Kurds in the Way

book review by Doug Nufer

Well-Founded Fear
Tom LeClair, Olin frederick 2000
293 pages, $22 hardcover

Well-Founded Fear by Tom LeClair (Olin Frederick) is a novel in the form of a file for a refugee who applies for political asylum. Questionnaires, interview transcripts, and a Letter of Recommended Action are among the documents used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) in Athens to determine whether someone gets to stay in the free world or risks getting sent back to a country where the refugee faces a miserable fate. One of the pleasures of reading LeClair's novel is to learn how these procedures operate, as his fictional UNCHR seems to be a reasonably accurate representation of what could be the real one. In the novel, however, the subject who pleads for asylum is not someone fleeing an oppressive military dictatorship but a citizen of the United States.

The entire book, then, is the file Casey Mahan assembles in order to prove her well-founded fear of persecution, with documents framing the long sections of narration. This device gives the book a compelling reason to exist. Like the narrator in Paul Auster's Leviathan, who supposedly writes as fast as he can, to get down his story before the authorities come, LeClair's narrator is driven by urgency; unlike Auster's narrator, who writes to clear the name of a friend, Mahan writes as though her life depends on the outcome. What she's afraid of is difficult for her to explain, particularly without incriminating herself, as the story careens toward an unsettling resolution. How do you tell the FBI that a Kurd you rescued from a Turkish prison has come to America to poison the water in order to force Congress to recognize its responsibility for the plight of his people?

There are more twists and turns to this political thriller than should be revealed in a review. Mahan's adventure begins when she leaves a cushy attorney position in the States to spend a year interviewing refugees in Athens. Shortly after she is assigned to specializing in Kurds, she becomes friends with her Kurdish translator, who draws her into a deep personal involvement with those whose causes LeClair explains with sympathy untainted by knee-jerk sentiment. Hunted down, tortured, and wiped out for centuries, these folks who say the mountains are their only friends are the ultimate homeless people. Events in the novel focus on the 1990s, when millions of dollars of U.S. military aid financed the Turkish army's ongoing persecution of the Kurds, and when the CIA would entice Kurdish resistance in northern Iraq with promises of support that never came.

Accounts of Saddam's genocide of Kurds with poison gas and of Turkish police arresting and torturing Kurds for playing Kurdish music can make anyone see why Kurdish "terrorists" should try to defend themselves by using any means available to them. And, although it seems that anyone who asks for asylum--if only to immigrate to a country where it's possible to make a living--should be granted this basic human right to survive, the political pressures on the UNCHR to exclude refugees are also understandable. If the interviewers recommend too many refugees for asylum, Greece won't be able to handle the infusion of newcomers and will close the UNCHR office.

Cynical State Department operatives, earnest and cynical UNCHR lawyers, earnest and cynical and brutal Turkish police, and Kurds, whose motives and traits go with the territory, fend for themselves in ways the attorney hero understands with an idealistic sense of justice tempered by a realistic appreciation of the etiquette of power. Tough and capable, she is also as naive as any American might be in a place where the languages she deals with are literally or figuratively Greek to her.

LeClair's interest in language and in the intricate complexities of narrated truth are clear throughout Well-Founded Fear, just as they were in his earlier novel Passing Off, a story of intrigue set in Greece and narrated by an American basketball player whose game is deception. Whereas that story moves from a straightforward situation to a predicament so complicated that it takes a master of razzle dazzle to cope with it, the lawyer's job is to make sense of a situation that seems hopelessly complicated from the start. At times Mahan's deliberations with the language and with potential narrative scenarios seem to be more a product of LeClair's concerns with his novel than of his character's problems with her job, but that's the advantage of having a narrator who must write to tell her story.

Mahan's main problem, like that of most refugees, is to provide documents to support her contentions. As the attorney knows, however, almost everything she claims is subject to interpretation. Nothing proves anything. Had LeClair provided more documents and less narration, i.e., less explanation by the narrator, this predicament might have been more engrossing, but a larger question LeClair raises with his treatment of these issues may be "why fiction?"

The lead blurb recommending Well-Founded Fear is by Don DeLillo, whose Libra enraged conservative pundits by making beautiful and/or truthful fiction out of documents on the JFK assassination. In an author's note at the end of this novel, LeClair recommends After Such Knowledge What Forgiveness? by Jonathan Randal and Kurdistan by Susan Meisalas for readers seeking more information. Between these recommendations we have an intelligently conceived and written story that's based on facts which are--however well-documented they may be--subject to the criticism that they can't be trusted because they appear in a work of fiction. And yet, by reading this novel, most people will learn more about the Kurds than they would have found out any other way.