Where She Was Standing

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

An opening epigram sets the tone for poet Maggie Helwig’s first novel:
“Someone says on the phone, How do you know they have disappeared? She
says, We know they were at a demonstration, we know people were
arrested. No one saw their bodies, and they weren’t in the hospital.
The government says they aren’t in jail, there are no records of them.
But none of their friends or family have seen them since. He says, But
how do you know they have disappeared?”

Perhaps the only way to get inside the horrors of East Timor’s
invasion by Indonesia in the early 1990s is through the use of a poetic
sensibility—a poet’s ability to seize moments of emotional power, of
grief and horror, and render them intelligible. In Where She Was
Standing, Helwig has succeeded in creating characters who “kneel at
the feet of the damaged world.” Rachel Seabrooke works at the Rights
Project, a London-based sibling of Amnesty International. She heads the
South Asian desk, and her central responsibility now is the
deteriorating situation in East Timor. A massacre of demonstrators by
the occupying Indonesian army has taken place, and among the victims was
Lisa James, a young Canadian art student whose lost camera might contain
footage of the killings—footage the army is desperate to suppress.

Within this framework, Helwig has developed several stories, all of
which involve the intensely modern theme of people disappearing, people
on the edge, people victimized by an occupying power. Rachel’s
difficult love affair with Edward, a doctor involved with London’s
destitute underclass, serves as a microcosm of the global subjects of
power and terrorism. This is a strong novel, well visualized and
carefully researched.