Comment
In Death, Imperialism Lives On
For the western media, it is clear that a tourist's tragedy is more
important than that of the 'locals'.
By Jeremy Seabrook
The Guardian
Dec. 31, 2004
Workers use elephant to clear debris in
Banda Aceh
The number of fishing
boats from Sumatra,
Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu at sea when the
Boxing Day tsunami hit will never be known. There is scarcely any
population tally of the crowded coasts. Nameless people are consigned to
unmarked graves; in mosques and temples, makeshift mortuaries, people pull
aside a cloth, a piece of sacking, to see if those they loved lie beneath.
As in all natural disasters, the victims are overwhelmingly the poorest.
This time there was something different. The tsunami struck resorts where
westerners were on holiday. For the western media, it was clear that their
lives have a different order of importance from those that have died in
thousands, but have no known biography, and, apparently, no intelligible
tongue in which to express their feelings. This is not to diminish the
trauma of loss of life, whether of tourist or fisherman. But when we
distinguish between "locals" who have died and westerners, "locals" all
too easily becomes a euphemism for what were once referred to as natives.
Whatever tourism's merits, it risks reinforcing the imperial sensibility.
For this sensibility has already been reawakened by all the human-made,
preventable catastrophes. The ruins of Galle and Bandar Aceh called forth
images of Falluja, Mosul and Gaza. Imperial powers, it seems, anticipate
the destructive capacity of nature. A report on ITN news made this
explicit, by referring to "nature's shock and awe". But while the tsunami
death toll rises in anonymous thousands, in Iraq disdainful American
authorities don't do body counts.
One of the most poignant sights of the past few days was that of
westerners overcome with gratitude that they had been helped by the grace
and mercy of those who had lost everything, but still regarded them as
guests. When these same people appear in the west, they become the
interloper, the unwanted migrant, the asylum seeker, who should go back to
where they belong. A globalisation that permits the wealthy to pass
effortlessly through borders confines the poor to eroded subsistence,
overfished waters and an impoverishment that seems to have no end. People
rarely say that poor countries are swamped by visitors, even though their
money power pre-empts the best produce, the clean water and amenities
unknown to the indigenous population.
In death, there should be no hierarchy. But even as Sri Lankans wandered
in numb disbelief through the corpses, British TV viewers were being
warned that scenes they were about to witness might distress them. Poor
people have no consoling elsewhere to which they can be repatriated. The
annals of the poor remain short and simple, and can be effaced without
inquiry as to how they contrive an existence on these fragile coasts. What
are the daily visitations of grief and loss in places where people earn
less in a year than the price that privilege pays for a night's stay in a
five-star hotel?
Western governments, which can disburse so lavishly in the art of war,
offer a few million as if it were exceptional largesse. Fortunately the
people are wiser; and the spontaneous outpourings of humanity have been as
unstoppable as the waves that broke on south Asia's coasts; donations
rapidly exceeded the amount offered by government. Selflessness and
sacrifice, people working away at rubble with bare hands, suggest
immediate human solidarities.
But these are undermined by the structures of inequality. Promises
solemnly made at times of immediate sorrow are overtaken by other
urgencies; money donated for the Orissa cyclone, for hurricane Mitch in
Central America, the floods in Bangladesh, the Bam earthquake - as for the
reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq - turns out to be a fraction of
what is pledged.
Such events remind us of the sameness of our human destiny, the fragility
of our existence. They place in perspective the meaning of security. Life
is always at the mercy of nature - whether from such overwhelming events
as this, or the natural processes that exempt no one from paying back to
earth the life it gave us. Yet we inhabit systems of social and economic
injustice that exacerbate the insecurity of the poor, while the west is
prepared to lay waste distant towns and cities in the name of a security
that, in the end, eludes us all.
Assertions of our common humanity occur only at times of great loss. To
retrieve and hold on to it at all other times - that would be something of
worth to salvage from these scenes of desolation.
Posted by Bulatlat
Jeremy Seabrook is the author of Consuming Cultures: Globablisation and
Local Life
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