An indifference to loss

A difficult reflection on genocide

I have a terrible relationship with grief. 

I am ashamed to admit that I am indifferent to loss.

I will do my fucking best to avoid acknowledging the losses that affect me. I am supremely good at bending them around me, like light curving around a super dense star. I see the grief, I feel its pull, but I keep it at a distance, allowing it to pass around me without direct contact.

It’s not a great way to live.

Try as I might to not let things affect me, in my avoidance I quietly cultivate in me another set of emotions: fear, anger, rage. 

In my denial of loss, I push down into my torso and percolate a lot of these negative, undigested feelings. Feelings that have no other choice but metabolise into destructive, brutal emotions. I will get angry with everyone else, about anything else, than the thing that truly upsets and unsettles me.

I know this because I’ve been spending the last year doing some of the genuinely terrifying work of confronting those emotions. 

Emotions that were trapped, locked away deep below my rib cage. They have appeared to me in the mirror of my mind, gnashing at me, clawing. A grotesque wolf - a werewolf even, shaped in my own face - that just wants to rip my throat out.

My indifference to loss, and my resistance and burial of it - as it occurred in my life - led me to some of my most personally negative experiences. Not just violence but amputation. Withering. Disassociation.

But in my gradual confrontation of my denial, to try and wrestle with the long undigested feelings of loss, I cannot help but intuit that this type of experience has affected (and continues affect) so many of us.

In this way, this is my reflection of how I have experienced - and honestly tried to ignore - what is happening in Gaza.

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“And here you are sitting in the courtroom, watching the defendants day after day. At first, like Primo Levi, you ask yourself: "Is this really a person?". To say that, as they say, no, this is not a person is too simple; but days pass and you see more and more humanity in these criminals. Over time, you feel that you know them almost personally. You look at their faces, whether they are ugly or cute, you notice small habits (yawning, noting some details, scratching your head, brushing your nails), and you ask yourself: "How is this a person after all?". The longer you know them, the more you wonder how they could commit such crimes; all those waiters, taxi drivers, teachers and peasants sitting across from you. And the more you realise that war criminals can be ordinary people, the scarier it becomes. Of course, this is because then the consequences are more serious than if they were truly monsters. If ordinary people committed war crimes, it means that any of us can commit them. Now you understand why it is so easy and convenient to think that war criminals are monsters.”

— Slavenka Drakulić, They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague 

“We want to define these persons not as evil. They do evil things and the decisions they made were evil, but they were not born evil. There is a darkness in all of us, and we have to be aware of that.”

— Actor Christian Friedel referring to his character, the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss in Zone of Interest

It is happening, over there.

That is the most disturbing truth that underpins the horror when I listen to the news coming from Gaza: everyone is capable of genocide.

It was a horror I also experienced when I spent the summer of 2019 in Montenegro, reading of the recent histories of the Bosnian War, and being confronted with that banality: it wasn’t the psychopaths who did the worst, it was the seemingly ordinary.

That banality is the disturbing truth at the centre of Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone of Interest, which cooly monitors the comings-and-goings of the Nazi Commandant Höss and his family in their bucolic home that sits along the wall of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943.

Watching the film was the moment for me - much like Höss’ character at the end of the film - when my body spoke a truth that my mind dare not accept: I am living through a moment in human civilisation, where I have opted into indifference to genocide. 

The film provided me with exactly the right amount of scaffolding to watch people acting normally, unseen, at ease. And I could almost feel the camera rotate slowly, panning to me, to see myself as the one enjoying a relaxed bourgeois life, as the murder of innocents is happening just over there. 

This isn’t meant to act as a mea culpa. I don’t seek forgiveness from anyone for this admission. It is a painful admission to be sure, but rather I’m writing and sharing to express that the feeling that the film Zone of Interest, as re-creating historical fact, captures in its mundanity the reality of the terrible present, in a way that finally got through my defences and makes the important point that what happens on film, as is what is happening in Gaza, is an expression of every other injustice of violence that has been passively permitted by the greater whole throughout history.

But what it also tells me, is another side of injustice: of loss, of grief.

Grief will always be prolonged, as long as injustice is prolonged.

— Tashel Bordere, Ph.D.

I strongly believe that when people are stripped of what is important, when they are reduced to their basic nature, and overwhelmed with the loss of their culture, their civilisation, their history, that it too can turn to indifference, and metastise into wolf-like violence.

The roots of the dehumanising destruction of a people, is rooted in the dehumanising destruction of another. The overwhelming realisation of this cycle, and its felt-sense of understanding in myself is what I find unbearable.

Faced with the horrific scale of loss in Gaza, in Auschwitz, in West Darfur… I turn away. 

I can admit now to myself, that out of an inability to be with it all, I keep turning away.

Anytime I genuinely get close to touching that pain, that grief, that horror, I let it go. I drop it.

I make excuses to myself that I can, because I am dealing with my own history, my own trauma (which is true to a point) but I tell myself that, so that I don’t give any more of myself of anyone else.

But even though I do drop it, I do seemingly cut the world out, I am deeply affected by it nonetheless. I deeply vibrate with the dissonance of knowing what is happening, but choose to pretend I am not affected.

I choose, in my garden of relative peace, to ignore the machinery of death, rhythmically churning in the background.

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You haven’t gotten much from me this year. Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t. But the silence around Mortals reflects my own silence about confronting mortality, which is a mirror to the regretful indifference I feel toward atrocities around the world. The overwhelming exposure to death has sometimes numbed me, but it is time to engage more openly, authentically.

It has been a difficult experience to recognise in myself, my own denial and avoidance of death. The cascading exposure to death has overloaded my system at times. But it hasn’t been happening at a conscious level, it’s been harder to pin point because it has been very subtly under the surface.

I’ve rationalised the indecision to a number of obvious things: competing interests for my time, anxieties and frustrations about how to develop things. But that’s not really it at all.

I have done some serious work earlier in the year to acknowledge that I have strong feelings about denying the inevitable death of my loved ones. A deep-rooted emergency kicks in, that simply short circuits the recognition. The light bends, and doesn’t contact the reality.

But I can now say that I am facing up to it. I am being called to face it by the Palestinians. By the Sudanese. By the Jews. There is a larger collective voice that penetrates my personal defences, which asks me to be more direct in my own lived experience, for the sake of myself, and for others.

I feel I am finally turning to face these feelings: the ongoing grief, the slow turning towards it, the recognition of the eternal nature of it, the real danger of bypassing or avoiding it, and what it does to my humanity… and our collective humanity.

If I remain indifferent to loss, I will suffer. If we collectively become indifferent to loss, the suffering will multiply.

But I do so with the understanding and compassion for those who cannot do it for their own safety or protection, and the admiration for those who do keep their heart open to it, who do not use it to separate themselves from victims and perpetrators but use it to reach deeper into their humanity.

I am trying to find a way to genuinely hold this, to come back daily and sit on the cushion of grief, and speak to these feelings.

Because for me, what is happening around the world, and what is happening within me, and what has happened in the past, and will happen soon in the future, are all happening at once, and being open to the feelings they create is the only way through.