No. 7

Fall 2004

That Desire:An Interview with Clea Koff
Marshall Warfield

Clea Koff, with her first book, The Bone Woman, has piqued interest across the world as she writes with intensity and wisdom about her experience as a forensic anthropologist investigating mass graves in Rwanda, and across the former Yugoslavia. An initial pursuit of an degree in English developed into a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Stanford and a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She divides her time between Los Angeles and Melbourne. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Marshall Warfield is a student in the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program.

Why did you write the Bone Woman?

I had been presenting slide shows to university students and to public groups about the work that I had participated in with the International Criminal Tribunal in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia ever since I came back from the very first mission to Rwanda in 1996. I soon discovered that I wasn't just telling people about the forensic work but I was also trying to convey to the audiences something about the places that I had been and how what I had seen in the graves led me to even learn more about those places and what happened there--I was sharing the nuts and bolts of forensic investigation in a human rights context. Over the years members of the audience would ask me if had considered writing a book about the things I was presenting in the slideshow, but I kept dismissing that advice because I didn't believe that I somehow had a broad enough perspective to somehow tie it all together for a book. In fact, I didn't know if it was possible to tie anything together and it wasn't until during a talk after I had returned from what turned out to be my last mission to Kosovo in 2000. During the end of the talk (the talk described in the end of the book) some students in their 40's, people who I really respected, said, "You've got to write." For the first time I felt like I could actually write something down and find a way to give people a chance to be transported to the places that I had been in a meaningful way.

Can you talk about how the book came together? I'm curious as to how the revision process and editing process went.

I initially started writing on my own. I spent about a year looking at journal entries from the missions. I've been keeping a journal or a diary since I was in high school, so it was completely normal that I kept on writing down the day's events or feelings--especially a lot of emotional reactions--things I didn't talk about with my teammates. When I first considered the idea of writing I initially looked at the journals to get a sense of details that I could bring forward to make everything more present and real. The book had to have primary reflections in it--not just my reflections later. I didn't want to have the kind of safety of armchair reflections--I wanted to describe things as they had happened at the time.
     I wrote on my own for about a year and I initially used journal entries interspersed with narrative that contextualized the entry and had some reflective material in it: journal entry, reflective narrative, journal entry, reflective narrative. About a year or so after I had started writing I found a literary agent and she helped me to reduce the amount of journal and increase the amount of narrative and I worked on that for about another 6 months or so. Then the agent started to send the material around to publishers in England and Australia and eventually in the US and other countries and after I had a publisher in Australia, they very gently broke the news to me that having journal entries, then narrative, then journal entries, was too difficult for the reader. I was afraid to relinquish the journal entries because that's really how you get the color and the emotion, especially about things that you might not otherwise want to reflect on later--things that don't seem important to me now seem really important then and I didn't want to write about them as though they were still important. I did get to keep some journal entries in, but I also was able to mine the removed journal entries for detail like what we ate on a particular day and things that I forgot.
     By focusing on narrative it forced me to consider particularly emotional aspects and my participation in the work means to me now. I had to consider all of that while I was writing and I think that it may have changed how I wrote it in the long run. I spent a lot of time "back there" in my mind while writing. Altogether it took about three years to get it to the stage where it looks like a book.

I was going to ask you what compels you to be so open in expressing your emotions as you tell the story but I see now that it was derived from the process you went through.

Yes, definitely. I had one editor here in Australia and occasionally we would check in with the US editor and the one in London, but I worked closely with the editor in Australia. We would see each other, we would talk on the phone, we used email. When we first switched to narrative--I just wrote the beginning--I think it was the Croatia part--and I sent it to her even though it wasn't finished and I asked, "Is this what you guys are expecting?" It was after I had a publisher that I thought to myself "What made me think that I could write a book? Am I crazy--how am I going to do this?" I mean I had 100 pages when the publisher became involved. I suddenly felt really bummed about it so I would just work on one chapter (now they're called parts) at a time. I sent that Croatia part off to her and she was so excited about how it began. It had changed into what it reads like now. That excitement transferred to me but they had to continually really hound me to expose my emotions more. I kept saying to myself: "I'm going to share these details about the work and a little about myself and what it means to me but I'm going to remain in the background. What's going to be in the foreground is the bones and the story they have to tell." The publishers kept saying to me: "It's through you that people will learn what the bones have to tell. You have to put yourself there too. You can't just hide."--which is what I wanted to do. There are a number of things that are in the book that I find personally embarrassing but I put them in because I figured that if this sort of thing is helpful than I will trust other people. I never presumed that I knew what should be in the book on the level of personal things. It turned out that a lot of people really liked knowing how many bras a woman had to take on a mission. A lot of people really responded to that sort of information, which I had the innocence to treat as a kind of throw-away thing. For me it was a logical thing, not an interesting thing, but it became interesting for everyone else. I came to understand that more as I finished the book.

I want to talk about a moment you write about in Bosnia. It's dusk--the American convoy is taking you back through towns on the way back to Camp Lisa.

Our convoy was the evening entertainment for local folks and since it was later than usual, we saw more people. The evening was balmy, so it was a perfect night to be outside with a cool drink. We waved and received some friendly whistles in return, which was interesting because as far as we knew, the few people left living in these RS towns were openly supportive of Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic--portrait posters of them were plastered on the sides of some buildings, the captions exhorting NATO not to "touch" these alleged war criminals if they wanted peace.

This was one of my favorite moments in the book because it described so beautifully the complexity of your work--and of political situations--perhaps of life in general. You knew the work that you were doing in those graves would be affecting those people. My question is--did you have similar thoughts about possible readers of this book or did you imagine readers and their responses?

When I was initially writing the book I did not believe (even though I had publishers and a contract to finish) that the book would be published. I couldn't imagine that something I was working on would someday go out into the world. When I first started writing I just imagined my literary agent, Isabel. I imagined speaking to her because she was someone that I knew, but not so well that we would finish each others sentences--I couldn't get away with not explaining myself. Once the manuscript was finished and made into galleys and I could see how much text was going to be on a page--at that point I began imagining readers--people out in the word as it were--who would (I had to tell myself) be the type of people who would have come to a slide show. I felt very generous toward these imagined readers because I was appreciative of anyone who would take the time to read it.
     I also thought about the possibility that one day the book would be published in a place where it would get to people who were survivors, relatives of people who we had exhumed from the gravesites being described in the book. When I talked about the bodies in the graves, certainly when I wrote about them I always thought about those people not so much because I expect any of them to see the book, but because I wanted my respect and care and consideration for them to be evident all the time.
      For example, I remember a national forensic conference where forensic pathologists gave talks about the USAir crash off the coast several years ago. There were a number of presentations about the scientific aspects of the recovery job. I often think that the scientists at these conferences don't imagine that there could be a relative of somebody that they are talking about listening to their presentation. There could be somebody who's also been affected by violent or sudden death. A forensic conference is an appropriate place to present, clearly factually, casework--but perhaps I'm a particularly sensitive character--I always imagine that.
      Because there haven't been a lot of first person descriptions of what I write about in the Bone Woman, how I write about it will represent it for all of us. So yes, I guess I did think about a number of different groups, and that changed while during the time that I was writing.

Are we getting closer to understanding that the reasons for genocide that we most commonly hear are manipulations, distortions, simplifications? A popular one is usually "Those two ethnic groups have always been warring." Are we getting closer to understanding that these statements wind up concealing the more complicated issues like the ones that you bring up at the end of the book: access to resources and opportunity, greed, bribery? Of course, I'm not even sure who "we" are…

I think of the "we" that you're referring to as regular people everywhere--regular people who read newspapers or listen to the radio or hear politicians speak. I mean all of us who are not either heads of state or heads of the military. I actually do think that there are some changes afoot. Some things appear to never change--in popular media there continues to be an apparent need to simplify or at least condense the context around any given conflict. I don't know what the reasons are, but I think that it's continuing. I shouldn't say that I don't know what the reasons are--I mean I have some idea as to what the reasons are--why that goes on--but the fact of the matter is that it continues.
      At the same time though, there are more and more people and other venues--they may be academic settings that reach out--or academic scholars who publish materials that get out to a more popular audience where they give any given conflict much more context. What's remarkable to me is that when one does give context to a particular conflict--there are patterns. For example resource competition continually comes up in different parts of the world so in a way there is a thematic aspect that allows one to see things in an even simpler way.
      I have a much easier time understanding that people in a government are fighting over particular things like oil, mineral wealth or water--that I find really understandable. If it is said that people are fighting over ethnic differences when a population looks the same and speaks the same language--that I have a hard time understanding. I think a lot of people could actually relate better to East Timor in this light. We hear that there's been an upheaval in East Timor as people vote for independence from Indonesia. People are crushed, killed--the Indonesian military is implicated. All we hear about is the violence, the confusion and that everyone's quality of life has been diminished. In the midst of all that Australia continues political and military ties with Indonesia--and one finds out, of course, perhaps sooner, perhaps later depending on how plugged in one is to the information--that Australia and Indonesia share an interests over the oil in the East Timor Sea. Why is Indonesia trying to crush this small section of land? Very few people live there--there's nothing going on with the economy--except for the fact that they are in proximity to a major oil production area. They have so much possibility for producing oil. Australia has an interest in it and Indonesia has a interest in it and the people are really just getting in the way.

How does one get access to this information?

I know that there is a lot of information on the web, but I pick up bits and pieces of information from different news stories. In other words, the news I've read, about the oil in the East Timor Sea, is unrelated to what's going on in East Timor--it's on the finance pages. In one part of the newspaper you will see that a previous, ex-general of the Indonesian military has just been elected and the Australian government has not seen the need to remind anyone of his previous behavior during East Timor's independence efforts. That interested me. Why wasn't Australia speaking out against it? Why would Australia need to maintain a good relationship with the Indonesian military, which everyone knows is responsible for human rights abuses? I end up piecing it together from a couple of different places and for me that's more meaningful than having it spoon-fed to me from say, an East-Timorese support site. Even though I would be happy to go there it's actually revealing for me to learn it from different places. When I see American and other soldiers being killed in Iraq almost like cannon fodder of old, I have to ask--what is it that's so valuable that our current administration is willing to have them die for it?" What is it? There must be something there. This is when I began discovering these issues coming through about water in Iraq--completely separate from oil which is already a big issue, but I digress.

May I ask you more about the role of questions in your work--would you talk to that?

When I was writing I tried to write very much like how I speak. In other words I wrote in a conversational way. Especially when I was working on the afterward of the book, I really felt like I was trying to talk to whoever was reading at that stage, it seemed natural to put in questions. I was hoping that the Bone Woman would have enough information in it prior to that last section--enough first hand information where people had effectively looked over my shoulder into the grave and come out again--that people might have already been asking those or other questions, while reading. I never wanted to make it sound like I was trying to state anything from on high. It was more like: "This is what I think. It led me to these questions about what was going on behind these conflicts. It led me to discover this." I feel that these issues, like resource competition--I'm not saying that they are the reasons for the death of all these civilians during a time of war--but they are too big for the governments and militaries involved to have ignored. These are the issues that are rarely talked about--and that interests me. To me it suggests that they could be potent. And so that's what I wanted to present--this kind of "I was out there and this is what I saw and I put this there for your consideration--giving you as many of the same facts that I had at my disposal."

When I first heard about your book I was expecting the kind of didacticism that often hits me when I read about War Crimes--but it wasn't there at all.

[Laughter] Good I'm really glad that you said that. I definitely didn't want a didactic approach. Especially because there are other books--none about forensics in relation to war crimes--but certainly other books about war crimes and crimes against humanity. Jeffrey Roberts has written several books (he is a lawyer) about prosecutions over crimes against humanity. His books are didactic--an important approach for that kind of work--but this had to be more experiential. The things I present in the afterward section are not just my passing thoughts--these are things that I believe in--or that continue to come up enough that I think that there's something there. I think that in a way it was harder for me to expose my thoughts and a belief in the "afterward" than it was to expose anything else that I described in the earlier portions of the book.

Several people have asked you about you smiling at the sites. I want to ask you about your humor--the dark humor--like the "nursery" you mention on page 53. How does that arise-how do you think it arises?

Certainly the humor that did arise on those missions wasn't directed at the bodies--it was directed at each other or something to do with circumstances. We never had the sort of gallows humor that often gets placed in background of an episode of CSI--it's not like that sort of reckless humor. Anyone, after dealing with a mass grave, after just beginning to uncover what is clearly an atrocity, after clearing soil and trying to number bodies, at the end of that day, when sitting down to dinner, is going to need something other than just a reflection on that day's activities. That's why the journal was a great place to write down anything that had to do "work." Around the dinner table, I needed something different. Often without even saying anything about it--we all felt what the others were seeing, that what we were uncovering was a bad thing, but we didn't actually talk about it. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question.

This is a fine answer--I guess what I'm asking is why do you think you were able to joke and smile in these horrible situations?

The only way that that could take place--that people could joke or smile or laugh is because we're all coming form the same place about the work itself. If you weren't sure that the people on your team really cared, had respect for the bodies, for the fact that this was a scene where a crime had been committed, that it was not 9-to-5 job--it would actually stress that team out quite a lot.

Negotiating privacy is something you write about- whether it's undergarments or the changing rooms or going to the bathroom--how important is it to your writing process?

[Laughter]Well I was told by the editor here in Australia to write everything down, then later, pare back if I wanted to. I understood that I was going to share a lot of myself and a lot of my deepest feelings in order to make the book what I thought it was going to be and I felt like I knew what "didn't apply." I was also writing between late 2000 and into 2003 and I don't watch a lot of television, but I know enough to know that the reality TV program had become a staple of television. And in books it became a theme of exposing oneself--one's whole body and everything ever thought or dreamt of. So I wanted to make sure that the book wasn't some sort of expose' and I certainly didn't want anything that was going to get in the way of what I felt was really important. A lot of it comes from the fact that I think that at the beginning that I didn't really feel like this book was going to be about me. At some point the book was called Genocide Journal--which is neither catchy nor fun. You mentioned being concerned that the book might be didactic--I was always concerned that the book was going to be perceived as very, very heavy or dark. That informed the writing process--although I must say that there was a lot of humor, a lot of things that I found funny, that I wanted to see in the book, that we ended up editing out, because they were apparently not funny to anyone else. So I had to learn that my sense of humor is completely offbeat.

On page 55 you write: "The gravesite provides the context for the bodies and that context enables better understanding of the details that are revealed through examination in the morgue." I was wondering what kind of examination your writing allows.

Well, from the aspect of the writing process itself, one of the biggest things that happened for me is that I had to determine whether or not I was saying what I meant to say, whether or not I had actually explained myself. That involved examining the first moment I would write something down. A very basic example would be describing how the work takes place--what the work consists of, being in the grave--I had to find a way to describe that in a way that would hopefully makes sense to other people. And then there was the aspect of describing everything that I had seen - for instance I never fully described the scent of decomposition. I spent a lot of time examining what I had written to see if what I had written was what I meant to say--if it meant anything to anyone else. I relied on other people to tell me how I was coming along on that front. I hope that the way in which I write about the work and the emotion that I had would resonate with readers in some way, allowing them to examine that larger context for the conflict that I was writing about.

There was a bet in which winners name weren't mentioned--would you talk about handling that line between the personal and the public?

I was aware that in some situations I would be relating experiences that I had and that was okay for me, but I was aware that there were almost always other people involved. In some situations, yes, I purposefully did not use the names of particular people, because it was the story that was meaningful. The name would only serve to potentially embarrass somebody if they read it. It seemed to me, unnecessary to potentially cause any embarrassment--but it wasn't going to stop me from telling the story. I tried to really bring forward everything that would help give a good idea of what it was like for us at the time. I was trying to be aware of other people's own privacy, private lives, but not compromise the telling of a complete story. I know a lot of people would argue that you can't tell a complete story anyway.

Are you saying that naming the betters allows readers to blame a character rather than simply say, "Oh--I guess this is what can happen in this context?"

That's right. You've got it. It's about the fact that anybody felt that they could place a bet, the fact that they felt that this was a betting situation as opposed to anything else. Who bet and who won is irrelevant--to put the names in makes it sound like it was no problem. I'll just say one more thing on this. I had two separate English versions of the book because apparently there's an American audience--which of course goes against everything I believe in about the world. It's my story the way I told it--but it had to be edited apparently for the American audience. One of the concerns for the publisher was that I not leave too much ambiguity in places -There were situations where I was asked to define people's emotions further than I had. My reaction to this was to say, "Well I don't know what led people to do what they did--I can't account for others behavior I can only state the fact of what they did." Any human being knows enough about being a human to know that we're full of contradictions and I think our imaginations can take us to any number of places. That was an interesting process and that was how I came to know that I may be a sensitive creature but I'm also empirically minded. I don't like to delve into what emotions may have motivated somebody to do something.

I'm wondering what kind of connection you might feel to writers now, I'm thinking of when you were working in Kosovo and of the poor reporter who was practically screamed at by your colleague.

First of all I should say that I've always loved reading. I've always admired writers. While I was in high school I was already interested in anthropology--but my best subject, my favorite subject was English. I felt that I was going to become an English major. It just so happened that when I went to Stanford where I planned to double major in English and anthropology that the first English class I took I happened to be in a class with a teacher who decided that--here I am saying that she decided--her behavior indicated--that she did not intend for me or another girl in the class (who became one of my best friends and whom I still friends with) to be involved. For example, when we raised our hands, she would not call on us. She would only call on people who were effectively sleeping on the table. It was a 7:30 in the morning class for people who had scored well on the AP English test and I don't think that she like me or my friend. When I wrote papers for that class, she would tear them apart and say scary things to an 18 year old. Once, she told me that I had "ghetto-ized" Jane Austen. Jane Austen was one of my favorite writers. Having never heard it before in my life--I didn't even know what the word ghettoized meant. I fled from her office on my bicycle in tears and I did not take another English class at Stanford for three years, whereupon I took a 20th century fiction class which I took pass/fail in case I got a "C." I got an "A" which of course, indicated "passed" but I loved it as much as I had ever loved it. In the intervening time I had decided that somehow I was not meant to write and not worthy of continuing to write. It took me a long time to realize that this woman just had some issues. My point with all of this is that I always loved the idea of writing and I never ever knew how difficult it was to actually craft a book. I had not thought about it because I had accepted books as something that people would write and were simply finished. I didn't realize how many steps of editing there would be and how much nit-picking detail there could be and because I am a detail oriented person I simply had to go over the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb and just proofread a lot. It was a very strenuous and arduous process toward the end and now that I have met writers, whether they think that they're writers or not (at festivals for example), I actually do feel an affinity with them. They'll make a joke to me like, "Oh yeah--I'm on my third draft. I hope this is the last one." I can laugh knowing what the hell they mean. On that level--on that functional level--I actually feel like I can relate to people. On the level of what one writes about and how one writes about it, I think that we may all come from very different places but that desire to write--or I should say the habit of expressing oneself through writing--is something that I've had for a long time. It tends to mark writers--whether they've got publishers or not--that they write and write and write on their own, for whatever reason--because they would rather write than do anything else. Looking back I'm able to see that that's always been the case for me.

What are you working on these days and what do you find you find yourself writing about these days.

That's a very funny question--it's funny because I'm attempting to start a non-profit in California that assists families with missing persons. It wil be an organization that acts as a liaison between them and the coroner's office. Effectively, I'm trying to start a service that deals with the fact that missing persons reports don't hold all the information you need to identify someone who is both dead and begun to decompose. By getting a full profile of a missing person from a family member and getting x-rays and comparing those x-rays to the FBI database I really hope to circumnavigate the shortcomings of the missing persons form. The process of trying to change the missing persons form is something that I've already looked into changing several years ago--it would be a very difficult process--so this is a sort of band-aid or triage approach that I hope to start. For me it's rooted in the same concept that's described with the Geneva Conventions--the need for the bodies of one's enemies during war to be honorably buried in single graves and identifying information to be kept on hand because families have the right to know the fate of a relative. I believe that that concept applies to civilians in war or in peace and it applies to people who have simply lost someone--for whatever reason. So I'm hoping to get bodies out of the freezers of the coroner's offices, bodies that have been there for years, by working with families. I'm in the process of trying to incorporate this non-profit and I will eventually start fundraising. Naturally what I'm writing is fiction about that very type of service, already existing. I didn't plan to write fiction and I don't pretend that I'm any good at writing fiction, but I'm thinking about this place all the time, imagining what it could be, its limitations, what it could morph into. It seemed very natural to start writing as though it already existed--with of course some more excitement than what would actually happen in real life.

Copyright 2004, Marshall Warfield

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.