Stealing the Pain of Others

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Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on Canadian Humanitarian ResponsesSherene H. Razack

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To cite this Article Razack, Sherene H.(2007)'Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on Canadian Humanitarian Responses',Reviewof Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies,29:4,375 — 394

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Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflectionson Canadian Humanitarian Responses

Sherene H. Razack1

There is always something mysterious about human empathy, and whenwe feel it and when we don’t. Its sudden upwelling at this particularmoment caught everyone by surprise. Slaves and other subjugated peopleshave rebelled throughout history, but the campaign in England was some-thing never seen before: it was the first time a large number of peoplebecame outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’srights. And most startling of all, the rights of another people of anothercolor, on another continent.

Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains. Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Freean Empire’s Slaves.2

What makes us care about the rights and the pain of others issomething all activists think about. When will the moment comewhen we become outraged about someone else’s rights, the rightsof people of another colour? Judging from the spate of films in2004 on the Rwandan genocide, and in particular Canadian produc-tions, it might seem as though the moment of massive publicoutrage has arrived or at least, is not far off. Yet I want to proposethat we could not be further from outrage than we are now. Afterthe documentaries, books, and news reports featuring GeneralRomeo Dallaire as he describes his encounter with the devil inRwanda and his own subsequent post traumatic stress syndrome,we, those of us who have consumed his story, are supposed to feelthe horror of a moment in history when a genocide unfolded andthe West did nothing to stop it. We are supposed to never forget,and to never let it happen again.

In this article I argue that outrage has not followed from our con-sumption of the horrific images and stories that filled our screensabout the Rwandan genocide. Rather, we have engaged in apeculiar process of consumption, one that is the antithesis to genuine

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outrage and which amounts to what I call ‘‘stealing the pain ofothers.’’ I see this process as a national one. Believing ourselvesto be citizens of a compassionate middle power who is largely unin-volved in the brutalities of the world, we have relied on theseimages and stories to confirm our own humanitarian character.However, I suggest that our witnessing of Rwandans’ pain hasmostly served to dehumanize them further, and in the process, toreinstall us as morally superior in relation to them. How does ithappen? Can it be otherwise? That is, how do we feel their painand see their humanity? Most of all, how do we recognize ourown complicity and move through outrage to responsibility?

Part one discusses race and the slipperiness of empathy, theways in which the pain and suffering of Black people can becomesources of moral authority and pleasure, obscuring in the processour own participation in the violence that is done to them. Parttwo considers how, through the figure of the traumatized peace-keeper, recent Canadian productions, in particular the prize win-ning documentary Shake Hands With the Devil, based on GeneralDallaire’s book of the same name, invites us into stealing the painof others. In the conclusion I explore what it might mean to remem-ber the Rwandan genocide in ways that take us closer to outrageand to action.

PART ONE: RACE AND THE SLIPPERINESS OF EMPATHY

In Saidiya Hartman’s excellent work Scenes of Subjection: Terror,Slavery, and Self-making in 19th Century America, Hartman discussesthe philosopher John Rankin describing, in a letter to his slave-holding brother, the evil of slavery.3 Rankin describes to his brothera coffle, the chaining together of slaves who are then paradedthrough the town and forced to dance and sing their way to the auc-tion block. Observing the scene, Rankin strives to render it fully,despite his feeling that the horrors of slavery defy description.What does Rankin accomplish in his graphic descriptions of thehorror of slavery, a description ostensibly intended to convert hisslave-holding brother?

Rankin’s narrative has one obvious purpose: to consider theslave as a person who suffers: ‘‘Pain provides the common lan-guage of humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and,in turn, remedies the indifference of the callous’’ (Hartman 1997, 18).

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Rankin is so intent on communicating the pain that at one point inthe narrative he imagines what he would feel like to be a slave in acoffle. He ‘‘slips into the captive’s body and unlatches a Pandora’sbox,’’ writes Hartman. The Pandora’s box reveals ‘‘the slipperinessof empathy’’ (18): ‘‘In making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankinbegins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise inimagination presumably is designed to reach’’ (19). In other words,the story Rankin tells is about him and not about the slave.

Hartman asks a difficult question (19): ‘‘Can the white witness ofthe spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of black sentienceonly by feeling for himself?’’

Put differently, the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness toblack suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of theblack body in order to make this suffering visible and tangible. (19, emphasisadded)

This makes empathy a double-edged sword: ‘‘in making theother’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’sobliteration’’ (19). The pain can only come into existence at theexpense of the slave as subject. Rankin engages in a ‘‘facile inti-macy,’’ identifying so readily with the slave’s pain that he existsin place of the other and his own complicity and privilege is therebyobscured.

‘‘Why is pain the conduit of identification?’’ (20). Why not thepetty everyday humiliations of slavery instead? Hartman suppliesthe answer: the ‘‘shocking and ghostly presence of pain effacesand restricts black sentience’’ (21). The nearer you bring the pain,the more the pain and the subject who is experiencing it disappears,leaving the witness in its place, suggests Hartman relying onZygmunt Bauman (20):

Moreover, we need to consider whether the identification forged at the siteof suffering confirms black humanity at the peril of reinforcing racistassumptions of limited sentience, in that the humanity of the enslavedand the violence of the institution can only be brought into view by extremeexamples of incineration and dismemberment or by placing white bodies atrisk. What does it mean that the violence of slavery or the pained existenceof the enslaved, if discernable, is only so in the most heinous and grotesqueexamples and not in the quotidian routines of slavery?’’ (20).

The slave owner who actually owns the captive’s body, andRankin who must occupy it metaphorically, are ‘‘kindred spirits,’’

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Hartman argues. Each comes into being through the objectificationof the slave. It is the slave’s status as object and not subject that con-firms both the master’s and Rankin’s ‘‘disembodied universality’’(21). By disembodied universality, Hartman means Rankin’s pos-ition as a moral subject who is not of the landscape he is surveying.

It should be clear that ‘‘to don, occupy, or possess blackness orthe black body as a sentimental resource and=or locus of excessenjoyment is both founded upon and enabled by the material rela-tions of chattel slavery’’ (21). A material system underpins Rankin’sappropriation of the slave’s suffering. The slave’s body is fungible,Hartman observes, in that it can simply be used as a unit ofexchange, a coin that buys, in this case, Rankin’s humanity. If theslave were of equal legal status as Rankin, he or she could speakfor themselves. Instead, Rankin gets to play both slave and master,a situation enabled by the slave’s legal incapacity to act as witnessesagainst whites. Blacks are not to be believed, Hartman reminds us,and only their scarred bodies or the white observer’s vicariousexperience of cruelty will be allowed to stand as testimony.

Rankin gains from speaking for the slave. His encounter with thecoffle offers him both moral authority and pleasure—‘‘the pleasureengendered by this embrace of pain’’ (21). Think of the masochismin imagining oneself as the slave, or the sadistic pleasure in recal-ling the pain. Hartman highlights the role of spectacle. Her bookexplores the many instances in which blacks were envisioned asvehicles for white enjoyment, forced to dance their way to the auc-tion block and to eternally confirm that they were in fact enjoyingslavery. The invisibility of the violence of slavery becomes completeas violence becomes conflated with pleasure. To enjoy is to possessand use with satisfaction, Hartman reminds us, turning to the defi-nition of the word ‘enjoy’ in Black’s Law Dictionary (23). Spectaclemay entail slaves dancing for the master’s enjoyment but it alsoentails, as Toni Morrison shows, the image of a black man on trialfor murdering his white wife, or the videotaped beating of RodneyKing.4 In each instance Black bodies provide whites with a form of‘‘race pleasure,’’ to use Anthony Farley’s words, confirming whitesuperiority through images of Black suffering.5

To Become without Becoming

For Sara Ahmed, reflecting not on the slave but on the figure of thestranger, the move to appropriate the other’s pain can also happen

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when we think we are recognizing not only the other’s pain but hisor her difference.6 Difference becomes the conduit of identification inmuch the same way as pain does. Discussing the movie Dances WithWolves, where the white male character (played by Kevin Costner)is fascinated with, and comes to respect, the Sioux to the point ofbeing able to dance their dances, Ahmed succinctly captures howit comes to be that the white man in this example is able ‘‘to become[Sioux] without becoming.’’7 It is the white man’s agency that is thepoint of Dances with Wolves. He alone is transformed through hisencounter with the Sioux, while they remain the mechanism forhis transformation. He becomes the authentic knower while theyremain what is to be known and consumed, and spit out again,as good Indians who confirm the white man’s position as hero ofthe story (there are also bad Indians). ‘‘These processes of recog-nition and expulsion,’’ she writes, ‘‘produce the figure of the stran-ger in the first place.’’8 But the significant point here is not only thatthe Sioux remain objects, while Kevin Costner is able to go any-where and be anything. It is also significant that his love of the tribehandily displaces violence. As Ahmed suggests, his transformationis a gift to the Sioux and we cannot then remember the ongoingviolence that structures their relationship with white people. ‘‘Viol-ence becomes love,’’ she concludes.9 The body of the slave, or thestranger, to use Ahmed’s term, is being used to establish the whiteman’s humanity. It is our own national participation in suchprocesses that I now want to consider.

PART TWO: NATIONAL WITNESSING

In Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeepingand the New Imperialism, I discuss how we as a nation have cometo occupy the position that I am comparing to John Rankin and tothe hero of Dances with Wolves.10 In the case of the Rwandan geno-cide, CBC and the Canadian military produced a number of docu-mentaries that conveyed to the public the figure of the traumatizedpeacekeeper whose trauma occurs on the killing fields of Rwanda.‘‘Witness the Evil’’ and ‘‘The Unseen Scars’’ depict a genocidewhose victims are first and foremost the peacekeepers who witnessit, most of them after the killing had stopped.11 It is their pain andnot the Rwandans’ that we are invited to listen to, and it is injusticedirected against them that we must consider. Injustice revolves



around the inefficacy of the military for not paying attention topeacekeeping traumas, the UN for producing the helplessness ofthe peacekeepers, and, for Dallaire at least, other Western govern-ments who had no interest in stopping the genocide.

As Liisa Malkki has suggested, the erasure of the experience ofRwandans themselves, and their ‘‘speechlessness’’ in the storiesthat are told of the genocide, should greatly concern us.12 It signalsour investment in understanding ourselves outside of history. Wecome to know of the Rwandan genocide as a horror that is unknow-able and unthinkable. The ‘‘flood of terrifying images’’ tells us allwe need to know, and in place of history and context, the veryinformation needed to consider the future,13 we install ‘‘absoluteevil’’ and the good soldiers overwhelmed by it. Throughout ‘‘Wit-ness the Evil,’’ the act of aggression that is the source of traumaremains amorphous, overwhelming and African. Visually, it ishacked up Black bodies on an African landscape. These imagesdo not only ‘‘displace narrative testimony’’ of the Rwandans them-selves but actively silence and dehumanize Africans by presentingthem as a ‘‘mere, bare, naked, or minimal humanity.’’14

As witness, the peacekeeper is not personally implicated in whathas traumatized him. He stands in the place Dana Nelson hasdescribed as the ‘‘objective and disembodied space of the univers-alist standpoint.’’ From this vantage point, he is witness to adepravity that can be named but is no less mystical. His is an‘‘occulted standpoint,’’ the viewpoint of the observer who is nothimself of the landscape, yet who is able to understand hiddenthings (the presence of the devil) that the Rwandans themselvespresumably cannot see.15

The story of an encounter with unfathomable evil is only intelli-gible through race. It is perhaps no accident that so many writers ofDallaire’s story compare Rwanda to Joseph Conrad’s Congo inHeart of Darkness (1901), and Dallaire to Marlowe, the narrator ofConrad’s novel. Edward Said, in discussing Conrad’s understand-ing of imperialism in Heart of Darkness, points out that Conrad islargely unable to think outside of imperialism.16 For him thereare no subjects who inhabit Africa.17 Chinua Achebe put it moreforcefully: Africa, for Conrad, ‘‘is a metaphysical battlefield devoidof all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering Europeanenters at his peril.’’18

‘‘Witness the Evil’’ and the news features on Dallaire invite us tounderstand ourselves racially as well as nationally, that is as good

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people forced to stand helplessly by as evil unfolds, and as morepowerful nations refuse to help. To be invited, as these documen-taries do, into the ‘‘abstracted space of universalizing authorityover others’’ is to join a fraternity, the fraternity of those who areneither of the hacked bodies on an African landscape nor of theunscrupulous U.S. or incompetent UN. Before long, we begin to feelthe bond that comes from sharing such high moral ground.19 Aninternational thus constituted is an ‘‘affective space,’’ a place wheremiddle-power nations can experience belonging.20

Canadians have turned with alacrity to the vision of ourselves asa good nation overwhelmed by the brutalities of the New WorldOrder. Our engagement with the world is everywhere depicted asthe engagement of the compassionate but uninvolved observer.We come to know ourselves as a compassionate people; indeed,trauma suggests that it is our very vulnerability to pain that marksus as Canadians. From our position as witness, we help to mark outthe terrain of what is good and what is evil. Possessed of uniquesensibilities, sensibilities that take us to the depths of grief andtrauma, we can diagnose the trouble and act as the advance scoutand the go-between. In this way, trauma narratives furnish middlepower nations such as Canada with a homemade, that is to say aspecifically national, version of the politics of rescue.

Shake Hands with the Devil

Since the production of these first documentaries, a virtual industryhas sprung up around General Romeo Dallaire. His book ShakeHands with the Devil, published in 2003, has stayed on the bestsellerlists for months and it has won several prestigious prizes.21 Docu-mentaries have been made about General Dallaire, and the bookitself has now inspired a prize-winning film by the same name.The producer of another successful film of the same genre, HotelRwanda, is now developing a film about general Dallaire.22 InMarch, 2005, Prime Minister Paul Martin appointed GeneralDallaire to the senate.23 I am not concerned to evaluate GeneralDallaire’s personal story, nor even the artistic merits of his bookor the films. My interest is in what has been done with his story.Through the public narrative of Rwanda, we Canadians come toexperience ourselves as national, as citizens, and indeed as human,all through the anonymous corporeality of the Rwandans them-selves. I want to suggest that the suffering of the Rwandans has



been transformed into our pleasure, the good feeling that we getfrom contemplating our own humanity. We have yet to emergefrom this pleasurable state.

Sitting in the audience at the Toronto Film Festival in 2004, Icould feel the palpable pleasure in the air as Shake Hands with theDevil was screened. The audience leapt to its feet in a standing ova-tion, enjoying the sense of having been a witness to great evil. (Thesame was true of the audience at the screening of Hotel Rwanda, sen-timents clearly in evidence on the red carpet at the Oscars.)Throughout the film, we learned little of the Rwandan genocideitself, except that it was great evil, and that Africa had mysteriouslydescended into savagery. We may have learned that the West wasracist not to help, and that there was some kind of colonial historyto consider (happily not ours), but we did not have to consider ourown economic or missionary complicity, and we spent little time onhow responsible we are for the little help that was offered. Morethan all of this, however, is the fact that we left the cinema warmedby our own capacity to care.

Shake Hands with the Devil is a film of Dallaire’s return to Rwandaon the eve of the tenth anniversary of the genocide. As the movieopens, his plane is about to descend into Rwanda. Visually, literallyand figuratively, the hero descends from on high, ‘‘a descent intohell,’’ the film critic Geoff Pervere revealingly suggests of the open-ing scene. Dallaire is a man ‘‘condemned to peer into the heart ofdarkness,’’ the film’s text informs us, and Dallaire himself confirmsthat he is entering ‘‘paradise assaulted by the devil.’’ The storylineremains the same as the one we have become used to. The Rwan-dan genocide was simply the work of the devil. Asked by Rwandanradio to explain his book’s title, Dallaire recalls that when he lookedinto the eyes of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that did much ofthe killing, ‘‘their eyes reflected the most evil I could imagine.’’ We,the viewers, offered close-ups of such eyes, understand that thegenocide was indeed an event of cataclysmic proportions, an eventin which we can have no involvement other than that of fascinatedonlookers. While the camera roams over the eyes of the devil, bring-ing us as close to evil as it is possible to be, it also offers what Per-vere describes as the General’s own ‘‘incredible eyes.’’ The filmmaker makes things matter to us through these shots of Dallaire’seyes, he suggests, the eyes that see and reflect such pain.

Unlike many early efforts, Shake Hands with the Devil includessome historical context. Dallaire himself tells us about the actions

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of the Belgians as former colonial powers, and the anthropologistswho declared Hutus and Tutsis different, something Dallairehimself did not know when he was given the mission. There is,as well, a naming of Western racism. In a passionate speech tothe Rwandans, Dallaire suggests that they were abandoned bythe world because they were Black, whereas everyone went to assistin Kosovo because the Eastern Europeans are white. We come tosee Dallaire and his small peacekeeping force of 450 as victims ofthis very racism, the U.N. having abandoned them to their fates.

Canadian experts such as Stephen Lewis explain that ‘‘the firesof ethnic hatred were stoked by the imperial powers’’ and thatthe French and the Belgians ‘‘gave the killers the clear impressionthat they would get away with genocide.’’ Powerfully, we seethe Belgians leaving and taking their nationals with them, abandon-ing the Rwandans to their fate with a careless ‘‘you guys sort outyour own quarrels.’’ Gerald Caplan confirms that the Hutus grewup learning to hate the Tutsis in church-owned schools and he sug-gests that the Catholic Church could have stopped everything. It isclear here who the villains are. When Rwandans speak in the film, itis often to confirm that the church, the Belgians, and the CatholicChurch are greatly implicated in evil.

If we know who is implicated, we also know who is not. Drawnpowerfully into General Dallaire’s suffering, we the viewers under-stand ourselves to be him. The disembodied observer who is not ofthe landscape but who hovers over it, Dallaire is the body who suf-fers and is transformed by it. His is still the principal story of thegenocide. When Rwandans speak of their own loss, as they do onlyvery occasionally in this film, the camera pauses briefly, and moveson to the close-ups that inform us who has really been shattered.Even the president of Rwanda, Paul Kigame, has the role of tellingDallaire that the genocide was not his fault, that he could donothing to prevent it. ‘‘There is something so good about RomeoDallaire,’’ concludes Stephen Lewis. Dallaire is ‘‘the only reason-able figure in all this chaos.’’ His goodness becomes our goodness,as the film reviews all make abundantly clear.

The film, one reviewer opines, is not meant to be a history oreven a character study. Rather, it is intended to be ‘‘a testimonyand a warning.’’24 The testimony is intended, as the title of Lacey’sarticle indicates, to provide us with ‘‘a firm grip on tragedy.’’ We(must) see Dallaire’s jaw clenching and hear his voice cracking,writes Sandra Martin.25 And just as Dallaire was transformed,



so too, we will be moved and changed from watching the film. Thefilm maker, Peter Raymont, himself acknowledges that he had todecide how much horror to show us, how many bodies, how manyskeletons. He decides to show us ‘‘just enough horror to punctuatememories Dallaire describes as he revisits the killing grounds, andno more.’’26 The film moves us by inviting us into the body of theRwandans, as Rankin saw himself as the slave but only so far as wecan make their pain our own. We become the Rwandans throughthe understanding that what has happened in Rwanda is a humanthing, devoid of historical specificity, devoid, in fact, of Rwandans.One reviewer aptly illustrates this conceptual move. HeatherMallick writes, ‘‘Look, a map of the murderous mind . . . . Genocideis a human problem, not an ethnic or religious one.’’27 In evacuatingthe specificities of the Rwandan genocide, the Rwandans them-selves simply come to stand in for the worst that is human, whilewe in Canada, stand in for the best. We literally absorb or consumewhat has happened to them, and become the humanitarians we saywe are.

On the witness stand at the war crimes tribunal, Dallaire testifies,and journalists gleefully repeat his portrayal of ‘‘white skeletons ontheir backs with their legs bent and apart. Between them would liean object, a broken bottle, a rough branch or a knife, long after theflesh had rotted and the sperm had dried.’’ What happens to usafter we read of such pornographic details? What has happenedto you as I say them or you read my repetition of them? Thesedetails become a fast-flowing river that sweeps us to the final con-clusion: ‘‘We can only conclude that genocide is inbuilt in thehuman brain.’’ Heather Mallick writes and she soon reaches thecrescendo of the story:

In honour of those humans going up in smoke at 11.a.m. on August 23,1944, could we listen the next time a Dallaire calls out? We can achieveindividual love. But when individuals are endangered en masse, couldwe love them as well, and for once, after civilization’s century of genocide,do something to help?28

Jeffrey Simpson echoes her cry: ‘‘The displaced and the dis-possessed want some Western presence. How can we sayno?’’29 There is now an interactive learning module for seniorhigh-school and university students which invites students tobe Dallaire, and to consider what they would do in the samesituation.30 At the moment of crisis, humanitarians must help.

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Terrible things happen. But what do we do about the crises wecause or provoke?

Why don’t we love them before they are endangered en masse?Who endangers them? We think we know. They endanger them-selves. In any event, such questions fall by the wayside in the fran-tic celebration of ‘‘one of our own [who] had acted very nobly andbravely in the face of horror and tragedy.’’ His story is meant toleave us ‘‘shaken and changed.’’31 But how have we been shakenand changed? Consuming the story of ‘‘extraordinary courageand monstrous collective and institutional evil,’’ we learn onlyabout ‘‘the powder keg of tribal and political unrest in that little-known central African country.’’32 We learn of ‘‘one man’s returnto his past, and a brave attempt to put a logical explanation onillogical, completely inexplicable events.’’33 Significantly, we learnabout ourselves. Critic Pervere, featured on the DVD of the film,declares the film ‘‘unabashedly Canadian,’’ and takes care toinform us that the film maker has impeccable National Film Boardcredentials. He has had the foresight to use only establishment lib-eral Canadian critics, Pervere adds, making this truly a Canadianstory.

We conclude that the movie is ‘‘genuinely life-affirming’’.34

Genocide, far from depressing us, uplifts us. It uplifts us becausethe hero of the story is us. The director, Peter Raymont, ‘‘believesthat part of the reason why Canadians make such compelling doc-umentaries is because we see the world from a very uniqueperspective . . . I think Canadians see the world more as anthropol-ogists. We see ourselves as part of the larger world community. Ithink we’re not burdened by the weight of being a superpower,and that gives us the chance to listen and understand differentissues around the world.’’ ‘‘If we had been in Iraq,’’ he continues(forgetting about the Somalia Affair), ‘‘things would have turnedout differently.’’ We would have been committed to U.N. protocols‘‘and taught their [the Americans] troops about different culturaltraditions that exist in that country.’’35

Don Cheadle, the star of the film Hotel Rwanda, commented to ajournalist that upon receiving the script for the film Rosewood, thetrue story of a racist lynch mob that burned a Black Florida town,he wondered who would want to see such a film.

I said white people don’t want to see themselves being portrayed aspurveyors of this violence and black people don’t want to see themselves



portrayed as victims of this violence. So I don’t know who the audience is.36

(emphasis added)’’

Cheadle was less insightful about Hotel Rwanda, at least on thered carpet of the 2005 Academy Awards, where he willinglyobliged journalists asking him to speak to the way the film movesus by solemnly asking viewers to remember the Rwandan geno-cide. We must never forget. What must we never forget? Perhapsthe answer lies in Cheadle’s earlier point. How do white people,Westerners in general and Canadians in particular, like to see them-selves portrayed? The answer is simple: as heroes, but in our case,as sensitive humanitarians who feel the pain of others deeply.

So have we virtually inhabited Rwandan bodies and ‘‘becomewithout becoming,’’ as Sara Ahmed puts it about the hero of Danceswith Wolves.37 Such ‘‘narratives of proximity,’’ Ahmed writes,‘‘become authorized as knowledge’’:

Not only do such multi-cultural fantasies of becoming involve releasing theWestern subject from responsibility for the past, but they also confirm hisagency, his ability to be transformed by the proximity of strangers, and torender his transformation a gift to those strangers through which he alone canbecome.38

Dallaire bestows on the Rwandans his transformation in ShakeHands with the Devil. This is all we have had to give them. If weneed to know more about Rwanda, we have only to ask Dallaireor the film’s director, as audiences happily did at the Film Festival.That’s reality.

Many critics and experts have made the connection betweenDarfur and Rwanda and have warned that we are in danger of let-ting another genocide occur. We must not forget. We must not let ithappen again, but we do. Ironically, film critics suggest, as GeoffPervere did, that the media bears much of the blame as it drawsus to simple pleasures while such horrors unfold. The trial of O.J.Simpson filled our television screens while the Rwandan genocidewas occurring. I want to suggest that it is also true that we can bedrawn to the simple pleasures of genocide. Preoccupied with ourown goodness, we can let the crisis in Darfur happen, as we lazilydebate if we should or should not descend into hell. The detailsnecessary to take action are simply unnecessary in the simpler storyof a world of evil doers, and one good brave nation. The absence ofthese details is what enables us to forget.

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In her discussion of Rankin, Saidiya Hartman emphasizes the‘‘slipperiness of empathy.’’39 Megan Boler correctly identifies thatthe slipperiness begins in the act of identification with the other,40

an act that involves a consumption of the other, and thus the other’sobliteration, as Saidiya Hartman showed. Sympathy is differentfrom empathy, Boler clarifies. Sympathy is the feeling of ‘therebut for the grace of God go I,’ whereas empathy involves experienc-ing what the other is suffering and becoming the sufferer. Boler suc-cinctly concludes:

Passive empathy produces no action towards justice but situates thepowerful Western eye=I as the judging subject, never called upon to casther gaze at her own reflection.41

Susan Sontag makes the same point another way, collapsingsympathy and empathy:

Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To thatextent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inap-propriate—response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others besetby war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges arelocated on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we prefernot to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some mayimply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirringimages supply only an initial spark.42

As a nation when contemplating humanitarian gestures, we havenot moved beyond this initial spark and it is my conviction that ourconsumption of individual experiences of trauma have effectivelyblocked any movement. We have too often felt, rather than thought,and very little has changed. Is the answer to abandon feeling? Tolook away from the corpses? To stop making the documentariesthat feature our horrified and traumatized faces?

CONCLUSION: THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

In a chapter entitled ‘‘The Problem of Evil,’’ J.M. Coetzee creates awoman writer of international reputation who is often invited toconferences to deliver keynote speeches.43 Now approaching oldage, Elizabeth Costello finds herself having things to say that heraudiences do not necessarily want to hear, things specifically aboutthe ‘‘problem of evil.’’ Costello, a writer who spent much of her life



on the executive of PEN Australia fighting for writers’ freedom ofspeech, no longer believes that writing or reading about evil isnecessarily a good thing. We cannot write or read of evil andemerge unscathed, she declares. The writing itself, ‘‘as a formof moral adventurousness’’ has the ‘‘potential to be dangerous’’(Coetzee 2004, 162). Costello, the former advocate of freedom ofspeech, ends up concluding: ‘‘certain things are not good to read orto write’’ (173). Costello suggests that we look away from the horror.

Using as her example a book published on the gruesome hang-ing of the men who had plotted to kill Hitler, Costello proposesto give a lecture on why some things are better left unsaid. Toher dismay, she finds that Paul West, the writer of the book in ques-tion is actually at the conference. Costello begins to try to articulateboth to the author and to her audience why Paul West ought not tohave written so graphically of the hangings in the cellar, hangingsthat Hitler ordered should be as cruel as possible. The event is‘‘obscene,’’ and to write of it is also obscene. ‘‘Absolute evil’’ issomething that can only be experienced, not reproduced. As sheconcludes her keynote address, Costello repeats her position:‘‘I am recommending to you that you do not try it out. You will notlearn from such an experience. It will not be good for you’’ (176). Itwill not be good to try to enter the cellar and to try to live the lasthumiliations and terrors of the men who were hanged by Hitler.

Why is reading or writing of such evil not good for us? Costellogoes back in her mind to the Saturday afternoon when she hadbegun to read the book. Terribly reluctant to read it, she rememberswith shame that the author nevertheless had made her ‘‘excited toread’’ (179). He possessed the craft to make her feel excitement, justas she herself as a writer does. Costello reads the book and feels‘‘the flap of Satan’s leathery wing,’’ a literal brush with evil itself(179). Aware that the majority opinion will be that we must knowthe horrors of the Nazis, Elizabeth Costello remains adamant: itwould have been better for Paul West to have stayed home andnot ventured into the labyrinth of Europe’s past. He has onlyrevealed things to us that ought not to be shown, things that havethe power to make us both better people and worse people. Coetzee is tan-talizing in the extreme in this chapter, and if we could never quitepin down why it is best not to let the horrors surface in all theirgruesome detail, we are at least clear that Elizabeth Costello doesnot merely wish to bury the past and forget it. She is not engagedin denying what the horrors are. Rather, her preoccupation is with

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how remembering and revisiting evil changes us, not always for thebetter.

Costello’s hesitations reminded me of the words of CharlotteDelbo, a French resistance fighter interned at Auschwitz. Delbowarned that what happened to her at Auschwitz was ‘‘uselessknowledge’’ which we should not be tempted to use.44 As withCostello, Delbo is asking us not to sentimentalize suffering, not touse other people’s pain and suffering to say or believe somethingabout ourselves, not, in sum, to take any pleasure from it,especially—to use the late Susan Sontag’s phrase—‘‘the pleasureof flinching.’’45

Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others inspired the title of thisarticle. I hoped to show that the theft of pain with which Sontag andothers are concerned is an act supported by a racial logic andunderpinned by a material system of white privilege. Sontag clearlyshares with J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello the sense that revisit-ing evil can change us for the worse. She writes of war photographsof wounded soldiers:

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of thisextreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say thesurgeons at the military hospital where the photographs were taken—orthose who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not wemean to be.46 (emphasis added)

Watching (or looking away because we cannot bear it) can helpto convince us that whatever is happening cannot be stopped, thatthere is an inevitability to the horror that absolves us of furtherresponsibility.

Her acute awareness of the risks of regarding the pain of othersnotwithstanding, Elizabeth Costello’s answer is a problematic one,as Coetzee undoubtedly meant to show. How else to change theworld and stop the horrors if not by first bringing them to light?If the solution is neither to stop looking nor to stop feeling, thenit is clear that something else must accompany looking and feeling,something that has so far been little in evidence when we have con-templated the Rwandan genocide.

Wrestling with the place of feeling and its connection to action,Elizabeth Spelman turns to Hannah Arendt and to Harriet Jacobs’slave narrative Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl.47 Spelman notesthat Arendt was uncompromising in her position that the sufferingof others cannot become public without becoming dangerously



distorted. Compassion nearly always amounts to pity, Arendt felt.Harriet Jacobs, however, writing as Linda Brent, and confrontingthe dilemma that her narrative of her life as a slave was likely toproduce in her readers pity and pleasure at the expense of the slaveas moral agent and critic, (a problem Hartman noted in Rankin),believed (in Spelman’s words) that compassion could be ‘‘fine-tuned through a process of exchange between the non-suffererand the sufferer.’’48 Brent ‘‘assumes that contest over the meaningof pain and suffering of slaves is central to the moral and politicallife around her and that the way to avoid the risks yet enjoy thebenefits of becoming the object of compassion is to try to add hervoice to that debate.’’49 Harriet Jacobs=Linda Brent is assuredly adifferent kind of witness than are Paul West, Elizabeth Costello,or Romeo Dallaire. Jacobs is a survivor witness while the othersare observers once removed. And we, in turn, as consumers of theirnarratives, are once more distanced. Jacobs advises that we nego-tiate these distances, even as we remain clear about the gaps thatcan never be breached.

Fine-tuning exchanges between sufferers and non-sufferersmight perhaps yield documentaries that seek to centre the voicesof the Rwandans themselves. Drawing on the work of ShoshanaFelman and Doris Laub, Boler suggests that we move beyond theindividualist response (how am I feeling) to a ‘‘collectivistaccount’’50 We ask such questions as who benefits from the pro-duction of empathy? Who should feel empathy for whom, andwhat has been gained other than a ‘‘good brotherly feeling’’?51

We need, in her view, a recognition of power relations, questioningon every turn the feelings of familiarity and intimacy (‘‘we knowthe Rwandan genocide, the slave’s suffering, the Sioux’s culture’’).We should consider the text, the film, the reviews in the paper, asan encounter, meeting the text with our own testimony of the col-lective history in which we are embedded.

Efforts to do all of these things have consistently run aground onthe shoal of race. First, we continue to maintain a willful blindnessabout our collective history, unable to call up, for example, any-thing that might show us how we are implicated in the West’spower over the non-West. Do we know about our support for theCatholic Church in Rwanda, about our economic activities there?Do we know about the bullets we make for Iraq, about the mineswe invest in Sierra Leone that seriously destabilize human rights?We cannot know this if our national mythology is that we are

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completely innocent, as a middle power and as nice Canadians.Second, race has handily enabled us to pursue the path of inno-cence, offering its well-worn tracks to make the journey speedy. Ifit has been easy to believe in tribal, genocidal Rwandans and goodCanadians who try to save them, it is surely because Africans haveno personhood and no history. We cannot render the Rwandangenocide ‘‘thinkable’’ as Mahmood Mamdani advises, because wewould have to grant to the Rwandans the status of subjects, ratherthan objects who are simply the conduit to our own sense of self ascompassionate.52 From captive bodies, to Rodney King and O.J.Simpson, North Americans have a long history with Black bodiesin pain, as Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Alexander, Saidiya Hartman,and others show us.53 We rely on the spectacle of such bodies toforge a national and white consciousness.

How do we give up racial power? By naming it as our own (wewho consume the narratives) and by understanding that powerhas a material base. We can steal the slave’s pain, and the pain ofRwandans because they have no personhood that stops us, andbecause we continue to benefit from their resources. We can mournwith them and avoid any responsibility for the past or implicationin the present. Wole Soyinka, contemplating the moves to truth andreconciliation in South Africa, suggests that reconciliation has bothmoral and material ingredients. For whites to redeem themselves,they must acknowledge the past, Soyinka concedes, but perhaps,he suggests wryly, there should also be a collective levy on SouthAfrica’s white population.54 Along the same lines, we in the Westmust feel the pain of the Rwandans and pay up, acknowledginghow we benefit at their expense. Let me end, then, with an instruc-tive quote:

In old times, when it was asked, ‘‘How can we abolish slavery?’’ theanswer was ‘‘Quit stealing.’’Frederick Douglass, 1894.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Gada Mahrouse, Carmela Murdocca, and Leslie Thielen-Wilson whose discussions helped to develop my thinking considerably. I thankthem also for their outstanding research and editing skills.

2. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains. Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free anEmpire’s Slaves (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 5

3. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in 19thCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.)



4. Toni Morrison, ‘‘The Official Story: Dead Man Golfing.’’ in Birth of a Nation’hood:Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison (New York:Pantheon Books, 1997), xv.

5. Anthony Paul Farley, ‘‘The Black Body as Fetish Objects,’’ Orlando Law Review 76(1997): 457–530.

6. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London andNew York: Routledge, 2000).

7. Ibid., 132.8. Ibid., 140.9. Ibid., 125.

10. Sherene H. Razack Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia affair, Peacekeeping,and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

11. Witness the Evil. Produced by the Department of National Defence, 1998. (Video,30 minutes). The Unseen Scars: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. CBC Television, ThisMagazine (25 November 1998). Accessed on line, 23 June 2003. CBC TV at http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/ptsd/wounds.html

12. Liisa H. Malkki, ‘‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, andDehistoricization,’’ Cultural Anthropology 11.3 (1996): 392–393.

13. Ibid., 393.14. Ibid., 390.15. Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of

White Men (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 10–11.16. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1993).17. Ibid., 25.18. Chinua Achebe, ‘‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,’’

in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987 (London: Heinemann,1988), 8, 1–39.

19. Nelson, 10–11.20. Ibid, 16.21. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (2003). Directed by Peter

Raymont. (Documentary Canada 2004, 91 minutes). This documentary won theGovernor General’s award for non-fiction and the Writer’s Trust ShaughnessyCohen Prize for political writing.

22. Sandra Martin, ‘‘The Globe Review,’’ Globe and Mail (31 January 2005): R1.23. Jane Taber, ‘‘Dallaire’s Frenzied Quest for Land,’’ Globe and Mail (25 March,

2005):A1.24. Liam Lacey, ‘‘A Firm Grip on Tragedy,’’ Globe and Mail (18 February 2005): R14.25. Martin, ‘‘The Globe Review.’’26. Patrick Evans, ‘‘Behind the Scenes of a Genocide,’’ Kingston Whig-Standard

(29 January 2005): 1.27. Heather Mallick, ‘‘Look, a map of the murderous mind,’’ Globe and Mail

(31 January 2005): F4.28. Ibid.29. Jeffrey Simpson, ‘‘Rwanda, Darfur . . . What are We Waiting For?’’ Globe and Mail

(27 August 2004): A15.30. Available on line at www.paxwarrior.com as cited in Martin.31. Film maker Michael Donovan, quoted in Canadian Press, ‘‘Dallaire’s Rwandan

Tale Slated for Film,’’ Globe and Mail (25 September 2003): R3.32. John Griffin, ‘‘Dallaire’s Demons,’’ The Montreal Gazette (11 February 2005): D12.

392 S. H. Razack


33. Alex Strachan, ‘‘Fine Tuning,’’ Regina Leader Post (31 January 2005): D7.34. Ibid.35. Katherine Monk, ‘‘Dallaire’s story wins top doc award at Sundance Festival,’’

Kingston Whig-Standard (31 January 2005):12.36. Jay Stone, ‘‘The Road Less Traveled,’’ Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (28 January 2005): D1.37. Ahmed, 132.38. Ibid., 125.39. Hartman, 18.40. Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999), 158.41. Ibid., 161.42. Sontag, 102–103.43. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Vintage Random House, 2004).44. Charlotte Delbo was a non-Jewish French member of the resistance who survived

Auschwitz. See Jennifer L. Geddes, ‘‘Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: HannahArendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust,’’ Hypatia 18.1 (2003): 113.

45. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2003), 41.

46. Ibid., 42.47. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing our Attention to Suffering (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1997).48. Ibid., 87.49. Ibid., 88.50. Boler, 164.51. Ibid.52. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and

the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,2001), 10.

53. Elizabeth Alexander, ‘‘Can you be BLACK and Look at This?: Reading theRodney King Video(s),’’ inThe Black Public Sphere Collective: A Public Culture Book,ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995), 81–98.

54. Wole Soyinka, ‘‘From The Burden of Memory: The Muse of Forgiveness,’’ in Viol-ence in War and Peace: An Anthology, eds. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and PhilippeBourgeois (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 475–477.

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Documents

Stealing the Pain of Others