Author says book is influenced by growing up around cannibals

One of the top read stories on CNN.com has a catching headline, “Best-selling author shaped by cannibals, Christianity.” The article is a short piece about Ted Dekker, a Christian thriller writer, and his childhood. We are all shaped by our experiences, and Dekker’s childhood memories are valid insofar that they have played a role in how he now understands the world. However, this article is an outrageous mockery of news reporting with little journalistic integrity.

Eric Marrapodi, the reporter of this story, blatantly perpetuates harmful misrepresentations of indigenous peoples in the first two lines of the article.

Ted Dekker spent his formative years living with cannibals. It’s a helpful background for an author who writes novels about serial killers.

The parallel Marrapodi draws between cultures with cannibalistic rituals and serial killers is outrageous. The continued existence of cannibalism myths in the media is a symptom of cultural inequality and gross misrepresentation. I do not deny the existence of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, nor in other parts of the world, but the conversation on it is mainly a practice in stereotyping and defining groups as taboo, horrifying, and human flesh feasting sub-humans.

“I grew up in one of the darkest places in the world you can imagine, in [the] jungle, with cannibals. I know we have certain images in our mind when we talk about cannibals, but we’re talking about animism, heavy spiritualism, tremendous amounts of fear,” Dekker says.

This is the most ridiculous descriptions of a place that I have ever read. Perceiving the jungle as dark and bad is a dualistic conceptualization that draws rigid lines between “us” and “them”. Such dialogue only tries to express superiority of one way of thinking over another. The social dynamics of a culture cannot be understood by juxtaposing dominant and marginalized discourses. Animism is the belief that souls don’t only exist in humans, but also in animals, plants, even geological features like volcanoes. Heavy spiritualism is dark? Dekker’s parents were Christian missionaries, obviously very devoted to their religion, that is very heavy spiritualism.

Indigenous identities have been suppressed and damaged by hundreds of years of colonization. The image of the cannibal is part of of this. This image has long been used to justify racism and point out difference.

Ted Dekker tries to inject [the] remembered anxiety [of hearing about two people being cannibalized when he was 6 years old] into his work. “I grew up in this environment, and it affected the way I viewed light and darkness. My parents brought into that very dark [and] ominous setting hope, light, penicillin, hygiene. The culture changed dramatically, not as a result of Christianity — at least not upfront — but as a result of them bringing into a very dark place hope and light. My stories reflect that paradigm shift.”

The truth here is that Dekker never let go of a dramatized version of his childhood and has been successful in exploiting that. Letting go and growing up would require recognition of the Kangime as a beautiful human culture whose practices were and are just as valid as his Christian heritage. He would have to de-romanticize them and see them as unique people with individual hopes, dreams and memories and whose understandings of the world are shaped by their own cultural and personal experiences.

The other truth here is that Eric Marrapodi confuses taboo and criminal cannibalism with culturally accepted ritual cannibalism. In the 1960s and ’70s there were a lot of trials in New Guinea where people stood on trial for cannibalism. Many were acquitted because the practice was not wrong in the eyes of their communities. There are few, if any, societies left today where cannibalism is an accepted ritual. That doesn’t change that the rhetoric of cannibals as blood-thirsty savages is biased, prejudice and perpetuates the marginalization of minorities.

The postcononial guilt has recognized victimization of indigenous peoples sometimes to the point of robbing them of their agency by interpreting the noble savage as having an inherently indigenous way of thing about the world without individual autonomy. Cannibals have not yet fallen under that romanticized ideal and instead are used for a dualistic dance to further civilize all those who aren’t involved in what the dominant culture perceives as disgusting, horrific, and primitive. This historical and cultural construct of the savage native has pervaded our minds for too long. These constructs have become more than an imaginary perception into a serious reality played out everyday, like in this news article.

A journalist has a responsibility to be non-biased in his or her reporting. Bias is impossible to completely get rid of, but definitely don’t use prejudice stereotypes. The factual-type language he uses (such as “true-life horrors” and “living with cannibals…[is] helpful background for…writ[ing] novels about serial killers”) is ridiculous. He wrote this as if it was a common sense, non-prejudice, everyone-can-relate kind of idea. You get an F on this one Marapoddi, better luck next time.

I could go into my views on missionaries, but that’s a whole other blog.