Participatory grief
COLUMNS
CT WEB
By Dr Devika Brendon
So, after the last few days of varied responses to the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in France, and the collective global reactions to it, we note that a great universal treasure has not been lost, but damaged.
People publicly wept, because of what this building represented to them, both personally and on a more universal level. It has aesthetic value, cultural value, spiritual and religious meaning, and is associated with famous literature and popular films.
Other people expressed themselves as dry-eyed, and unemotional, because of the disproportionate significance placed on a Western religious icon, when the West has been responsible for so much desecration and appropriation of the art and cultural artefacts of the countries it has colonised, over the past several hundred years.
Extremely wealthy people have stepped forward to fund restoration of the building. On a material level, restoration will be done. But the extent of the damage, in my view, can really be measured in the lack of empathy and the sneering contempt of those of the ‘now they know what it feels like’ school of inhumanities.
One of the most significant academic courses I have studied was called ‘The Holocaust and Moral Justice’, a Jurisprudence course at the Graduate Law School at The University of Sydney. Each student in the class of 30 had to present a seminar on one section of the course materials to the rest of the class, and mine was a report on the writing of the holocaust deniers.
The book I reviewed by David Irving was loathsome and repellent, and my presentation said so, but the response of my fellow students to his book was a revelation. Many of them were grandchildren of survivors of the holocaust, and to have terrible acts of genocide against their ancestors mocked, diminished and belittled was insult on an unprecedented scale.
One student told me that, because I was not genetically from one of the ethnic categories affected directly in that specific time and place, I had no right to claim any feeling at all, or speak about the experience of others.
I pointed out that as a fellow human being, if I feel genuine sorrow for another’s loss, it makes my human experience greater than the limits defined by my mere ethnic identity. To restrict what resonates within us, and what we respond to, is to narrow our own lives.
I have had the opportunity to study the meaning and symbolism of the rose windows of the cathedrals of France as part of a course I was taught on Poetry and the Visual Arts. I have been to see the flying and soaring buttresses and arches of the glorious building, and have sat inside its sanctuary. People’s reactions to this recent fire seem to reflect not so much what happened to an architectural monument, but their own residual pain.
They are afraid about the end of the world as they know it, and the meaning they make from it: that Western values, which have formed their frames of reference, are now under threat from vigorous anti-colonialism.
And indeed all eras do come to an end, and the longevities and viabilities of first world empires which profited from colonialism are being challenged, in the days of Brexit and of Trump.
And indeed all eras do come to an end, and the longevities and viabilities of first world empires which profited from colonialism are being challenged, in the days of Brexit and of Trump.
Hypocrisy
Many of the world leaders now commiserating with the French people in their loss authorised the destruction of other people’s culture and lives during their political tenure. Former US Secretary of State under President Clinton, Madeleine Albright, said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqis were ‘a price she was willing to pay’ for the mission she was spearheading. When loss of life was measured, the lives of her citizens were more valuable than those of others, to her, at that time.
If we operate on this isolationist and egotistical principle, any chance of a broader humanity will wither. If we mock the losses of other people, and their grief at the damage to what they hold dear, we attack any common ground we might ever have had. To jeer at the pain of another is unforgivably petty, however justified or karmic satisfying it may seem to our judgment.
Our own losses and ordeals have been great, and precious little empathy was accorded to us. Situated on the nexus of a trade route, rich in natural resources, colonised threefold, by empire -building Europeans, we have a right to be bitter. But at this point in our own history, to not allow ourselves a response of participatory grief in a universal loss is to perpetuate the injustices of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of divide and rule, that colonisation imposed on every country it utilised. Only we can free ourselves of this dynamic.
That student said so, after the class, when we had coffee after the Jurisprudence presentation. Recognising what someone values via their grief at its loss is an act of empathy, and that is a human instinct which is denied by hatred. It is the opposite of appropriation, because it respects the rights and dignity of the other, and the value of what is important to them. It is the opposite of denial. It is affirmation of more than just an assertion of self and identity rights.
It is the opposite of annihilation.
Image credit: Disney
Image credit: Disney
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