We are asked, in comradeship, to contemplate the politics of disaster and aid in the wake of the tsunami. I am reluctant to participate because I am full of cynicism and because words seem raucous and jarring amidst the stunning silence of death. To what end do we write?
To keep alive the memory of what has happened? The tsunami has been normalized as an icon in our circuits of representation. It is now a regular feature in newspapers, webpages, shopping channels – an insert at the margins of news and consumption to which we can allocate what our hearts desire, in the name of benevolence, charity, and development. But these technologies of marginal memory cannot – they do not wish to – compete with momentous media-events. The freedom fest of the Iraqi elections is brought to us live, 24 hours a day, soon to be superseded by what the American media is gleefully billing as the event of the century: the trial of Michael Jackson.
To what end do we write? To create a narrative and text to counter what seems less rational, less sombre – tsunami in the space of televisuality? The Living Channel (TLC), in addition to its regular repertoire of reality shows, now promises a new one: “The Tsunami: Tales of Survival.” Might this nudge the real not-real “Survivor” off the ratings charts? But can our narrative escape this production of drama, fiction, entertainment and profit? The tsunami was real for me because I witnessed its aftermath on BBC World, because I heard the testimonials of the living and watched the piles of the dead. I bore witness to hyper-reality. This is the basis of my writing.
To what end do we write? I teach international development, tracings its genealogies and trajectories of domination, empire, subalternity, insurgency. I am indignant but also intrigued as the world competes to give aid. In the days following the tsunami, I am in Cairo and then in Calcutta. Everyone is talking about the cavalier George Bush on his cowboy vacation at his mock White House in Crawford, Texas. Everyone is talking about the stingy United States. The EU, Japan, these are named for not just being rich but also for being civilized. They give, they give more. No one is talking about how some of the richest nations, such as Saudi Arabia, are truly miserly. “Saudi Arabia gave less to the Muslim tsunami victims ($30 million) than the amount spent by King Fahd’s entourage on his last two vacations in Marbella (reportedly $100 million).” But then this is a line from Thomas Friedman (New York Times, January 17, 2005). I now quote Thomas Friedman! To what end does he write? He laments that the meager American aid efforts, while important, pale in comparison to the urgency of the more important task: spreading the gospel of the golden arches – free market capitalism and liberal democracy – to the Muslim world. So many Muslim futures are at stake. Our future is at stake.
Africa complains. Or rather the United Nations, speaking on behalf of Africa, complains. There is great worry that no one cares to allocate aid to the grinding tragedies of poverty, AIDS, civil war – the non-stop crisis that is Africa, the underdevelopment that takes lives on a regular basis, like a gentle tsunami that never stops flowing. Would it be worthwhile to pile up the corpses? Would the world then notice?
To what end do we give? For compassion? As charity? I am in India. It is early January. Trainloads of aid and donations make their way to Tamil Nadu. They are filled with used clothes. The reporters keep reminding the “public” that the fishermen and women rendered homeless and assetless by the tsunami are too proud to wear used clothes. Do they have the right to thus refuse? In the compassionate transaction of aid, can those who are being saved enact a politics of disavowal? Others send cooked food. But the rice and daal and sabzi rot before they get anywhere. The Indian media brainstorm on every nightly news, presenting alternative ways of giving. They showcase Vivek Oberoi, the boyishly handsome Bollywood star who made his way to Tamil Nadu right after the tsunami and stayed in a village to assist with physical reconstruction. He encourages his Bollywood colleagues to not only donate money but also their time and energy – to adopt a village, to be there, to build trust. He is the Bollywood-style Peace Corps volunteer. Despite W’s public relations campaign, no American soldier lugging drinking water and food packets can match his charm. But two days later Oberoi has to return to Bollywood. The most important film of his career, the epic `Kisna,’ is about to open. I sound critical. But I should note that in the meantime, I have not stirred from my middle-class Calcutta, where I am spending a few days with my parents.
To what end do we give? The missionaries flock to Asia, hoping to spread hope. There is the teenage girl from Texas posing with orphans in Sri Lanka. They are in the New York Times. Father Bush and Bill Clinton launch a joint public service announcement seeking donations from Americans. The donations are coordinated through the volunteer network that George W. Bush launched in 2002: USA Freedom Corps. The website runs a series of homilies from the president: “make a difference, volunteer.” “A strong and prosperous nation must also be a compassionate nation.”
So much giving and yet I am impatient with these transactions of benevolence. I am back at Berkeley and I am teaching. Our first case-study is the politics of urban redevelopment and we are studying the reconstruction of Ground Zero. In teaching about the crater of disaster that is Ground Zero, I teach not about compassion but rather about compensation. Yes, the calculation of compensation has been a spectacle, where the actuarial worth of the stockbroker from New Jersey is compared to the restaurant worker from Queens. In responding to accusations that such differences in monetary compensation are unAmerican, Kenneth Feinberg, the Special Master of the 9-11 Victims Compensation Fund, has responded that the system might be unfair but it is as American as it gets: to compensate differentially on the basis of differences in potential earning power. Life as exchange-value, and yet this calculus leaves me less distressed than the tsunami. At Ground Zero, there is the right to be compensated. And this right is something other than, something more than, the hope of charity, the faith that the faithful will deliver. In the politics of aid, we have consigned the poor, the destitute, the underdeveloped to the whims of benevolence and the conditionalities of morality. When some of them find their own salvation, their own heavens of virgins, we are betrayed, shocked, scared.
As I tell the story of post 9-11 reconstruction in my Berkeley classroom, I am struck by how Ground Zero is marked by the promise to remember, the right to be remembered. The memorial, “Reflecting Absence,” lists the dead. Of course, regimes of memory are always regimes of truth, constructed through epistemic violence. At Ground Zero, the contest over memory continues. In this listing of the dead, should firefighters and policemen and women be distinguished as “heroes” from the “victims”? Was not their willing death more noble than those who were simply trapped there? And who will build a memorial to the other bodies that are buried here at the foot of Wall Street – the 18th century African slaves worked to death who were once the main instruments of accumulation? But in Indonesia, there are so many dead, so many thousands, that it is not possible to draw up a list of the dead. In places like Aceh, they can only draw up lists of the living. How will we cherish those who live? The day after the tsunami, a colleague of mine in Cairo comments sardonically: “In the reality of underdevelopment, are not the dead better off than the living?” He continues, “In countries like ours, is not the loss of life a boon – less people to feed, less people to clothe, less people to house?”
To what end do we talk? To tell the stories of the living? I know few of the thousands of places destroyed by the tsunami. They must all be beautiful places for it is in such beautiful places, ringed by the sea, that the sea moves so ferociously. The places I know are those whose beauty has been made familiar through colonial and neo-colonial consumption: the Maldives, Phuket, Koh Phi Phi. It is a live broadcast and the BBC journalist, reporting from Phuket, interrupts the anchor person stationed in London to remind her that only a part of Phuket has been affected. The tourists must return. The disappearance of the tourists can turn into its own disaster. There are the living to think about and the living want tourists. They want to clean the hotels, cook the satays, hold up the beach umbrellas, ply the diving boats. The living are desperate to prove that paradise still exists, that Swedes can still return here for the hallowed lull in the Western calendar between Christmas and New Year. My mother, heartbroken by the swath of broken lives and livelihoods, tells of a visit she had made to Galle, Sri Lanka. The ruins of Galle form the regular backdrop to the regular broadcasts of yet another BBC reporter. She tells of tea at Galle – white starched linen napkins, thin cucumber sandwiches, Ceylon tea in a silver teapot. Are they waiting to serve tea at Galle?
To what end do we write? Will our words in this volume add up to match the voluminous number of the dead? Would we have done so if they were not corpses? Aceh and its simmering rebellion, northern Sri Lanka and its rebellious Tigers, the stubborn and proud tribes of Andaman and Nicobar – they were all fused into one narrative of violent natives of former empires. Today, they are recast as the destitute, the deserving destitutes. But we care because these destitutes might turn desperate. They might threaten, as Colin Powell has noted, our security. They could, if left unaided, turn into terrorists. The race for aid and souls is supposedly on between Al Qaeda and USAID. Aid then is meant to construct a warning system for this terrorism as much as it is meant to construct one for the movement of the sea. Another front has opened up in the war on terror, once again fusing humanitarian aid with imperial ambitions, casting aid as the spread of freedom. Will our warning systems ever capture the magical realism of disaster? Will the Harvard political scientist know when to sound the alarm? Will we know which ocean to wiretap?
There are many tiny islands off the coast of Thailand and on one of them reside a band of “gypsies.” They saw the water recede and knew that it would be followed by “the wave that eats.” They ran to higher ground and survived. This was native knowledge, passed down through oral traditions of communication. They are being celebrated now in Thailand as the wise. Lest I sound Arcadian, I should note that my fascination is not with the “gypsies.” Despite the media coverage of their ways of life, I cannot visualize them. The image they connote of wise survival is impressive but it does not move me. I am obsessed however with a different image: a photograph in Newsweek which accompanied an article on the tsunami that I read while traveling from Bangkok to Tokyo in January, an eerie journey over the regions flattened by the waves. The image is seared in my memory. The waters have receded at Marina Beach in Chennai. There are throngs of onlookers because this must have been a magical sight: the fish gaping, waiting to be scooped up; the contours of the sea floor suddenly revealed; the sucking in of the elliptical horizon; a brilliant blue winter sky. There are even cars on the beach as if they are daring themselves to chase the receding waves. The photograph is ethereal, an aerial view, not of this earth, not of the deadly force that was to follow. It captures a moment of wonderment for which no warning can be sounded. How can we seek to be safe from that which captivates us?
To what end do we write when power visits us in the guise of stunning beauty?
To what end do we write when those who are dead had desires, pleasures, and wonders and yet we can only write about them as victims?
To what end do we write when in searching for testimonials and memories we cannot acknowledge the impossibility of bearing witness?
To what end do we write when each new disaster becomes the occasion to inaugurate a new world order?
To what end do we write when our prose takes on the responsibility of saving and giving but not the accountability of compensation?
Perhaps we write because when death is so overwhelming, when memory is so meek, we can only create lists of the living. We write to remind ourselves that we are alive.
To what end will we educate ourselves in this literacy of life?
To What End?–Ananya Roy
To what end?
Ananya Roy
University of California at Berkeley
We are asked, in comradeship, to contemplate the politics of disaster and aid in the wake of the tsunami. I am reluctant to participate because I am full of cynicism and because words seem raucous and jarring amidst the stunning silence of death. To what end do we write?
To keep alive the memory of what has happened? The tsunami has been normalized as an icon in our circuits of representation. It is now a regular feature in newspapers, webpages, shopping channels – an insert at the margins of news and consumption to which we can allocate what our hearts desire, in the name of benevolence, charity, and development. But these technologies of marginal memory cannot – they do not wish to – compete with momentous media-events. The freedom fest of the Iraqi elections is brought to us live, 24 hours a day, soon to be superseded by what the American media is gleefully billing as the event of the century: the trial of Michael Jackson.
To what end do we write? To create a narrative and text to counter what seems less rational, less sombre – tsunami in the space of televisuality? The Living Channel (TLC), in addition to its regular repertoire of reality shows, now promises a new one: “The Tsunami: Tales of Survival.” Might this nudge the real not-real “Survivor” off the ratings charts? But can our narrative escape this production of drama, fiction, entertainment and profit? The tsunami was real for me because I witnessed its aftermath on BBC World, because I heard the testimonials of the living and watched the piles of the dead. I bore witness to hyper-reality. This is the basis of my writing.
To what end do we write? I teach international development, tracings its genealogies and trajectories of domination, empire, subalternity, insurgency. I am indignant but also intrigued as the world competes to give aid. In the days following the tsunami, I am in Cairo and then in Calcutta. Everyone is talking about the cavalier George Bush on his cowboy vacation at his mock White House in Crawford, Texas. Everyone is talking about the stingy United States. The EU, Japan, these are named for not just being rich but also for being civilized. They give, they give more. No one is talking about how some of the richest nations, such as Saudi Arabia, are truly miserly. “Saudi Arabia gave less to the Muslim tsunami victims ($30 million) than the amount spent by King Fahd’s entourage on his last two vacations in Marbella (reportedly $100 million).” But then this is a line from Thomas Friedman (New York Times, January 17, 2005). I now quote Thomas Friedman! To what end does he write? He laments that the meager American aid efforts, while important, pale in comparison to the urgency of the more important task: spreading the gospel of the golden arches – free market capitalism and liberal democracy – to the Muslim world. So many Muslim futures are at stake. Our future is at stake.
Africa complains. Or rather the United Nations, speaking on behalf of Africa, complains. There is great worry that no one cares to allocate aid to the grinding tragedies of poverty, AIDS, civil war – the non-stop crisis that is Africa, the underdevelopment that takes lives on a regular basis, like a gentle tsunami that never stops flowing. Would it be worthwhile to pile up the corpses? Would the world then notice?
To what end do we give? For compassion? As charity? I am in India. It is early January. Trainloads of aid and donations make their way to Tamil Nadu. They are filled with used clothes. The reporters keep reminding the “public” that the fishermen and women rendered homeless and assetless by the tsunami are too proud to wear used clothes. Do they have the right to thus refuse? In the compassionate transaction of aid, can those who are being saved enact a politics of disavowal? Others send cooked food. But the rice and daal and sabzi rot before they get anywhere. The Indian media brainstorm on every nightly news, presenting alternative ways of giving. They showcase Vivek Oberoi, the boyishly handsome Bollywood star who made his way to Tamil Nadu right after the tsunami and stayed in a village to assist with physical reconstruction. He encourages his Bollywood colleagues to not only donate money but also their time and energy – to adopt a village, to be there, to build trust. He is the Bollywood-style Peace Corps volunteer. Despite W’s public relations campaign, no American soldier lugging drinking water and food packets can match his charm. But two days later Oberoi has to return to Bollywood. The most important film of his career, the epic `Kisna,’ is about to open. I sound critical. But I should note that in the meantime, I have not stirred from my middle-class Calcutta, where I am spending a few days with my parents.
To what end do we give? The missionaries flock to Asia, hoping to spread hope. There is the teenage girl from Texas posing with orphans in Sri Lanka. They are in the New York Times. Father Bush and Bill Clinton launch a joint public service announcement seeking donations from Americans. The donations are coordinated through the volunteer network that George W. Bush launched in 2002: USA Freedom Corps. The website runs a series of homilies from the president: “make a difference, volunteer.” “A strong and prosperous nation must also be a compassionate nation.”
So much giving and yet I am impatient with these transactions of benevolence. I am back at Berkeley and I am teaching. Our first case-study is the politics of urban redevelopment and we are studying the reconstruction of Ground Zero. In teaching about the crater of disaster that is Ground Zero, I teach not about compassion but rather about compensation. Yes, the calculation of compensation has been a spectacle, where the actuarial worth of the stockbroker from New Jersey is compared to the restaurant worker from Queens. In responding to accusations that such differences in monetary compensation are unAmerican, Kenneth Feinberg, the Special Master of the 9-11 Victims Compensation Fund, has responded that the system might be unfair but it is as American as it gets: to compensate differentially on the basis of differences in potential earning power. Life as exchange-value, and yet this calculus leaves me less distressed than the tsunami. At Ground Zero, there is the right to be compensated. And this right is something other than, something more than, the hope of charity, the faith that the faithful will deliver. In the politics of aid, we have consigned the poor, the destitute, the underdeveloped to the whims of benevolence and the conditionalities of morality. When some of them find their own salvation, their own heavens of virgins, we are betrayed, shocked, scared.
As I tell the story of post 9-11 reconstruction in my Berkeley classroom, I am struck by how Ground Zero is marked by the promise to remember, the right to be remembered. The memorial, “Reflecting Absence,” lists the dead. Of course, regimes of memory are always regimes of truth, constructed through epistemic violence. At Ground Zero, the contest over memory continues. In this listing of the dead, should firefighters and policemen and women be distinguished as “heroes” from the “victims”? Was not their willing death more noble than those who were simply trapped there? And who will build a memorial to the other bodies that are buried here at the foot of Wall Street – the 18th century African slaves worked to death who were once the main instruments of accumulation? But in Indonesia, there are so many dead, so many thousands, that it is not possible to draw up a list of the dead. In places like Aceh, they can only draw up lists of the living. How will we cherish those who live? The day after the tsunami, a colleague of mine in Cairo comments sardonically: “In the reality of underdevelopment, are not the dead better off than the living?” He continues, “In countries like ours, is not the loss of life a boon – less people to feed, less people to clothe, less people to house?”
To what end do we talk? To tell the stories of the living? I know few of the thousands of places destroyed by the tsunami. They must all be beautiful places for it is in such beautiful places, ringed by the sea, that the sea moves so ferociously. The places I know are those whose beauty has been made familiar through colonial and neo-colonial consumption: the Maldives, Phuket, Koh Phi Phi. It is a live broadcast and the BBC journalist, reporting from Phuket, interrupts the anchor person stationed in London to remind her that only a part of Phuket has been affected. The tourists must return. The disappearance of the tourists can turn into its own disaster. There are the living to think about and the living want tourists. They want to clean the hotels, cook the satays, hold up the beach umbrellas, ply the diving boats. The living are desperate to prove that paradise still exists, that Swedes can still return here for the hallowed lull in the Western calendar between Christmas and New Year. My mother, heartbroken by the swath of broken lives and livelihoods, tells of a visit she had made to Galle, Sri Lanka. The ruins of Galle form the regular backdrop to the regular broadcasts of yet another BBC reporter. She tells of tea at Galle – white starched linen napkins, thin cucumber sandwiches, Ceylon tea in a silver teapot. Are they waiting to serve tea at Galle?
To what end do we write? Will our words in this volume add up to match the voluminous number of the dead? Would we have done so if they were not corpses? Aceh and its simmering rebellion, northern Sri Lanka and its rebellious Tigers, the stubborn and proud tribes of Andaman and Nicobar – they were all fused into one narrative of violent natives of former empires. Today, they are recast as the destitute, the deserving destitutes. But we care because these destitutes might turn desperate. They might threaten, as Colin Powell has noted, our security. They could, if left unaided, turn into terrorists. The race for aid and souls is supposedly on between Al Qaeda and USAID. Aid then is meant to construct a warning system for this terrorism as much as it is meant to construct one for the movement of the sea. Another front has opened up in the war on terror, once again fusing humanitarian aid with imperial ambitions, casting aid as the spread of freedom. Will our warning systems ever capture the magical realism of disaster? Will the Harvard political scientist know when to sound the alarm? Will we know which ocean to wiretap?
There are many tiny islands off the coast of Thailand and on one of them reside a band of “gypsies.” They saw the water recede and knew that it would be followed by “the wave that eats.” They ran to higher ground and survived. This was native knowledge, passed down through oral traditions of communication. They are being celebrated now in Thailand as the wise. Lest I sound Arcadian, I should note that my fascination is not with the “gypsies.” Despite the media coverage of their ways of life, I cannot visualize them. The image they connote of wise survival is impressive but it does not move me. I am obsessed however with a different image: a photograph in Newsweek which accompanied an article on the tsunami that I read while traveling from Bangkok to Tokyo in January, an eerie journey over the regions flattened by the waves. The image is seared in my memory. The waters have receded at Marina Beach in Chennai. There are throngs of onlookers because this must have been a magical sight: the fish gaping, waiting to be scooped up; the contours of the sea floor suddenly revealed; the sucking in of the elliptical horizon; a brilliant blue winter sky. There are even cars on the beach as if they are daring themselves to chase the receding waves. The photograph is ethereal, an aerial view, not of this earth, not of the deadly force that was to follow. It captures a moment of wonderment for which no warning can be sounded. How can we seek to be safe from that which captivates us?
To what end do we write when power visits us in the guise of stunning beauty?
To what end do we write when those who are dead had desires, pleasures, and wonders and yet we can only write about them as victims?
To what end do we write when in searching for testimonials and memories we cannot acknowledge the impossibility of bearing witness?
To what end do we write when each new disaster becomes the occasion to inaugurate a new world order?
To what end do we write when our prose takes on the responsibility of saving and giving but not the accountability of compensation?
Perhaps we write because when death is so overwhelming, when memory is so meek, we can only create lists of the living. We write to remind ourselves that we are alive.
To what end will we educate ourselves in this literacy of life?