to the mayor's budget announcement.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Applause]

[Sound: Mayor speaking]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: During her speech, she talked about sanitation. Her main point: it's not as simple as just putting in more toilets.

SOUNDCLIP

You can't have just a toilet planted there and hope everything will happen and everything will run into the ground. You have to process and transport the stuff somewhere. What is displayed here is the ignorance of the SJC, where they don't realize what goes into the toilet needs to go down a pipe to a wastewater treatment plant to be processed. That is the ignorance that they are illustrating.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: For the government, informal settlements are complicated. They're often on private land, so they can't just go in and start digging. Then there are the roads. They're narrow, used mostly for pedestrians not cars. Putting in infrastructure, like pipes to transport sewage, is difficult. It means there are areas where temporary toilets and emergency sanitation measures have been used for decades.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: The people in parliament don't care about Khayelitsha. I'm 26 years now, staying at that house without toilet. And nobody's telling us when or what is going on, when are we going to get the toilets?

LINDSAY SAMPLE: For Asake Holiday, the lack of sanitation is a serious problem.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: If no one is going to help us about the toilets, this is going to happen again. It is going to happen.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: In July, Nosiphelele and her colleagues filed a lawsuit against the city of Cape Town. It claims that the city has failed residents of informal settlements by not providing proper sanitation. The case is ongoing. Back at Iminathi's house, I ask her what she now knows about what happened to Sinoxolo.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: There's many stories that people are telling, but I think she was followed. That's when they got the advantage to do what they did to her. I was thinking that if maybe if she had asked us to accompany her, she would be alive today. But then she thought it was safe of her to go alone to the toilet.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: About two weeks after Sinoxolo's body was found, two men were arrested: relatives of her boyfriend. She worries about what happens if there are no convictions or if Sinoxolo's murderers are still free.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: It doesn't make me feel safe because I didn't think going for a toilet must be something that a person is afraid of. If it's at night, I have to bear with it till it's the morning.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: And you're pregnant now?

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: Right now. So I, sometimes I limit my food because I don't want to go to the toilet at night. I'm scared. So we just live in fear. We just live in fear.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Many residents in Khayelitsha don't trust the authorities. They complain of lack of policing. A controversy is swirling while I'm here—another murder of a young girl in a wealthy neighbourhood has received far more media attention and swift justice. Asake Holiday puts it this way:

ASAKE HOLIDAY: To me, it seems as if it's racism to me. That’s what I was thinking. I did also say to the minister is it because we are black? Because the police don't respond to us quickly.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Sinoxolo's murder trial is set to begin this month in South Africa's High Court. The two men charged say they are not guilty.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Man yelling in alternate language]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Before I leave Khayelitsha, I ask Iminathi if she can show me around. She says yes and we leave, accompanied by a group of community leaders, including her neighbour Asake.

SOUNDCLIP

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Can you explain to me—there's four other women here from the community, community leaders—why is that the case? When we’re walking around, it seems there’s always community leaders.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: No, I think they just want to make sure that you're safe.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: They're worried about me, not you?

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: Yeah. It's for your safety since you're the visitor.

[Sound: Music in background]

[Sound: People chatting quietly]

LINDSAY SAMPLE: So where are we walking to now?

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: To the toilets, the old ones.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Iminathi hasn't been back to the old toilets since Sinoxolo died. I'm uncomfortable. I tell her she doesn't have to come, that I don't want her to go if she doesn't want to. But she insists it's fine. We come to a clearing at the edge of the shacks on the side of the highway.

SOUNDCLIP

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Oh, this is—is this where the toilets were?

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: Yeah, they were here. The toilets were in this site.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: And they're completely gone.

IMINATHI MAFEVUKA: Yeah, so there's temporary toilets now.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Nobody seems to know why the toilets are gone. They've been replaced temporarily by bright blue portable ones. Iminathi sits down on a log nearby. Asake explains where we are.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: I'm standing at the place where the toilet was before, at where the Sinoxolo body was found.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: All that's left of the old toilets are a few white pipes sticking out of the ground and a tire.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: I'm sure it's a symbol that shows that the toilet and Sinoxolo were lying here because the toilets was removed and this tire was removed also. But every time I come this way, this tire is here.

LINDSAY SAMPLE: Asake wants people to know what happened. She wants her community to be safer.

ASAKE HOLIDAY: I'm sure that Sinoxolo's spirit come and put it back here so that everybody like you when you come, you wanted to know where the toilet was, we show you this tire. The symbol of what happened, where it happened.

AMT: We have been listening to the documentary, When She Didn't Come Back. It was produced by Vancouver journalist Lindsay Sample with The Current’s documentary editor, Joan Webber. We would like to thank Gladstone Mali who helped Lindsay on the ground in South Africa as well as the International Reporting Project. To see pictures of some of the people you just heard in that documentary, go to our website: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Bridge]

Meet Trump's chief strategist Stephen Bannon, the man behind alt-right Breitbart News

Guests: Josh Green

AMT: You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I don't give a damn if the phony intelligentsia like it or not, the liberal media don't matter to me. Republican establishment don't matter to me.

VOICE 2: To hell with the establishment because the establishment has put us in this position in the first place.

AMT: You betcha. That is a trailer for the 2011 movie about Sarah Palin. It is called The Undefeated and it is written and directed by Stephen Bannon. Mr. Bannon has just been appointed as US President-elect Donald Trump's chief strategist and senior counselor, a move that has outraged civil rights groups as well as Democrats and some Republicans. Stephen Bannon took over the Trump presidential campaign as CEO in the summer. You may remember they started switching who was at the top of the campaign. He is an anti-establishment entrepreneur with a very establishment history—naval officer, Harvard Business School grad, media mogul. But he is best known for heading up the website, Breitbart News. Critics see that as a platform for the white nationalist and so-called alt-right movement. The website has featured such headlines as: “Planned Parenthood's body count under Cecile Richards is up to half a Holocaust,” or “Political correctness protects Muslim rape culture.” Another article called “Hillary Clinton's assistant Huma Abedin: a Saudi spy with connections to global terrorism.” Josh Green is a senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. More than a year ago, he profiled Stephen Bannon in an article entitled: “This Man is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America.” Josh Green joins us from Washington, DC. Hello.

JOSH GREEN: It’s great to be with you.

AMT: The most dangerous political operative in America, why?

JOSH GREEN: Well, Bannon and Breitbart News for the last three or four years have been kind of a hidden force in US politics. On the one hand, they have been this rogue splinter faction of Republicans who have kind of gone after and torn down the GOP establishment in Washington. One of the big reasons that former House Speaker John Boehner wound up leaving his job was because of the ire that Steve Bannon and Breitbart directed at him and essentially made his job impossible. And then when I wrote about Bannon last year, he also was the architect of a long-range plan to bring down Hillary Clinton. So he is really a guy who is at the centre of what Clinton once referred to as the vast right wing conspiracy and now he's been elevated to a key job in the Trump White House.

AMT: And he actually got involved with something called the Government Accountability Institute in relation to Hillary Clinton to—what was that about?

JOSH GREEN: Sure. Well, if you were to map out an organizational chart of the conservative right outside the mainstream of the Republican Party, essentially all paths would lead back to Steve Bannon. On the one hand, he's the publisher of Breitbart News which has delighted in gleefully attacking Republicans and Democrats. On the other hand, he's the head of the Government Accountability Institute which is a non-profit research organization that employs the man who wrote a book called Clinton Cash that became a surprise best seller last summer and documented all the Clintons’ supposedly nefarious dealings with the Clinton Foundation and taking money from foreign government. It seems like a million years ago now but when the book came out last April, it dominated US political discussion and really tarnished Clinton's image, driving up her negative ratings. And part of the thinking behind the book—and this is Bannon's thinking—was that the right wing had failed in going after the Clintons in the 1990s because they were too prone to silly conspiracy theories that nobody kind of really believed. So Bannon's big insight was that if we could use this think tank and do real research and draw links between foreign governments and unsavoury donors and the Clintons, then we would have real facts that we could hand off to reporters at places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and essentially inject these ideas into the mainstream media. And that is very much what happened. I think it's one of the big reasons that Clinton, to everybody's surprise, lost the presidential election.

AMT: So he had real fact. It wasn’t made up.

JOSH GREEN: He did. Yes. And that has been one of the big differences, this cycle as opposed to let's say when Bill Clinton was president in the mid-1990s. There were all sorts of famous and ridiculous right wing-driven scandals back then—the idea that Clinton's Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, who tragically committed suicide, was actually murdered by the Clintons and all these sorts of ideas that any normal objective person would kind of recognize on their face were ridiculous and tune out. What Bannon believed was that conservatives, the mistake they made was to kind of get caught up in their own echo chamber so they were really only talking to each other and not convincing anybody in the wider world. So his big project vis a vis Clinton, was to document actual facts and to go out individually sometimes and talk to investigative reporters in the mainstream media and say listen, I know you're not a right winger but we've dug up some important information here that I think is worth your looking into. And in a lot of cases reporters did look into that and did agree that Clinton had taken money from some unsavoury people and that there were conflicts of interests that were legitimate news stories and those wound up being reported on the front pages of US newspapers.

AMT: No, but Breitbart News has been accused of promoting white supremacy, anti-Semitism, rabid misogyny. To what extent are those accusations well-founded and do they come back to him?

JOSH GREEN: Well, it's a tricky question to say. I spent a lot of time with Bannon over the last couple of years and you know I can really only speak to my personal experience with him. But he’s a former Wall Street banker at Goldman Sachs. He’s like a lot of other testosterone-driven Wall Street bankers. I've encountered a lot of profanity, somewhat sexist, but I never personally witnessed any racism.

AMT: Establishment. If he was a Wall Street banker, he’s pretty establishment.

JOSH GREEN: Well, yeah. Very much. He comes out of the establishment. He has a fascinating, fascinating background. I mean he was essentially you know radicalized at some point in the last 10 years against everything that he kind of once represented, which makes as an interesting story. But to get to your question, I think the thing that upsets so many people about Bannon is that at the end of the day, he is chairman of Breitbart News and as an outlet, it is deliberately provocative. It runs articles and headlines that aim to offend and upset people and has used that vehicle to kind of channel grassroots anger at the government and the culture. I think it’s one reason why our politics here in the US has gotten so intensely ugly about five or six years.

AMT: Okay. And so then of course we have to watch what he does now that he's right next to Trump. We have to leave it there, Josh Green. But thanks for your insights.

JOSH GREEN: It was a pleasure.

AMT: That is Josh Green, senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, focusing on political coverage for the magazine and Bloomberg Politics. He joins us from Washington, DC. Well, keep watching all of that. That is it for The Current today.

[Music: Ending theme]

AMT: Tom Power is standing by waiting in the wings with q, so stay with us on CBC Radio One. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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November 15, 2016 full episode transcript

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