American Labasha
Daniel Alarcón
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“Everyone in Paraguay has the same fingerprints. There are crimes but people chosen at random are punished for them. Everyone is liable for everything.”
—Donald Barthelme, “Paraguay”
While I was researching my first novel, I came across a passage in Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Emperor that I’ve never quite been able to shake. In it, he describes Haile Selassie’s attempts to modernize Ethiopia in the years immediately preceding the fall of his government. In the more distant and isolated provinces of the empire, there was, according to one of Kapuściński’s informants, an antique ritual called labasha that took the place of a criminal justice system. It worked this way: a community is confronted with a crime—a theft, for example—and instead of making any attempt to discover who is responsible, the people of the village select a child, usually a boy, and stupefy him with a potent herbal tea. Under the herb’s hallucinogenic effects, the drunk child stumbles about, and eventually, based on signifiers only the boy in his altered state can know—the color of a woman’s dress, a man’s posture or the geometric pattern of his shirt—he identifies the culprit. No further proof of guilt is necessary. This person, whoever they are, is then punished according to whatever crime they have now been convicted of.
In the case of theft, his or her hands and legs are amputated.
Naturally, this strikes those of modern sensibilities as particularly cruel, as deplorable and essentially unjust. And it is all those things—to punish people at random for crimes they have not committed certainly offends our notions of right and wrong. We like to believe that power is not arbitrary, and indeed, in the best of times, under the best circumstances, it may not be. But as this passage lingered, and eventually insinuated itself into the novel I was writing, I decided it would be a mistake to think of labasha as foreign or strange. If anything, it is simply a corrupt version of something we see all too often: in many ways, in many states, punishment is random. And the more complex and troubled the political situation, the more random it becomes.
