A Man of Letters Inserts Himself Into Sudan Debate

Renaissance scholar Eric Reeves had never set foot in Africa. He spent his days teaching the works of Shakespeare and Milton to the young women of Smith College in Massachusetts. But that didn't keep him from getting involved with the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. From his office at Smith, Reeves has becomea leading activist against the genocide.

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A troubled part of Africa gets an unlikely advocate in this next item. It's the story of Eric Reeves. He is a Smith College professor of renaissance literature. And he's become one of the world's authorities on the violent conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. His command central is a cramped home office in a small New England town. From member station, WFCR, Caren Brown reports.

Eric Reeves upstairs den in Northampton, Massachusetts is testament to the yen and yen of his professional life. Portraits of Charles Dickens share wall space with political maps of Africa. The poetry of W. H. Auden sits on a bookshelf next to Samantha powers' seminal book on genocide. Most of his novels are collecting dust.

I read very very little that's not related to Darfur or the course I'm teaching which's, the moment is Shakespeare. And that's a strangely bifurcated life I can assure you.

Reeves remembers the moment when his life split in two. It was 1998. The humanitarian organization, Doctors without Borders had just named the Sudan Civil War, the most underreported crisis in the world. Reeves, a long-time donor to the group was talking to the executive director.

And we were lamenting Sudan's invisibility, the intractability, the conflict, and I said something like I'll see what I can do.

In the eight years since, Reeves has published more than 100 articles and op-eds. He speaks at congressional hearings and writes a weekly 6000-word analysis of Darfur which is read online by key policymakers and activists. It goes beyond armchair blogging. He gets information from highly placed confidential sources in Sudan and pores over stacks of original documents.

These are various files. The International Criminal Court, and the reports from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty international, mortality reports.

At 56, Reeves is tall and fit with a youthful face and gentle demeanor. But don't let it fool you. Reeves was among the first to label the killing of 9 Arab civilians in Darfur genocide. And his meticulous death count now close to half a million people blew previous estimates out of the water. He is on the enemy list of the Sudanese government which has spent thousands of dollars on mailings to discredit him.

Hello?
This could explain why journalists look to him even beyond his expertise. Here is Radio France calling him to comment on Ethiopia's former dictator.

Actually I work only on Sudan. So I really wouldn't be able to comment on that trial.

Reeves makes no money from his political work. He donates all speaking fees to a Sudan charity he founded. There is something else that keeps him going.

I'm pretty much always angry, extremely angry at the international community for failing to respond to what we have known to be genocide. And I see part of my task as creating a(n) historical record that is simply irrefutable so that somebody going back, looking archivally at what I've written. We will see what we knew and when we knew it.

Reeves came of an age in the Vietnam era. He still carries his conscientious objecter card. Today he rattles off details of U. N. resolutions and military budgets the way other people talked about batting averages. His friends say his encyclopedic knowledge is matched only by his passion for sharing it.

You can see it in his eye. You can see it in the words that he used.

Ten Darnea is an African specialist for the congressional research service. He says Reeves takes every individual tragedy in Sudan personally.

It's as if they're family. You know, a loss of life in a remote village in Darfur. When you call Eric, you know he is really sad and in the bad mood. And he writes about it the next day.

Reeves has enjoyed a few incremental victories including a college divestment campaign. There have also been personal costs. His two daughters went through adolescence while Reeves was consumed by his cause. His wife Nancy says the family understands that Darfur needs him right now.

Eric's very persuasive. It's hard to deny it. This is the important moment that it is. Even a diagnosis of leukemia two years ago, only focused his efforts.

It was always easy to get up no matter how wretched I felt after chemotherapy. I always had something to do that meant a great deal. And I didn't have to go any further than my computer.

Eric Reeves' leukemia is in remission. And he is only working half time for Smith. But he still hasn't gotten to the 3-foot stack of book reviews by his bed.

I dream as that peace will come to Sudan, I will return to being a professor of English, and I will teach a seminar in the short fiction of Alice Munroe. At the moment it seems like a very far off dream, but that's the dream.

For NPR news, I am Carmen Brown. Trying our dose at NPR's your health, a podcast that's good for your body. Get a full prescription at NPR. org/podcasts.
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cramped
a cramped room, building etc does not have enough space for the people in it [?? crowded]:
The kitchen was small and cramped.
a cramped apartment
The troops slept in cramped conditions with up to 20 in a single room.
yen
[singular] a strong desire
yen for
a yen for foreign travel
yen to do something
She'd always had a yen to write a book.
seminal
formal
a seminal article, book etc is important, and influences the way things develop in the future:
a seminal study of eighteenth-century France
bifurcate
formal if a road, river etc bifurcates, it divides into two separate parts
op-ed
op-ed page/articleTCN a page in a newspaper that has articles containing opinions on various subjects, or one of these articles
armchair traveller/fan etc someone who talks or reads about being a traveller, or watches sport on television but does not have any real experience of doing it:
Her books about her adventures give enjoyment and inspiration to armchair travellers.
Armchair fans will have to pay extra to watch the best games live.
pore over something phrasal verb
to read or look at something very carefully for a long time:
She was poring over a book
blow somebody/something out of the water to defeat someone or something that you are competing with, or to achieve much more than they do:
Motown had blown all the other record companies out of the water.
irrefutable
an irrefutable statement, argument etc cannot be proved to be wrong, and must be accepted
irrefutable evidence/proof/facts
irrefutable proof of his innocence
conscientious objecter
someone who refuses to become a soldier because of their moral or religious beliefs
divestment
the process of taking your money out of a company by selling your shares in it [≠ investment]
in remission
a period when a serious illness improves for a time
in remission
The chemotherapy was successful, and she is now in remission.
The cancer has gone into remission.

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