At a Safe Distance

Beneath a photograph of the refugee camp at Calais, France, known as "the Jungle", in yesterday's New York Times, this caption appeared:

"The squalid camp, growing and festering for over a year, has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis."

The sentence was a quote from the article itself. This morning, the first thing I saw when I checked my Instagram feed, were the photograph and caption, posted by Teju Cole, with the following comment (quoted here with his permission:)

Sometimes it's not the photo, it's the caption. Sometimes it's not the caption, it's a single word. What work is the word "festering" doing here? The caption is an excerpt from the article, which you can find yourself. "Squalid" is permissible in context but imperfect, but there are at least two problems with the framing of Calais as a "symbol of Europe's faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The first is that this is a crisis for those who must leave home, not for those who receive or refuse them. Europe does not have a migration crisis. The second problem is that Europe is not a country. There's a reason there's no "Jungle" in Germany, and there's an opposite reason there isn't one in Switzerland. Whatever is happening in Calais is about French policy and British policy. Italy is another thing. Hungary is a different thing. But that's all about the framing.
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What I keep coming back to is that word "festering." I've heard it before. What festers? What instinctual response do we have to that which festers? I think I know the kind of work the word is supposed to be doing. That work is all about mislocating the crisis. And when the crisis is mislocated, when it is about those who must witness the crisis rather than those who must undergo it, then other actions, otherwise unimaginable, become compulsory. After all, what is one to do with people or places that are "festering"?

[Later this morning, I note that the caption has been changed to read "The squalid camp has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The text remains the same in the article itself; the New York Times does follow TC (one of their own critics and authors) on Instagram.]

What, then, is actually "festering?" In my opinion, it is our hatred and fear of "the other" who will somehow take away or undermine what we feel is rightly "ours" -- our jobs, our health, our security, our resources, our prosperity...and, if we dig deeper, our very whiteness and privilege: god forbid, one of them might intermarry with one of our children.

Well, you know what? That's exactly what I did. 35 years ago I married the son of a Syrian immigrant and a refugee from the Armenian genocide. And that changed forever my ability to be indifferent to or distant from those who are not white, Anglo-Saxon, American, Protestant, English-speaking, Euro-centric...you can fill in the adjectives yourself. I was already a young person leaning in the direction of difference; I was curious and open. But I had not yet been broken open. And if we carefully defend ourselves forever, if we hide behind words and never take action, our hearts will never be broken and we will never truly understand or help the other out of that brokenness. We will simply sit at a safe distance, maybe spouting outrage and sadness at the world's ills, but our empathy will be temporary and we will not have to change, grow, or give anything that is an actual sacrifice of self. Outrage is, frankly, cheap. My question to you is, what are you willing to do?

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Language does matter: I agree. We have seen it at work in this deplorable election season, both for good and for ill. We are not, in general, careful with it, but taking great care with words is supposed to be the job of journalists, as well as speechwriters.

I would like to recommend another article, "What Does it Mean to Help One Family?", about the Canadian response to the plight of the refugees, which shows the complexities of both immigrating and helping. We will be welcoming a refugee family through the cathedral sometime in the coming year; at the present time they are still mired in paperwork in Beirut. This will not be the first time I've tried to help people making a new life in a new country, nor will it be the last, and every single time I know that I am not doing enough. I feel compelled because of my parents in-law, who had been helped by others and who never forgot that. Their story changed me: for their sake, as well as my own conscience, I cannot turn away. And then I became an immigrant too -- an immigrant with money, relative security, and language skills, to be sure -- but I found out firsthand what it means to leave your past behind, with all its practical and emotional connections and knowledge, and have to begin again to build a new life in a new place.

We all need to be more careful with the language we use. We cheapen our empathy by spouting  platitudes, we speak when we ought to be listening, we use words for effect and shock value that linger and cause great harm, and in this word-intensive internet environment, we invest a stream of empty words with weight as if they represent acts of actual sacrifice or self-emptying.

Words matter; they descend from our heads to our hearts and continue to live there, as a sort of compost for our emotions and actions. In the heart, certain things fester, and others flower; which way it goes is ultimately up to us.

Comments

[Dick]

A wonderful piece of writing, Beth. I relish the supercharge that kicks in with 'Well, you know what? That's exactly what I did...' Powerful stuff at a time of need.

[Beth]

Thank you, Dick. I hope it makes a little bit of difference.

[Natalie]

Yes, absolutely,I echo everything you've written so well in this post, Beth. These are cruel, tragic times for so many people, young and old, and it's difficult to understand how it's still possible for many powerful leaders of prosperous countries to shut their eyes and ears to their cries, washing their hands of any responsibility. Pilate is alive and well, wearing many disguises, the rabble still shout "crucify!" and the crucified are legion.

[Rachel Barenblat]

Thank you for this post, Beth. I am reminded of an essay I read a few years ago that delves deeply into the language of the Exodus story --about the words Pharaoh uses to describe the children of Israel (they are compared to teeming vermin), and how those kinds of words have been used to justify and spark hatred of the other for millennia and into our own day.

[Roderick Robinson]

Ah, the luxury of being far away (I mean the NYT, not Teju Cole), the luxury of being able to shrink one's judgment down to an over-simplified 23-word caption. Of all possible misunderstandings "festering" is probably the least of Mauricio Lima's blunders. Viewed dispassionately from, say, a helicopter the Jungle may be said to be festering - a wound which will not heal, with the occupants' plight reduced to a struggle between bacteria and white corpuscles. Reduced to the point where the people below become sub-human and those ever-damned politicians are merely a vague force and charitable instincts an even vaguer force.

The Jungle is both a tragedy and - riskily - a symbol, since symbols tend to simplify. Even a thousand words are insufficient to summarise what is afoot in this enormous upheaval centred on Europe. Millions are involved, some you instinctively sympathise with, some you hate - only to discover after a few seconds' reflection, that those crude reactions could easily be reversed and are in any case an intellectual indulgence.

And if anyone wants another symbol, how about this? Following the transportation of the Jungle's residents and a fire which has destroyed those pitiful shelters (bulldozers are yet to arrive) small dribbles of people are returning to the site and wrapping themselves in blankets at the roadside. Their reason? That here they are as near as they can be to their preferred goal - Britain. Britain! A country which has voted (by a small majority) to engage in a futile act of self-hypnosis, whereby those in charge (temporarily I hope) imagine the country can insulate itself from the woes of the rest of the world. Thank God I have never claimed to be a patriot.