Content note: 9/11, natural disaster, spectacle, whitewashing

I guess I’m on a publication streak? “I Am Always in Transition When Disaster Strikes,” a piece about the spectacle, 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, is live at r.kv.r.y quarterly literary journal. I said this in a process interview I did with my literary agent and close friend, Mary Krienke, about why I was motivated to write this piece:

Because the Sri Lankan conflict hits so close to home, I privately resent its invisibility in mainstream news. I’m sure I’m in the company of individuals who survived or grew up in the shadow of this or other conflicts.

It was striking to me that Sri Lanka appeared in the news again at the precise moment its invisibility peaked, during the media blackout toward the war’s end, as though to suggest that absence is necessary to restore presence in the public eye. Like when it’s inaccessible, we want it. I feel like in my work I’m constantly negotiating a balance between making conflict visible and asserting that it is worthy of visibility, that war doesn’t begin and end when the news media say so but simmers to a boiling point long before it explodes into Black July, or continues with refugees in camps, sexual abuses, privation, arbitrary detainment.

We—be it countries or individuals—invest in conflicts that are the most worthwhile to us in terms of emotional costs, economic resources, cultural or political or physical similarity. There’s a concept known as “compassion fatigue,” where being inundated with stories and images of war in Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Ukraine, etc., etc., anesthetizes us to atrocity. But I think there’s more to it. While there’s some truth to inuring oneself through repeated viewing, as I’m prone to doing, it’s sort of a generalization that removes agency from the public, positioning the government and media as the purveyors of compassion. I want my writing to ask: Can we displace the register of compassion from governmental policy to public empathy, catalyzed not by war photographs (which never exist in isolation) but by intertextual narratives within a social, economic, political context at home and abroad?

And maybe that’s the best description of BLACK TIGER, WHITE VAN, which seeks to refigure the terms of looking—not at consequences but at violence in process, when intervention still seems possible, when we are more willing to engage.

Read “I Am Always in Transition When Disaster Strikes” at r.kv.r.y Quarterly Literary Journal (access check: white text on black ground may be difficult for some readers) or download it as a PDF.