Reading Ordinary Notes: Note 22

We all felt angry. We all wished we had not heard the film, because, although none of us could not bear to watch it, we all knew every breath, every word, every name, every clip by heart and by skin. One time had been enough to never forget, and watching them (hearing them) successively spliced together as a long Black death made no new revelations. It compelled no new understandings, forced no new action. It renewed traumas.

—Rachel Zellars, letter to Claudia Rankine

Yesterday, I was watching a show I like, and it showed, briefly, two clips from deaths that have been shown over and over and over. I had never seen those clips. I had chosen not to see those clips. And there was no warning that the clips might be shown. I knew what was in those clips. It has been described over and over. But I had chosen not to watch them. I could not bear it the first time they circulated and I could not bear it all the other times they circulated.

A friend and I talked during one of Kenya’s outbreaks of political violence—outbreak, I write, as though these things are not produced and managed by political actors, most often those running for office—and I said I did not want to watch the graphic violence that was circulated by some as evidence. Important evidence as the Kenyan state has a history of denying that violence has happened. The friend said Kenyans needed to see death happening, to witness violence. We disagreed.

When I am gracious, I think of the history of being disappeared in Kenya, a history that stretches from the founding of Kenya as a colonial state to the present. People are disappeared. It’s not clear how and when they are taken, by whom (we know by whom, but let’s pretend we don’t), where they end up, what happens to them (torture, of course, and worse), and where and how their bodies are disposed of. This history shapes how we think about evidence: we want to see with our eyes and hear with our ears what is happening to us. Not necessarily in the pursuit of elusive justice. Yet, I share Rachel Zellars’s position: “One time had been enough to never forget.” One time need not be watching; it can be hearing about.

Grief and anger are woven into the imagination. We hear about and imagine what happened. Details feed imagination. But we also do not need details. I know this from the history of disappeared people in Kenya. I can only wish that they had quick, torture-free deaths. What a perverse thing to wish. Yet, what are the alternatives? Imaginations fill in gaps. And the histories we have read about what happens to political dissidents offer brutal answers.

What, then, might it mean to bear witness and stand with and stand for in our times of ordinary and catastrophic violence? I do not know. I wish I did.