The aesthetics of terror
15
A SUNDAY evening in spring at a park in the middle of a crowded city; the squeals of children, laughter, joy and general merriment. It was what terror wishes most to mar with its cruel infliction of death, and it is indeed where terror struck. Even as Pakistan’s album of horrors lies full, this Sunday past brought another lurid page, another tragedy to add to what is an achingly long list. When the bodies were counted, and so many were so small, more than 70 lay dead and over 200 were injured, some undoubtedly likely to perish in the days to come. According to news reports, many families perished in halves or wholes; one big brood visiting from Sanghar in Sindh lost eight family members.
Even before the bodies were counted, the lists of injured and dead posted on hospital bulletin boards for distraught relatives to read over and over, there was a claim of responsibility. The Jamaatul Ahrar, a splinter group of the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, claimed it had carried out the attack, releasing not only a picture of the suicide bomber but a promise of their own video of the attack. Their targets, they said, had been those celebrating Easter; the fact that they were families and children did nothing to temper the death sentence that the group wished to deliver.
As in previous attacks, the greater the horror of it all, the greater the impact, the greater the blow — actual and emotional — to that portion of Pakistan’s humanity that dares to consider enjoyment, however small, however momentary, a possibility.
There are some who do not watch anymore, who tune in to other things and talk about other things.
In contemporary Pakistan’s age of the 24-hour news cycle, there are many witnesses to terror’s power. Within minutes of an attack, often even before rescue vehicles, it is journalists who are there before paramedics, and everyone who is at home, who happens to be watching, sees terror’s horror unfold live.
It is a costly proximity; in Sunday’s attack on Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park, there were dead children on stretchers, then there were no stretchers; there was the helplessness of so many, the realisation that for many help would not come in time or come too late. Death, and lots of it, live on television, distraught relatives, the pain of a sudden catastrophe seen by so many millions and so many times. Initial reports magnify and then grow some more: 10 dead, 20 dead and then suddenly 50 dead, ever-growing numbers.
There are some I know who do not watch anymore, who tune in to other things, talk about other things, make a concerted effort to keep terror and its inflictions off their screens and out of their minds. There is plenty of misery in one’s own life, one of these self-preservationists told me once, and the encroachment of the toxicity of terror must be kept out of it.
Not all of us are so resolute when confronted by terror’s televised trauma, and our reasons are as complex as the many threads of extremism that produce its horrors. Horror is the opposite of harmony, but it exerts its own magnetism, a dark attraction that compels many of us to bear witness to its wreckage; we have all seen it before, but watch it yet again. Fresh horror elicits fresh curiosity and a repeat audience. The groups that make it happen know this, count on this.
If there is truth to this calculation of terror and its audience, some questions must also be asked regarding its consumption. In a country where so many are dying of terror’s cruelties, it seems flippant to speak of the lesser traumas of those that watch at home, in living rooms and bedrooms and over dinner and tea.
Yet the multitudes of these other consumers of terror must be discussed, for they are, if lesser ones, still target audiences for those that orchestrate terror’s trepidations, who count on the mayhem that will occur after detonation, after impact, after the blast. It is only if one considers this audience that one can consider the moral dimensions of bearing witness to horrors.
Does watching the attacks and their immediate and always horrific aftermath create more empathy? Does the ubiquity of the attacks, their predictable if sometimes intermittent recurrence, give them the awful normalcy of the not so new, even of the familiar? Indeed, if this is so, does watching the attacks in the way Pakistanis are shown them, make them care less, feel less? Is a less feeling country not worse equipped to combat terror? If we have seen it, must we no longer feel it; if we cannot feel it, then can we fight it? If we cannot fight, how can we win?
The trauma of a terror-struck nation produces its own macabre aesthetics, an assault on an ambivalent and uncertain morality and the politics constructed upon it. The montage of the bits and pieces of toys and tinsel from Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park are being shown again and again in the hope of commemoration.
At the same time, the mobs that burn and rage and kill, goaded by sermons that justify the killing of the Hindu, the Christian, the anyone less powerful, suggest that the impact of terror’s telecasted cruelty is not producing either the empathy or sympathy it should and must. Pakistan’s millions are witness to the pain of the unfortunate others but it does not goad them out of their own cherished hatreds, their silent sympathies.
As it was in the aftermath of the attack on Army Public School in Peshawar, the coming days will be marked with public tributes and many promises. The dead children deserve them but will not be resurrected by them.
For terror’s tentacles to be unwound from around the thoughts and fears of Pakistan, a deeper contemplation is required into the role the ordinary at-home Pakistani plays in consuming and perpetuating the aesthetics of terror, a measure of the cost imposed by those the of us who watch, nod, shrug, do nothing and say nothing — and, most troublingly, feel nothing.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2016
