Unmournable Bodies
By Teju Cole
January 10, 2015 "ICH"
- "New
Yorker"
-A northern-Italian miller in the sixteenth
century, known as Menocchio, literate but
not a member of the literary élite, held a
number of unconventional theological
beliefs. He believed that the soul died with
the body, that the world was created out of
a chaotic substance, not ex nihilo, and that
it was more important to love one’s neighbor
than to love God. He found eccentric
justification for these beliefs in the few
books he read, among them the Decameron, the
Bible, the Koran, and “The Travels of Sir
John Mandeville,” all in translation. For
his pains, Menocchio was dragged before the
Inquisition several times, tortured, and, in
1599, burned at the stake. He was one of
thousands who met such a fate.
Western
societies are not, even now, the paradise of
skepticism and rationalism that they believe
themselves to be. The West is a variegated
space, in which both freedom of thought and
tightly regulated speech exist, and in which
disavowals of deadly violence happen at the
same time as clandestine torture. But, at
moments when Western societies consider
themselves under attack, the discourse is
quickly dominated by an ahistorical fantasy
of long-suffering serenity and fortitude in
the face of provocation. Yet European and
American history are so strongly marked by
efforts to control speech that the
persecution of rebellious thought must be
considered among the foundational buttresses
of these societies. Witch burnings, heresy
trials, and the untiring work of the
Inquisition shaped Europe, and these ideas
extended into American history as well and
took on American modes, from the breaking of
slaves to the censuring of critics of
Operation Iraqi Freedom.
More than
a dozen people were killed by terrorists in
Paris this week. The victims of these crimes
are being mourned worldwide: they were human
beings, beloved by their families and
precious to their friends. On Wednesday,
twelve of them were targeted by gunmen for
their affiliation with the satirical French
magazine Charlie Hebdo. Charlie
has often been aimed at Muslims, and it’s
taken particular joy in flouting the Islamic
ban on depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
It’s done more than that, including taking
on political targets, as well as Christian
and Jewish ones. The magazine depicted the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in a
sexual threesome. Illustrations such as this
have been cited as evidence of Charlie
Hebdo’s willingness to offend
everyone. But in recent years the magazine
has gone specifically for racist and
Islamophobic provocations, and its numerous
anti-Islam images have been inventively
perverse, featuring hook-nosed Arabs,
bullet-ridden Korans, variations on the
theme of sodomy, and mockery of the victims
of a massacre. It is not always easy to see
the difference between a certain witty
dissent from religion and a bullyingly
racist agenda, but it is necessary to try.
Even Voltaire, a hero to many who extol free
speech, got it wrong. His sparkling and
courageous anti-clericalism can be a joy to
read, but he was also a committed
anti-Semite, whose criticisms of Judaism
were accompanied by calumnies about the
innate character of Jews.
This
week’s events took place against the
backdrop of France’s ugly colonial history,
its sizable Muslim population, and the
suppression, in the name of secularism, of
some Islamic cultural expressions, such as
the hijab. Blacks have hardly had it easier
in Charlie Hebdo: one of the
magazine’s cartoons depicts the Minister of
Justice Christiane Taubira, who is of
Guianese origin, as a monkey (naturally, the
defense is that a violently racist image was
being used to satirize racism); another
portrays Obama with the black-Sambo imagery
familiar from Jim Crow-era illustrations.
On
Thursday morning, the day after the
massacre, I happened to be in Paris. The
headline of Le Figaro was “LA
LIBERTÉ ASSASSINÉE.”
Le Parisien and L’Humanité
also used the word liberté in their
headlines. Liberty was indeed under
attack—as a writer, I cherish the right to
offend, and I support that right in other
writers—but what was being excluded in this
framing? A tone of genuine puzzlement always
seems to accompany terrorist attacks in the
centers of Western power. Why have they
visited violent horror on our peaceful
societies? Why do they kill when we don’t? A
widely shared
illustration, by Lucille Clerc, of a
broken pencil regenerating itself as two
sharpened pencils, was typical. The message
was clear, as it was with the #jesuischarlie
hashtag: that what is at stake is not merely
the right of people to draw what they wish
but that, in the wake of the murders, what
they drew should be celebrated and
disseminated. Accordingly, not only have
many of Charlie Hebdo’s
images been published and shared, but the
magazine itself has received large sums of
money in the wake of the attacks—a hundred
thousand pounds from the Guardian Media
Group and three hundred thousand dollars
from Google.
But it is
possible to defend the right to obscene and
racist speech without promoting or
sponsoring the content of that speech. It is
possible to approve of sacrilege without
endorsing racism. And it is possible to
consider Islamophobia immoral without
wishing it illegal. Moments of grief neither
rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of
the responsibility of making distinctions.
The A.C.L.U. got it right in defending a
neo-Nazi group that, in 1978, sought to
march through Skokie, Illinois. The extreme
offensiveness of the marchers, absent a
particular threat of violence, was not and
should not be illegal. But no sensible
person takes a defense of those First
Amendment rights as a defense of Nazi
beliefs. The Charlie Hebdo
cartoonists were not mere gadflies, not
simple martyrs to the right to offend: they
were ideologues. Just because one condemns
their brutal murders doesn’t mean one must
condone their ideology.
Rather
than posit that the Paris attacks are
the moment of crisis in free speech—as
so many commentators have done—it is
necessary to understand that free speech and
other expressions of liberté are
already in crisis in Western societies; the
crisis was not precipitated by three
deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has
consolidated its traditional monopoly on
extreme violence, and, in the era of big
data, has also hoarded information about its
deployment of that violence. There are harsh
consequences for those who interrogate this
monopoly. The only person in prison for the
C.I.A.’s abominable torture regime is John
Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden
is a hunted man for divulging information
about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is
serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her
role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are
blasphemers, but they have not been
universally valorized, as have the
cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.
The
killings in Paris were an appalling offense
to human life and dignity. The enormity of
these crimes will shock us all for a long
time. But the suggestion that violence by
self-proclaimed Jihadists is the only threat
to liberty in Western societies ignores
other, often more immediate and intimate,
dangers. The U.S., the U.K., and France
approach statecraft in different ways, but
they are allies in a certain vision of the
world, and one important thing they share is
an expectation of proper respect for Western
secular religion. Heresies against state
power are monitored and punished. People
have been arrested for making anti-military
or anti-police comments on social media in
the U.K. Mass surveillance has had a
chilling effect on journalism and on the
practice of the law in the U.S. Meanwhile,
the armed forces and intelligence agencies
in these countries demand, and generally
receive, unwavering support from their
citizens. When they commit torture or war
crimes, no matter how illegal or depraved,
there is little expectation of a full
accounting or of the prosecution of the
parties responsible.
The
scale, intensity, and manner of the
solidarity that we are seeing for the
victims of the Paris killings, encouraging
as it may be, indicates how easy it is in
Western societies to focus on radical
Islamism as the real, or the only, enemy.
This focus is part of the consensus about
mournable bodies, and it often keeps us from
paying proper attention to other, ongoing,
instances of horrific carnage around the
world: abductions and killings in Mexico,
hundreds of children (and more than a dozen
journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last
year, internecine massacres in the Central
African Republic, and so on. And even when
we rightly condemn criminals who claim to
act in the name of Islam, little of our
grief is extended to the numerous Muslim
victims of their attacks, whether in Yemen
or Nigeria—in both of which there were
deadly massacres this week—or in Saudi
Arabia, where, among many violations of
human rights, the punishment for journalists
who “insult Islam” is flogging. We may not
be able to attend to each outrage in every
corner of the world, but we should at least
pause to consider how it is that mainstream
opinion so quickly decides that certain
violent deaths are more meaningful, and more
worthy of commemoration, than others.
France is
in sorrow today, and will be for many weeks
to come. We mourn with France. We ought to.
But it is also true that violence from “our”
side continues unabated. By this time next
month, in all likelihood, many more “young
men of military age” and many others,
neither young nor male, will have been
killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and
elsewhere. If past strikes are anything to
go by, many of these people will be innocent
of wrongdoing. Their deaths will be
considered as natural and incontestable as
deaths like Menocchio’s, under the
Inquisition. Those of us who are writers
will not consider our pencils broken by such
killings. But that incontestability, that
unmournability, just as much as the massacre
in Paris, is the clear and present danger to
our collective liberté.
Teju Cole is a
photographer and the author of two works of
fiction, “Open City” and “Every Day Is for
the Thief.” He contributes frequently to
Page-Turner.