Alexa Hagerty (Hachette)
NOWADAYS, we are all familiar with forensic anthropology. Shows like Bones and Silent Witness taught us to expect meticulously excavated bodies assembled on tables, elaborate chemical assays and computer-assisted reconstructions of fatal injuries. The anthropologists quip darkly over the remains and solve the case within an hour. The stories are fun, but implausibly neat.
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In contrast, social anthropologist Alexa Hagerty’s Still Life With Bones is the real thing: an unvarnished account of forensic anthropologists uncovering and identifying victims of atrocities. It is moving and beautiful, harrowing and horrifying. And the horror doesn’t come from cartoonishly gruesome details about maggots and decay, but from a quiet, certain knowledge of evil.
The story returns many times to a well in Argentina – a dumping ground for the victims of state-sanctioned murder – as it is being excavated, layer by appalling layer. The repeated image of human bodies, crammed and twisted into strata, takes on a nightmarish quality. At one point, Hagerty, who worked on the exhumation, writes that she no longer thinks people are good. In many ways, the book is her attempt to come to terms with this.
The well was part of the atrocities committed during the rule of the Argentine military junta of 1976 to 1983. The junta came to power in a coup d’état and “disappeared” thousands of people who resisted it.
Hagerty also worked on exhumations that were the result of atrocities committed during the Guatemalan civil war of 1960 to 1996. This war originated in 1954, when a coup engineered by the US Central Intelligence Agency overthrew a democratically elected left-wing government and installed a right-wing dictatorship.
Six years later, left-wing military officers failed to oust it and decades of violence ensued, killing about 200,000 people. The government routinely violated human rights and committed genocide against the Indigenous Maya people. Despite a peace accord in 1996, the Guatemalan military still exerts disproportionate power and violence is endemic in the country.
While her book does describe anatomy and how skeletons are reconstructed, her focus is more on social aspects. She criticises the idea that grief proceeds in predictable stages, describing it instead as an ongoing process. Her conversations with survivors, and the relatives of the dead and disappeared, show how the scars remain decades later.
A single sentence can stop you in your tracks. Hagerty isn’t one for purple prose: her descriptions are often simple and clear, and the more appalling for that. Several times, I had to stop and do something else while I processed what I had read.
The exhumations took a dreadful toll. Hagerty experienced physical and mental health difficulties: on one occasion, she hallucinated the ghosts of three of the dead people in her flat. Now, she works in fields like surveillance and human rights, aiming to prevent similar atrocities.
She is honest about her position as a kind of tourist, wondering if she has the right to insert herself into other people’s suffering. Hagerty decides that it may be a myth that exhumations provide closure, but they can deliver empowerment, as the evidence can help prosecute and convict perpetrators.
Still Life With Bones is stark and upsetting, but also deeply humane and shot through with a hard-won wisdom. You will see forensics in a new light.
Michael Marshall is a writer based in Devon, UK
