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“Blood Country” by Paul Auster and Spencer Ostrander: autopsy of American violence

sangBy Serge Bressan – Lagrandeparade.fr / Some talk about “mass killings”. Others speak of “mass shootings”. In two days at the end of January 2023, the United States experienced horror. First, a man enters a nightclub in the suburbs of Los Angeles, he shoots, balance sheet: 11 dead, 9 injured. Forty-eight hours later, in farms in San Francisco Bay, another man shoots: 9 dead. During the first three weeks of this year 2023, thirty-nine “mass shootings” took place. On average, more than 130 people are killed by gunfire every day in the United States. Faced with this increase in armed violence, no State is spared. The United States is indeed a global aberration in terms of weapons: according to the Small Arms Survey (SAS), the country has 120 weapons per 100 inhabitants. No country in the world has so many… and the question arises: why is the United States the most violent country in the Western world?

A man, Spencer Ostrander, 39, became interested in what some sociologists specializing in American affairs call an “epidemic”. A photographer living in New York for twenty years, he is the author of two books published in 2022, “Long Live King Kobe” and “Time Square in the Rain”. Above all, he initiated a large-scale photographic project: fixing on film and paper more than thirty sites where, in the United States, mass killings were perpetrated. Black and white shots – each time, in legend, the place, the date, the number of dead and wounded. For example: Kirkwood, Missouri. February 7, 2008. 7 dead, 1 injured, or Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Parkland, Florida. February 14, 2018. 17 dead, 17 injured…
Another man was aware of the work and photos of Spencer Ostrander: he is one of the most prestigious contemporary American writers, born in New Jersey and living in Brooklyn. Paul Auster, 75, author of, among others, “Leviathan”, “4 3 2 1” and “Burning Boy”, is also the stepfather of Spencer Ostrander. Logically, he became aware of the work of the photographer whose work he describes as “photographs of silence”, they joined forces, the result, a book: “Pays de sang”. Subtitle: “A History of Gun Violence in the United States”. In a recent interview with a British newspaper, the writer confided: “The right to own a weapon in the United States is considered a kind of Holy Grail”… And, from the outset, he takes care to specify: “I I never owned a gun. Anyway, not a real one, but for two or three years after the period of childbirth, I walked around with a six-shooter in the hip. I was a Texan, even though I lived in suburban Newark, New Jersey, because in the early 1950s the Wild West was everywhere”…
The history of American violence is written in the personal and family history of Paul Auster. He says: “On January 23, 1919 (…) my grandmother shot my grandfather and killed him”, his father was only 6 years old and his uncle, who witnessed the murder, barely three moreover. The grandmother was tried in Wisconsin but acquitted for “temporary insanity” and settled with her children in New Jersey, near New York. Again Auster: “The weapon had caused all this; not only did the children no longer have a father, but they lived knowing that their mother had killed him”… In “Pays de sang”, Paul Auster also recalls that he knows how to be a polemicist – an exercise he had already practiced in 2009 with “Alone in the dark”, a pamphlet novel against America during the Bush years. This time, he tries to know, to understand by unfolding the history of gun violence in the United States – his story and his analysis run from the “prehistory” of the country to the present day and point to this problem of possession. gun law that divides the country into two fundamentally irreconcilable camps. By firearms, America fractured… And Paul Auster, to note: “The cracks in American society are continually widening to become vast chasms of empty space”…

country of blood
Authors: Paul Auster (text), Spencer Ostrander (photos)
Translation: Anne-Laure Tissut
Editions: Actes Sud
Publication: February 8, 2023
Prix : 26 €

According to a recent estimate from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute, residents of the United States currently own 393 million firearms, or more than one gun for every man, woman and child in this country. Every year, about 40,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds, roughly equal to the annual death toll on American roads and highways. Of these 40,000 gun deaths, more than half are suicides, a number which in turn equals half of the annual suicides. If we add to that murders by gunshot, accidental deaths caused by gunfire, executions by gunfire during police operations, the average amounts to more than 100 Americans killed by gunshot every day.

From the same author:

“Burning Boy” by Paul Auster: homage to the “bad boy” of American literature

A Life in Words: All About Paul Auster

4 3 2 1: Paul Auster, one character, four possible lives…

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