The “hierarchy of death”. This term is used by journalists but also by social scientists to describe the disproportionate amount of media coverage various incidents of death around the world get. In an article for The Guardian, Roy Greensland writes that this rule states that “foreign deaths always rank below domestic deaths”[1]. In France, this rule is called the “loi de proximité”, the proximity law or “mort kilomètres”, death-kilometers. To me, those two names further emphasize the centrality given to physical distance or proximity. This distance between “us” and the deaths which we are informed of in news articles is supposed to play a role in our involvement, in our grief, in our mourning, in our empathy. But what makes a life grievable? Who deserves to be mourned? Why do some deaths get media coverage for multiple weeks, while other deaths stay uncovered, ignored by the masses, silenced? Judith Butler wrote: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?”[2]. This disproportional and selective distribution of empathy and grievability acts as a magnifying glass of social inequality. What often hides behind unequal grieving are questions of race, class, gender, disability, speciesism, etc.
In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman writes: “From the Zong case he had learned that 132 live slaves dumped into the sea were just cargo. It was easier to feel fully the loss of one life and to hang your hopes on one girl. Too many deaths were unmanageable.”[3] Unmanageable. 132 slaves dumped into the sea. How can our brains and our hearts manage those numbers? When, in Chapter seven “The Dead Book”, the author focusses on the horrible death of this single slave girl, when she goes into details on the atrocious treatment she received, when she exposes to us the violence of her torture, I think she is aware of this unequal grievability. She knows that the human brain needs stories, it needs faces, it needs names in order to relate, in order to feel empathy and finally in order to grieve. But what when we have no name? That is the case here, the torture described by Saidiya Hartman is endured by a nameless girl. She writes: “(…) not even her name survived. I suppose I could have called her Phibba or Theresa or Sally or Belinda. With a name she might have been more difficult to forget. A name would have afforded the illusion of knowing her and made less painful the fact that the girl “never will have any existence outside the precarious domicile of words that allowed her to be murdered.”[4]
The importance of knowing and stating the names of victims of injustices is underlined by movements such as #SayHerName, a campaign launched in December 2014 by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS). This campaign has been aiming to bring awareness “to the often invisible names and stories of Black women and girls who have been victimized by racist police violence”[5]. Furthermore, Kimberley Crenshaw pointed out in an article in The Guardian, that the campaign highlights forms of state violence that especially impact women, such as sexual violence: “There is little public discussion of sexual abuse by police officers, Crenshaw says, although “according to some reports, they are the second most-common report of police abuse”.”[6] The aim is to make the invisible and hidden, visible. Similarly, in 2021 in France, Collages Féminicides Paris, a group which has been active for a couple of years in different cities around France organized a memorial in the 11th district of Paris. In 2020, 111 women had been victims of femicides in France. The collective put up posters of those 111 names alongside denunciations such as “reforms before we die”, “guilty state, complicit justice”[7]. Names are crucial, they make us aware that behind every number we are faced with lies a life, a person with her own hardships, relationships, struggles, personality.
Numbers, of course, can also be impactful and we need to hear them, to read them, to acknowledge them. Be it the 132 slaves mentioned by Saidiya Hartman on this ship in the 1790s, the 111 femicides in France in 2020 or the 1146 migrants who died in the sea only in the first semester of 2021[8]. Statistics and numbers like these need to be widespread. Yet we all know that numbers don’t affect us the same way as concrete life stories do and if we go back to what Judith Butler wrote, we also know that our sensitivity and our empathy isn’t equally distributed. Some might say “we can’t mourn everyone or else we would stop living”, but I strongly disagree. I think actively fighting in favor of sensitivity and against desensitization is a daily hustle, especially when it comes to not getting desensitized to death. Of course, death is a natural part of life, but we do not face death equally and that shouldn’t be made invisible.
I think that is what Saidiya Hartman tries to do in Chapter 7 of Loose your mother. She tries to make it impossible for us to look away. Our instinct, when faced with intensely violent facts (unless you are a masochist I guess), is to look away. Saidiya Hartman forbids us to. We are faced with the torture inflicted to this girl and we cannot look away. I would like to think that this act of seeing would automatically result in an act of acknowledgement itself resulting in an inability to deny said violence. But as we say in French, some still decide to “play ostrich”, meaning that they turn a blind eye and burry those facts, numbers, statistics, and realities deep down into the sand. As Sarah Ahmed wrote in her article “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)”, this leads people who expose a problem to be themselves labelled as the problem: “Given that racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who "bring it up" are bringing it into existence. (…) Those who talk about racism are thus heard as creating rather than describing a problem.”[9] Calling into existence what many try to burry down in the sand “kills the joy” as she writes. In her text, she uses the metaphor of the dinner table and goes on to show that people who call out and underline systemic issues are often not welcomed at the dinner table anymore. Their mere presence makes it harder for others to continue pretending.
The dinner table, although used as an image by Sarah Ahmed, can also be read in the literal sense, when ethical questions about the food we consume are being raised by the very act of sharing a meal. What if one of the guests at the table doesn’t eat meat, nor dairy, while others indulge in sausages, steaks, cheese, salmon, or other sorts of flesh? Just by being present at this table, this guest is disturbing the status quo, they are making what normally goes unnoticed – the fact that multiple corpses are being eaten without anyone questioning it – visible. Even if they do not speak about it, even if they do not mention it, the fact that they refuse to partake in it forces the other guests to question themselves and their unquestioned eating practices. It seemed impossible to me to write about unequal grievances without writing about speciesism. Speciesism is a term coined by Richard Ryder in 1970 and it refers “to the widely held belief that the human species is inherently superior to other species and so has rights or privileges that are denied to other sentient animals.”[10]Richard Ryder asked himself the following question: “Since Darwin we have known we are human animals related to all the other animals through evolution; how, then, can we justify our almost total oppression of all the other species?”[11] If we are related to other animals, why are their deaths, which account for millions every year, not mourned? Why are people still putting a blind eye when faced with the atrocious torture endured by animals in slaughterhouses?
This essay can in no way cover at length the history of speciesism and its multiple facets and that is not my intention. My wish here is to illustrate that who we mourn and why we mourn them, is socially and culturally constructed. Our empathy is framed and restricted to specific individuals whose lives are presented as worth grieving. Constructed categories such as “humans” and “animals” serve these asymmetrical grievances. Historically, groups of humans have been animalized while some animals have been humanized. In a society where animals aren’t deemed worthy of our grieving, animalized humans aren’t either. Myriam Bahaffou is an author, scholar in philosophy and ecofeminist activist whose work questions the “philosophical construction of the "animal" through a feminist and decolonial perspective”[12]. In an interview for ChEEk, she highlights that she considers herself as part of those humans that have been “naturalized, animalized, (those) which do not fit correctly into the category of ‘humans’”[13]. She calls upon the importance of reclaiming the categories of “non-human”, “subhumans” or even “dissidents of humanity”, a category where “women, enslaved people, people of color, fat people, disabled people, all these bodies that are not ‘correctly human’”[14] would finally belong. She reminds us that colonialism was fed by discourses that associated certain populations with “nature”, presenting them as “savages”, “non-civilized” and “undomesticated” individuals[15]. Historically, human zoos have been the most direct illustration of this animalization of certain individuals, based on their morphologies and/or race. But race isn’t the only thing used to other, animalize or dehumanize individuals. Disability and sexuality for example have also been weaponized. In an exhibition presented by the Schwules Museum in Berlin (2. September 2022 – 30. January 2023) entitled Queering the Crip and Cripping the Queer, the scholar Carrie Sandahl writes: “sexual minorities and people with disabilities share a history of injustice: both have been pathologized by medicine; demonized by religion; (…) victimized by hate groups; and isolated socially”. This exhibition reminds us that during World War 2, the Nazi “Aktion T4 program” ordered the mass murdering of disabled people in gas chambers: “The disabled, like other groups viewed as weakening the Reich, were deemed ‘useless eaters’ and ‘unworthy of life’”[16]. Who defines who is worthy of life? Who defines whose lives are worth grieving and whose aren’t?
The purpose of this essay is to underline the arbitrary nature of grievance. It’s an invitation to aim towards undifferentiated grief, to mourn each life to the same degree, independently of the race, the class, the gender, the sexuality, the ‘humanity’ or the ‘proximity’ of that individual. It’s a call to get our ostrich heads out of the sand and to not look away. It’s a cry in favor of sensitivity, an active call to oppose desensitization. Every death deserves grievance, every name deserves to be remembered and the invisible needs to be made visible, even if that means that we lose our seats at numerous tables. Those tables not only decide to deny grievances - they deny lives. A death that is not mourned is a life deemed less worthy. Invisible deaths are the result of invisibilized lives.
[1] Roy Greensland, “A hierarchy of death”, The Guardian, April 19, 2007.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/apr/19/thirtytwodieinamericanuniv.
[2] Judith Butler, Precarious life – the power of mourning and violence (Verso, London, 2004), p.20.
[3] Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2008), p.108.
[4] Ibid, p.105
[5] Cf ‚Our demands‘ on the official website of The African American Policy Forum: https://www.aapf.org/our-demands
[6] Homa Khaleeli, “#SayHerName: why Kimberlé Crenshaw is fighting for forgotten women”, The Guardian, May 30, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/30/sayhername-why-kimberle-crenshaw-is-fighting-for-forgotten-women
[7] Franceinfo avec AFP, « Féminicides : des militantes dressent un "mémorial" à Paris pour les victimes de 2020 », Franceinfo, January 10, 2020. https://www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/harcelement-sexuel/feminicides-des-militantes-dressent-un-memorial-a-paris-pour-les-victimes-de-2020_4252031.html
[8] Le Monde avec AFP, « Le nombre de migrants morts en mer en tentant de rejoindre l’Europe a doublé en un an », Le Monde, July 14, 2021. https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2021/07/14/le-nombre-de-migrants-morts-en-mer-en-tentant-de-rejoindre-l-europe-a-double-en-un-an_6088196_3210.html
[9] Sara Ahmed, „Feminist Killjoys (And other willful subjects)”, The Scholar and Feminist online, Issue 8.3, 2010, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm.
[10] See Dr. Richard D. Ryders official page: http://www.62stockton.com/richard/
[11] Richard Ryder, “All beings that feel pain deserve human rights”, The Guardian, August 6, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/06/animalwelfare
[12] See Myriam Bahaffous Academia page: https://u-picardie.academia.edu/MyriamBahaffou
[13] Faustine Kopiejwski, « Myriam Bahaffou : “Si l’on veut parler d’écoféminismes, il faut parler des corps” », ChEEk, November 15, 2022. https://www.lesinrocks.com/cheek/myriam-bahaffou-si-lon-veut-parler-decofeminismes-il-faut-parler-des-corps-513191-15-11-2022/
My own translation: « je fais partie des gens qui ont été naturalisés, animalisés, qui ne rentrent pas correctement dans la catégorie “humains” »
[14] Ibid, my translation : « Ça m’intéresse beaucoup plus de parler des non-humains, des “sous-humains” ou des “dissident·es à l’humanité”, que ce soit les femmes, les personnes esclavagisées, les personnes de couleur, les personnes grosses, handicapées, tous ces corps qui ne sont pas “correctement humains” ».
[15] Ibid, my translation : « Car, qui sont les personnes associées au “naturel”, celles qui ne sont pas encore vraiment “sorties de la nature”? Qui sont les “sauvages”, les “non-civilisé·es”, les « indomestiqué.es » ».
[16] See the presentation of the exhibition on the website of the Schwules Museum Berlin, https://queer-crip.schwulesmuseum.de/en/