Confronting Trauma
Rachel Aviv, in her piece about the intertwined lives of the writer Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater, the innocent man wrongfully imprisoned for Sebold’s rape, provides valuable insight in describing the complex harms endured by victims of sexual assault in cases of exoneration (“Words Fail,” May 29th). Both Sebold and Broadwater are victims of the actual rapist, and of a justice system that set Sebold up to fail as a witness. Instead of ignoring victims during post-conviction litigation, as routinely happens, we should recognize that conventional approaches risk retraumatizing all victims, and also take into account what assistance they might need during the process. There are organizations, such as the nonprofit Healing Justice, that are dedicated to helping everyone affected by these cases; in programs such as these, assault victims and justice-system victims support one another and work together to protect future victims.
James M. Doyle
Salem, Mass.
Aviv’s searing and beautifully written piece goes a long way toward questioning presuppositions about whose perspective rises to the status of the protagonist. Aviv effectively transfers the story’s nexus from Sebold’s experience to the life-altering trauma of Broadwater’s wrongful and protracted incarceration, which resulted from mistakes and abuses that were hiding in plain sight.
Why, then, does the story open with a full-page photograph of Sebold, seen from an intimate distance, while Broadwater’s portrait, given less than half a page, appears in the middle of the story, and shows him from farther away? A different placement of these two photographs could have done more to challenge the asymmetries in our assumptions, much as Aviv’s narrative does. As the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas reminds us, ethics begins with looking at another person’s face.
Yola Monakhov Stockton
Assistant Professor of Photography
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Buffalo, N.Y.
Forest for the Trees
Jill Lepore, in her article about our relationship with trees, states that “a forest is an ecosystem, and a tree farm is a monoculture” (“Root and Branch,” May 29th). This may be true for industrial tree farms, but Lepore overlooks a large portion of forest ownership. Thirty-nine per cent of forest land in the U.S. is owned by families and other nonindustrial private entities.
My family has owned three hundred acres on a ridge above the Cowlitz River, in southwest Washington State, for more than fifty years. Rather than create a monoculture, we plant diverse species, including Douglas fir, Western red cedar, Western white pine, incense cedar, Port Orford cedar, and alder. We grow trees longer than a typical industrial tree farm does, harvesting at eighty or ninety years, instead of forty. This allows a variety of mosses and underbrush to flourish: Oregon beaked moss, electrified-cat’s-tail moss, sword ferns, salal, red huckleberry. Each stand in our forest is the preferred habitat of different animals and birds. The Western saw-whet owl likes a twelve-year-old thicket of fir and ponderosa pine; deer find soft green bites in a four-year-old stand of red cedar and white pine. Family forest owners have a deep love and knowledge of trees and have much to teach us as we try to understand how to live more gently on our planet.
Ann Stinson
Toledo, Wash.
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