It came to me when I was reporting the mad uproar over Bill Henson’s photographs a couple of years ago that I’ve been writing about panics all my career: how they are whipped up, do their worst and disappear leaving only wreckage behind. Perhaps I’m alert to the subject because I’m gay. When I was growing up, preachers, police, politicians and the press were still keeping panic alive about people like me. It has left me despising panic merchants, particularly those Tory fear-mongers who represent themselves as guardians of decency. The politicians I most admire are those who hold their nerve in the face of irrational fear on the rampage. I’ve come to believe the fundamental contest in Australian politics is not so much between Right and Left as panic and calm.
Labor drove the early fear of the Chinese, and Labor has been up to its neck at times in panics about Blacks and Reds, poofs and dirty books. Labor can’t claim to be always on the side of calm. This is an issue that goes deeper than division between the parties. It’s about the odd willingness of Australia’s leaders to beat up on the nation’s fears. They coarsen politics. They narrow our sympathies. They make careers for themselves in this peaceful and good-hearted country by managing, from time to time, to make us afraid. The last fifteen years have seen this country in states of exaggerated alarm over native title, Muslim preachers, Muslim rapists, drugs, terrorists both foreign and home grown, demonstrators in the streets and pictures of naked children on gallery walls. But we end the decade as we began in a full-scale panic over refugees coming here – as they reach countries all over the world – uninvited in little boats.
— David Marr, Panic, 2011(Source: blackincbooks.com)
The snapshots are thrust at us urgently, as if they were passports being shown at a border crossing, official proofs of national identity. Mostly, they are prosaic pictures of family members or houses. Sometimes a diploma will be offered up instead, or theater reviews clipped from newspapers or a membership card to a duck-hunting club. Later, other, more frightening, pictures will be shown, but they all serve the same function.
For the men and women assembled in “Aftermath,” the smart and sobering documentary drama that opened on Tuesday night at the New York Theater Workshop, these flimsy objects have more than sentimental value. They are confirmations that all of the characters onstage are citizens of a country called Iraq, a place that they haven’t visited recently, but one that they love and that still exists. Or does it?
Assembled by its creators, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, from interviews with Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, “Aftermath” might be said to be set in limbo. Its performers, first seen sitting rigid on benches with their backs to us, seem to exist in an eternal waiting room.
When they turn around to tell their stories, with a courtly politeness that eventually shades into a sorrowing, baffled rage, there’s no doubt that it is we, the Americans in the dark, to whom they’re speaking. It was our country invading theirs, in 2003, that brought them to the point that, as one puts it, “I am floating between here and nowhere.”
From the New York Times’ review of Aftermath, by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. I saw this earlier in the week as part of the Melbourne Festival, and was floored.
Christos Tsiolkas, “On the Concept of Tolerance,” from Tolerance, Prejudice, Fear, 2008.
(Altered excerpt available on ABC’s The Drum.)
[Pain is] a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject.
[…] The first, the most essential, aspect of pain is its sheer aversiveness. While other sensations have content that may be positive, neutral, or negative the very content of pain is itself negation. Pain is a pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of “against,” of something being against one, and of something one must be against. Even though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as “not oneself,” “not me,” as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of.
— Elaine Scarry, The Body in PainHouse guest
The morning after she leaves, I am rinsing out the teapot when I realise she had filled it almost to the brim with loose tea: as though to prepare mess-hall servings, or to stimulate an appetite for its strong black flavour. I am taken back to the previous day when she sung out, “Don’t mind me, I’ll just make a cup of tea and then I’ll be out of your way,” and then squeakily tiptoed around the living room, humming to herself.
It was as if the events of that year had set out to demonstrate that history could not be confined to historical places.
In the same spring as the towers fell, boats making their way to Australia foundered on the treachery of currents and destiny. People looking for sanctuary drowned. They might have been found; they might have been saved. But what prevailed was the protection of a line drawn in the water.
Night after night, images of the refugees appeared. Tom saw death flicker in the furtive glow of TV and knew the guilty rage of those who have crossed to safety. Time toppled like a wave. He was a falling thing, spiralling down to wait forever in a room as blue as an ocean. He felt the convergence of public and private dread.
Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselfishly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dreams. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty film. It was a confession coded as denial. It was as if a fiend had paused in its ravaging to cover its face and howl.
**
From The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser.
