Transcriber: Ustina Kamal Reviewer: David DeRuwe
For 18 years of my life, I had but one single goal ...
to find the man who had wronged me
and to murder him.
All that time, I plotted in secret.
I didn't tell a single friend.
I grew up in Liberia, West Africa,
in the warm African sun.
Each afternoon, I would play in the sands and bushes
around my family home.
Each afternoon, I'd come running home
as soon as I saw my father's car in the driveway.
See, because my one job was to get his briefcase out of the car,
take it to his room,
get his slippers, bring those out,
and take off his shoes and socks.
My father, or as I would call him "my pa,"
was my hero.
The person I wanted to be like.
The person I lived to please.
I turned eleven in 1990,
and the climate in Liberia changed overnight.
There was a civil war going on,
and the front line of that war inched closer and closer
to where we lived.
My father worked for the government,
and we had the same last name as the dictator being overthrown.
Fearing for our lives,
my father sent me to live with my older brother
until things returned to normal.
Two years later, Liberia was ravaged
by civil war,
and I was a refugee in Ghana.
One day, I received a letter
that turned my life upside down.
It was from my brother Lemuel.
He said to me, "Our father turned himself in to rebels.
He was interrogated, led away,
and never seen again by his family."
Tears streamed down my face.
In a matter of 16 months,
I had gone from beloved son to orphaned refugee.
As the days became weeks, I resolved to find the man who did this
and to murder him.
This dark secret governed my life.
Three years after leaving Liberia,
my brother, his wife and his family -
we were resettled in Massachusetts as refugees.
I started school here.
My English was great, but my brain wasn't.
I couldn't bear to tell anyone that I was a refugee.
I couldn't bear to tell anyone
that my father had been brutally murdered -
not my teachers, not my friends.
I went from an academic achiever in Liberia
to barely getting Cs and Ds in America.
See, because during tests and quizzes,
my mind would drift back to the war, back to my pa,
and back to the man I called General X.
Alone at night, I'd sit across from an empty chair
and interrogate the man who had killed my father.
I'd say to him, "How could you kill someone so dear?
How could you kill my pa?
Did you even know he had a son?
Did he plead with you when you snuffed out his life?
I need to know
because that man that you killed
was my father."
Suddenly, the scene would shift.
Back in Liberia, in my hands awaits -
cold in my fingertips, but warm in my palms -
in my right hand, a machete and a pistol.
Right there before me, he's begging me,
"Don't do this!
Don't do this!"
I feel powerful.
He's on his elbows, crawling backwards.
I can see the fright in his eyes,
the tears,
and he's begging me, "Don't do this. Don't do this."
All of a sudden, he stops moving.
In a flash, I raise my right hand,
and I plunge the machete deep into his ribs.
As he lays there groaning,
clinging to life,
I'd hurriedly reach into my waistband
and pull out my pistol
and plant a bullet so far into his brain
that everything about him ceases to exist ...
his body, his mind, his soul.
Every molecule of carbon dioxide he'd ever breathed
vanishes,
like he'd never even existed.
No one would ever remember him.
Then, I'd catch myself
back in my living room with spit dripping from my lips,
my muscles so tight from screaming
that I needed water.
See, I hated General X
for what he did to my father.
But I hated him because of what he did to me.
My whole life was ruled by thoughts of him.
My most intimate moments were framed by the anger
of not having my parents there.
I graduated high school and college.
I celebrated lots of birthdays.
No parents.
He took from me what I could never get back:
a sense of belonging,
a sense of unconditional love.
No one in my life had any idea,
but for 16 years, this violent fantasy played,
repeated over and over, and got more and more intense,
from the time I was 12 and a refugee in Ghana
until I was 28 in America.
So I found myself sitting across from a grief counselor in Denver.
She said to me,
"Could you live the rest of your life, Marcus, the way you are today?"
And I knew I couldn't.
So I began doing the inconceivable.
I began reaching back to my faith.
Right there in my living room, ironically the same place
where my revenge fantasies played out, came to life,
I read Jesus's words.
So if you forgive other people when they sin against you,
your heavenly father also will forgive you;
but if you do not forgive others,
your heavenly father will not forgive you.
And so, after 18 years of secretly plotting revenge,
I was faced with an impossible alternative:
Forgiveness.
How could I?
If my sole reason for living was to kill this man,
how could I?
Who would there be for me
if I chose to forgive him?
And so, increasingly,
in my conversations with the chair,
I'd drop my machete,
and we'd sit and we'd talk,
or I'd end my interrogation with the words,
"I forgive you."
I have not forgotten the crimes committed,
the injustices,
because forgetting devalues the lives lost.
Forgiveness isn't the opposite of justice; it doesn't negate justice.
Forgiveness paves the way for reconciliation.
It is not naive;
it's courageous.
(Applause)
And it's not simplistic;
it's knowledgeable.
Because forgiveness frees people like me
from living a life
clouded by anger and revenge.
And so, 20 years after leaving Liberia,
I boarded a plane and went back to Liberia.
I had come full circle.
I was going to find him,
not to plunge a machete through his ribs,
but to embrace him.
Liberia was what I remembered, but it was a shadow of itself.
I would be looking for one single rebel,
someone who wouldn't want to be found.
A needle in a stack of needles,
in a society emerging from its pain,
in a country desperately trying to move past
its darkness hour.
I searched for few weeks
and asked a few people if they knew him.
Then I found myself in a local barber shop,
a little booth on the side of the road, made from two-by-fours.
As I stepped into the tiny shop,
I could tell that I was no longer a part of the society
that I loved.
The men in the shop could smell the America on me,
(Laughter)
but they were courteous and kind.
I paid the barber generously in American dollars,
and he began cutting my hair, slowly and really carefully.
As he got to shaving my face,
he held the blade close to my neck,
and I flinched.
See, because 20 years earlier, these men would have killed me.
Some of them had probably killed people that I knew.
But there we were, in that barber shop together,
and I began to realize
that these former child soldiers were not the monsters I had imagined.
They had lost their childhood just like I had.
They were outcasts,
trapped by their past, desperately trying to move forward.
We had very little in common,
yet we had everything in common.
They went to sleep each night
reliving the lives they took.
I went to sleep for years
imagining their demise.
General X was nowhere to be found,
but what I did find in Monrovia
were hundreds of General Xs
littered all over Monrovia.
Young men and women
who had been coerced into committing horrendous crimes.
I found out General X's real name,
but to my disappointment, he was dead.
He died in 1996.
So for almost two decades of my life, I was obsessing with a man
who had been dead for 14 years.
But I had already forgiven him,
and so I was free.
I came back to America,
sat in my apartment across from the empty chair ...
relieved.
There was a time in my life
where I couldn't bring myself to tell this story
because it was too messy.
But now I have closure.
I smile now when I talk about my parents.
I smile because a murderer did not determine my father's legacy,
and I had set myself free from the prison of unforgiveness.
In this life, people take things from us
that we can never ever get back.
For some, it's your innocence
or your trust.
It's easy for us to lose faith in humanity,
in community, in people, in family.
We let hate occupy so much real estate in our minds,
choosing to relive terrible thoughts.
Forgiveness is not the opposite of justice.
It does not negate justice.
Justice has to keep its course,
but forgiveness is human to human.
It's good for us.
No one deserves
to be defined by the worst moments of their life.
(Applause)
We all deserve forgiveness,
and in that forgiveness,
we can be set free.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Cheers)