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Wednesday, December 30, 2009
IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (AND I FEEL FINE)
R.E.M.
Document
I.R.S. : 1987
[Buy It]
CROSSEYED AND PAINLESS
Talking Heads
Remain in Light
Sire : 1980
[Buy It]
ONCE IN A LIFETIME
Talking Heads
Remain in Light
Sire : 1980
[Buy It]
COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE
Fela Anikulapo Kuti & Africa 70
Coffin For Head of State
Kalakuta : 1981
[Buy It]
Hi. I'm new to Moistworks. I'll do my best to be as good to you as Ben and your other regulars. In fact, Ben's why I'm here in the first place. When I read his post a few weeks ago about distant pain and local pain and the ways in which the first may obscure our ability to deal with the second, it prompted a lot of thinking, which resulted in a lot of writing.
Two years ago, I got a copy of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer, for Christmas. I was working on a novel concerned with memory and the senses, and when I read a chapter on Whitman's experience with wounded Civil War soldiers, a passage about phantom limb struck me as the perfect metaphor for memory: like the phantom limb, it's as invisible to others but as real to the self as an itch. The next day, I heard an interview on BBC with a survivor of the civil war in Sierra Leone. As he spoke, I wondered how he dealt with his phantoms – his memories, and the limb I imagined he lost, knowing that the conflict left countless amputees. His twenty seconds lapsed, the BBC anchor moved on, but the man's life continued. That, too, struck me as an application of the metaphor - the lives of survivors persist beyond media coverage of conflict, and are no less real for being invisible to us.
I fixated on phantom limb, and after some digging found that one treatment involves holding a mirror in such a way that the remaining limb appears in the reflection where the missing limb would be. The perceived reality is thus made to match the imagined reality, and the pain subsides. Could oral history be a kind of mirror treatment to survivors of war? Might rendering the invisible past assuage, even a little bit, the mind's longing for what is lost? I had long understood the importance of paying attention to atrocity, but Ben's piece gave me pause (and cause) to think about why I think it's so necessary for "us" to look. More than anything, it made me reflect on my own interest in conflicts far from home. Six months after I read the passage on phantom limb, I was interviewing landmine survivors in Cambodia Though I was ill-equipped - in language, time, or emotional know-how – to handle the stories I was hearing, I immersed myself. I abandoned my novel for this project. I strained my marriage. I left my four-year-old son for two weeks. I did it all because I believed that these were stories that needed to be told, yes, but also because it was the kind of work I wanted to see myself as capable of doing. And yet, when I read Ben's essays, I was reminded of some of the doubts that accompanied my conviction. Was I just one of his soulful solipsists, paying attention to far-flung conflicts to satisfy an image of myself as principled, and in so doing avoiding challenges closer to home?
I hoped not.
I'll admit that my engagement favors intellectual over inter-personal growth. I could think and write all day about the importance of creating space for survivors to speak out and be heard, to tell their own stories in their own words, but I will hold my own silence indefinitely in order to avoid confrontation with friends and family. And it is certainly easier to think and write all day than it is to actually do: the intensive research and planning I did for Cambodia was one of the most intellectually stimulating times of my adult life so far, but when it came time to do my first in-person interview, I choked. I am still reeling from my failure to live up to my own expectations for that trip, and am haunted by a sense of unmet responsibility to the people who entrusted their stories to me. Cambodia was a third rail in my mental life for a full year after I came home. It made me insular. I retreated, wrote fiction that was close to home.
If this was a return to the local, though, it was unfamiliar ground. The ease with which I could stop engaging with Cambodia made me deeply uneasy. I rail against how disposable distant conflicts seem here, the fetishized depictions of suffering and poverty that are as unsurprising as Tiger Woods' affairs yet eminently more dismissible: for their distance, for their anonymity, for their intractability. We feel pity, and feel better about our own lives, and feel like better people for having seen how much worse life can be, and are not really invited to wonder what, if anything, that life has to do with us. REM has addressed this issue--the distance between distant tragedy and our experience of that tragedy-in a song that often is read ironically but which seems to me entirely straightforward: It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine). Even if we do let it get to us, we don't always know what the "it" is that's getting to us, or what the "us" is that's being affected. This is in Ben's essay, too - - he says that by lamenting horrible conditions elsewhere we are "making a monument to my own powerlessness." Was that what I was doing? As I was mulling over all this the past few days, I read a lot of Carolyn Forche. These lines from her poem "Return" struck a chord with me:Your problem is not your
life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left. That's what's missing from whatever alchemy of thought and feeling and experience feeds my moral imagination and informs my sense of what "we" should look at. My sense of my own life cleaves close to the lives of "people" in general. Ben draws a geographic distinction between the local and the distant - situations you can have a tangible impact on versus those you can't actually touch - but another distinction one might draw is less about distance than it is about perception. There are people I "know" because I interact with them. There are people I "know" because I hear their stories. And there are people I don't know at all, but imagine intensely. Still, for me, this act of imagining draws a line from me to that other person. Though this may expose boundary issues (feeling responsible for things that aren't my responsibility) it also establishes some foundational morality.
Ben draws a distinction between passive observers and people who feel international grief and then act upon it. I acted, to a degree. I went to Cambodia. But my experience there was not ideal by any means, and the way that it was limited activates many of Ben's questions about powerlessness. I had only ten days and no Khmer language skills, and my interviews were arranged through organizations and not organic encounters, and forcing the point in this way set me up to fail my own impossible expectations. But why do I spend so much energy caring about distant strangers in the first place? Here's one answer: At the core of this is my conviction that humans are interestingly complex to the individual; nothing compels me more than my desire to know or imagine other people in all their mess and nuance. It's why I write fiction. It's why I love stories. And my heart for people as individuals is why I feel so strongly when I hear about conflict or injustices that fragment and violate and extinguish the lives of so many. But this effect has two parts that pull at one another. It helps me imagine individuals, and I feel grief. But the the window that opens to such conflict or injustice often itself suppresses individuality. As Ben points out, and David Byrne confirms, people who feel grief far away are sometimes only
numbers:Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out. Individuals are subsumed, their stories essentialized, lost, mis- or not represented. There are not often particulars, and where a story is offered, it is told through a human-interest lens, made superficial and palatable for an American audience. So what to do? How to answer Ben's questions about my motives, or the overall importance of caring about things that are so far away?
I'm going to paraphrase Charles Simic. He once wrote something like, don't use a number like five million to indicate, for instance, the number of people who have died in the First and Second Congo Wars. Instead write 5,000,001. That dangling unit disrupts the statistic, reminds one what it means, gives the number some visual traction where statistics typically fail to gain hold. I thought of this over the weekend, when I saw Fela!, the Broadway musical portrait of the life of Fela Kuti. In the final scene, Fela brings his mother's coffin to the steps of an army general, demanding that the powers that responsible for her death look at what they've done. That happened, in 1977, and in the musical version, Fela's compatriots stacked tens of other coffins alongside his mother's, demanding in song:Them no want take am
Them no want take am
Who go want take coffin?
Them must take am Each coffin functioned like Simic's dangling "1," suggesting an individual, each a single death, a particular loss. And in the audience, I had my typical reaction. I felt compelled but I also I felt implicated: Who go want take coffin? I felt asked to carry that burden.
The work I wanted to do in Cambodia years back was impossible to accomplish with the time I had available. I couldn't be gone from my son for more than two weeks, and though I came home from Cambodia feeling like fiction was the best medium for me to explore the subject, instead I wrote fiction set in rural Ontario. Lately I've been ready to peek out again. I don't want to write safe, sturdy fiction. But what to write, when I'm tethered to Brooklyn? Imagination is leash-less, I know. It is for unleashing. I once heard Zakes Mda say, "Write what you don't know - write what you wonder." Fiction is the best way to explore, to activate empathy, I tell myself. But sticking close to home is hard. I always was driven to move, to wander. When I was nineteen and depressed, I left Georgetown for a semester in Turkey. When I was twenty and depressed, I left Georgetown for a semester in South Africa. I have a tendency to suggests trips to my husband when I feel the neighborhood closing in: let's go to Tanzania, Bali, Berlin. Let's go back to Cape Town. Let's move to Vancouver, Nova Scotia, Paris, let's go teach English in Bangladesh. But I stay in Brooklyn. I wanted to be a doer, and then a writer, and instead what I do is write.You may ask yourself
Well
How did I get here? But what does it say, that I see that as one of my life's disappointments: my comfort, my family, my success? What a disgusting and childish thing. And who's to say I even would have survived any trial by fire? It's easy enough to picture myself at eighteen, starting down a different path, toward being eaten by a bulldozer in Gaza, or murdered in Khayelitsha, another half-formed American martyr. But that was never me. I was interested in nuance and stories even then, and I cared too much about living. I was open, but intuitively cautious when I needed to be.
So does this answer Ben's question about why we look at distant atrocities? It could be as simple as this: my attention to distant conflict is my way of engaging with my mind what I once hoped to grapple with in person. It seems patently obvious now that I could siphon or convert some of that energy toward attention to conflict closer to home, my inner push and pull. I said before that nothing compels me more than my desire to know or imagine other people in all their mess and nuance fiction. But I avoid my own mess at all costs, despite the fact that my secret inner wounds are where I am most essentially, individually human. It's near the place that pains when I hear stories of atrocity, and though I would never equate them, I shouldn't privilege the extreme pain of distant others over the emotional pain I feel or inflict.
--Posted by Nicki
[Photograph by Nura Qureshi.]Labels: activism, global consciousness, nicki
posted by Ben
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