Chasing Trauma

After considering whether or not to include an image in today's posting, I opted for one of my favorites from Patty's ever growing collection of astounding photography in Madrid. This one she has titled "Silence," which appropriately describes this morning's experience.

Fátima's boyfriend Pablo and I get together once or twice a week to practice his conversational English, a necessary skill for his work in television broadcasting, as a majority of the international production crews communicate in this second language. Pablo works for a company that produces the live broadcasts we see on the nightly news, usually from breaking stories in Mauritania or Dubai, Baghdad or wherever the company sends his crew with a few hours notice. Having worked several years under these "on-call" conditions, Pablo and Fátima have seen countless disasters, both natural and man-made, and have become witness to those moments of crisis we define as 'History' with a capital 'H'-- the Palestinian elections, the War in Iraq, terrorist bombings in Jerusalem, genocide in Africa... the list goes on. In short, a rather vulgar approximation to this kind of work might be described simply as 'chasing trauma' on two accounts: for the gravity of the disasters they are contracted by television to pursue, and for the speed with which the market of 'capturing the TV image' requires them to be at 'ground zero' in an instant, well before the human mind can take stock of what one is really witnessing.

So as part of our conversation class I ask Pablo to tell me about his work and the kind of travel he has done over the course of the past few years. Without hesitation he consults his laptop computer to open a folder of images of the tsunami in Indonesia, going through the photos one by one to describe what he saw during the 28 days he lived among the devastation of the coast. "Twenty-eight days," he says, "and only two showers. Can you imagine?" He chuckles, and so do I in response. Pablo flips through more photos of the television crew unloading fresh water packets and food rations from the back of a truck, hands grabbing at the supplies and far off in the distance still others running after the vehicle. And behind the people running towards the truck, a terrain leveled and scattered with debris, the only recognizable landmark being a tugboat sitting on top of crushed houses, two miles inland from the water. Then he shows me photos of people, portraits of a lost girl no more than eight years old, another of a man who, wearing a mask to combat the stench, picked through the floating corpses one by one to see if he could identify his parents, despite the waterlogged bloating of their faces that make his task impossible, and yet another of a team of townsmen dumping crane loads of mangled and deformed bodies into a mass grave.

The most shocking photos are those that take me a moment to indentify what I'm looking at, even as Pablo explains the content of the photographs. Witnessing these photos bears a repulsive moment of recognition, of anagnoresis, when I realize after asking myself "what is this?" that what I am seeing is a photograph of splintered debris and body parts floating in water, the torsos and arms bloated and bloodied, unrecognizable to anything we associate with the human, but that which bears the sign of pure horror as beyond death, as dismemberment and putrefaction. Or the photo of a mangled pile of branches that, upon closer inspection, reveals to me that this messy heap is in reality part human, burying the washed up remains of a young boy whose face has decayed to expose the cheek bone and decomposed eyes giving us a milky glass stare. The horror of these images is seeded in that moment of recognition, when the unseemingly real suddenly becomes recognizably (albeit formerly) human to the witness at present, a leap made possible over time and space, a return to the moment of the photograph and its reception at present-- in sum, a sort of rhetorical 'haunt.'

It is as if Pablo's recounting and reliving of these horrors--right there in a coffee shop in our neighborhood in Madrid--implies me as a witness to the destruction of the tsunami as well, not in any way the same as Pablo's experience, but through the seeping into consciousness of an event--despite the geographical distance and time that has passed since--, a traumatic event that is often regarded as incomprehensible, insufficient for words, or inutterable. The insufficiency of words might just be a cover for what's really at work, that repulsion (or not wanting to become witness to, the impulse to turn away from the images) is in effect only a conditioned response, a way for the 'civilized' to manage what it regards as indecency.

It is this irony that struck me. Pablo's work in television to report the disaster, to transmit images into the living room of a nightly viewing audience, cannot begin to approximate the impact of his own experience in first-person. Yet, perhaps here lies the ethical power of narrative, and of fiction.