Last Tuesday, I very nearly tripped over a corpse.
As I finished up my dinner at Delightful Fast Food, I took a phone call from Bryna and chatted briefly before beginning the 10-minute walk home. Had I not, I might've witnessed a murder first-hand.
About five minutes from my house, I encountered a small crowd and, in the dark of night, took a second to notice the lifeless body at their feet - just off the roadside, arms splayed, eyes closed. Though it was too dark to make out any blood, it seemed immediately clear that I was staring at a dead man. No one in the crowd stooped over him searching for signs of life. There were none.
After pausing for a split second, I overrode my inquisitive journalistic instincts and kept walking, passing by a larger, agitated crowd as it huddled around a man I suspect was the killer. This didn't seem like a situation I'd be wise to linger in.
When I was almost home, I stopped to ask what had happened, and was told the deceased had been stabbed to death over a disagreement of some sort. To date, that's the most reliable information I've received, thanks to the unfortunate yet predictable reality that no media reported on the incident.
It sounds like the type of thing I should have found traumatizing, does it not? And yet, while on the phone with my folks for nearly an hour last night, I didn't even mention the incident - not because I was gallantly protecting their peace of mind (they're among this blog's most committed readers, after all), but because it didn't occur to me as one of the week's noteworthy happenings. That's more than a little unsettling, I assure you.
Perverse desensitization is one thing, and perhaps understandable in my current living situation. Here, death is not the shocking and unwelcome intrusion it is back home. It's commonplace, though usually brought about by less violent means.
About a month into my stay in Sierra Leone, my colleague Mabel was telling me about a cool project she'd been working on with a couple other journalists. As I delved further, she noted that it probably wouldn't be finished, as the girl who had been taking the lead wasn't working with them anymore.
"Oh ... did she switch stations or something?" I inquired harmlessly.
"She died," Mabel responded.
But her words carried neither the profound sadness of one who has recently lost someone they held dear, nor the jarring awkwardness they would have if uttered from the lips of a Westerner that empathized as I tried to dislodge my foot from my throat. Mabel's voice was not without emotion, but it was clear that her and death were old acquaintances.
Just recently, the banality of death was again on full display as I sat at my computer in stunned silence after reading an email from my buddy Trevor about the murder of Nadia Gehl. Though I didn't especially know her, I've known the family since I was 7, having played ball with both her brothers in various seasons spanning the past 15 years.
The two Kalleone employees in the newsroom at the time, Princetta and Muctar, showed interest, but the office was by no means overcome by an air of solemnity. Minutes later, they were joking and asking to see pictures of my girlfriend. It seems at least part of death's meaning is culturally derived.
However, the disconcerting aspect of all this is not merely that I'm desensitized to death. It goes well beyond that.
The very night I told my roommates of my brush with another man's mortality, it was already fodder for the pervasive black humour of 19 Smartfarm Rd.
As Patrick fantasized about murdering our landlady on account of her insatiable greed, he joked that he'd throw her down the stairs just as I was walking by, causing me to remark, "Damn, that's the second corpse I've seen in 12 hours."
Such remarks are quite at home in our humble abode. A couple months back, Patrick read a particularly bone-chilling excerpt of Ambushed, in which Ian Stewart describes rebels forcing a young teenager to rape his own mother before they cut off his head. Looking up from the book, he remarked sardonically, "Great work! Satan himself would probably pat you on the back."
Later, commenting on the somewhat troubling policy of rehabilitating rebels by covering the start-up costs to let them become motortaxis, Patrick imagined a government official stumbling upon the scene of a just-committed atrocity: "Wow. That's possibly the most perverse thing any human being could ever think up ... Get this man a motorcycle!"
The list goes on.
And I don't want to paint Patrick as some sort of callous monster. His dark musings are generally set against a backdrop of my hysteric laughter, while Kevin shakes his head in stunned silence and Bryna begs him to stop. But I'm most certainly complicit.
And to my Cord colleagues, I'm sure this comes as no shock. In my year as News Editor, my co-editor Tonezone and I often elicited looks of astonishment from our young and innocent crop of first-time journalists, as we casually made light of headline-grabbing calamities.
That is, until most of them quickly followed suit, as journalists almost invariably do. I'm convinced the profession uses black humour more than any other, with foreign correspondents as a subsection employing it most readily.
Last week, my roommates and I were discussing a fire at Freetown's most impoverished slum, Kroo Bay, where the ramshackle dwellings will be flooded by Atlantic Ocean tides when the rainy season hits in three months.
Talk turned to the global recession, as we pondered how we'd pay the bills back home, and I joked that I ought to use my time here as a bargaining tactic in signing a lease: "You want how much?! I'll have you know that oceanfront properties in the last city I lived were going for $8/year."
But most of the 'gems' do come from Patrick. He's simply better at black humour than I, through no lack of callousness on my part.
On Sierra Leonean youth unemployment: "Send them to Iraq and let them out-terrorize al-Qaeda: 'Just do what you did back home, boys'."
On the percentage of those standing around us at the Inauguration Night concert who were affected by the war : "Let's hear from all the R.U.F. rebels in the crowd! Can I get a 'what, what' from the amputees?"
Apparently, squalor, homicide and crimes against humanity are funny to me now. In a way, they have to be, or I'd just be constantly depressed given that pretty much everything in Sierra Leone can be traced to one of the three. Dark humour is a coping mechanism. You grow weary of tragedy and try to turn it into something less negative in any way you can.
Still, I can only imagine how appallingly insensitive it must all sound to most of my readers. Without understanding the genuine goodness of the people uttering these jokes and removed from context, I'd like to think I'd find it abhorrent too.
The scary part is that I'm no longer sure I would.
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8 comments:
Solid post, Mr. Brown, and good to see you back in the wonderful world of web.
I think you've hit on something that doesn't often get explicitly discussed before people set off into from their comfortable, sanitized, and safety-conscious Western homes.
The attitude towards death in the parts of Africa I'm most familiar with was much the same. When I was working in Uganda, it was one of our regular stumbling blocks. Where I lived, everyone had to travel everywhere by dugout canoe - from home to school, to work, and to market - and yet nobody knew how to swim. Enter a gaggle of horrified white people eager to save lives, and you have a recipe for incomprehension. We ran our swimming lessons anyhow, but I was well aware that they were regarded by most of the locals as something done to keep us happy, rather than for any greater purpose.
Time and time again, this fatalism came up in our work. For most people I knew, death was something that just happened, not something to be especially fussed about, or to invest much effort or thought into avoiding. This is by no means some quirk of sub-Saharan Africa, of course. but a pretty sensible byproduct of a life lived in such uncertain terms.
Nine times out of ten, I'll argue that the basics of village or city life in the poorer corners of the world are pretty recognizable to a Westerner. This is one place where it's really not. Its not so much a matter of Western individualism (though there is that) as it is our luxury to be raised with the expectation that death is something that can be controlled. The question is still out there, though - is bringing in our own conceptions of the value of individual lives really productive?
At times, I've admired strains of that fatalism, contrasted against what is often paranoia in our own culture, but I still can't help but think what tragedy it is not only that that poor fellow got stabbed, but that it didn't have the emotional oomph to get much of a reaction.
I'm not a moral relativist, either, I guess.
Perhaps oddly enough I am not concerned about your "insensitivity". I think you hit the nail on the head when you said: "Apparently, squalor, homicide and crimes against humanity are funny to me now. In a way, they have to be, or I'd just be constantly depressed given that pretty much everything in Sierra Leone can be traced to one of the three. It's a coping mechanism. You grow weary of tragedy and try to turn it into something less negative in any way you can."
I think that is exactly what being a journalist is about.
I do find it too bad however that there was no media coverage on a murder, I guess when it is so commonplace, no one bothers if the story isn't really "good enough".
Perhaps unsurprising the one thing that caught my attention in this entry was your friends asking to see photos of your girlfriend... looks like I, too, am able to skip over the content of death, racism, murder threats and gore. I pick out the important things :P
I was going to leave an airy comment on Patrick's legendary gallows humour, but Smyth just pre-emptively blew me out of the water. Well done, sir!
PS - Really, Patrick's NOT a callous monster?
Haha I was going to say something clever too but I didn't want to follow Josh's comment.
I do like that part about why journalists might have such an awful sense of humour. A lot of my friends and definitely my family think my seemingly insensitive jokes are inappropriate but because it's difficult to explain the reasoning behind it, I usually just refrain from using such humour outside of the Cord office. Maybe next time, I'll just direct them to this blog.
Thanks for blogging again. I was getting worried there.
Hah, that's what I get for tooling around on the internet after a couple glasses of wine - I end up posting ramblingly moralistic blog comments.
I'd never mean to get in the way of a good genocide joke.
Damn. Apparently the key to engaging my audience is not to post for a week and a half. *laughs* Thank you all for your comments. I'll try to address each one.
Josh, if that's the type of stuff you come up with after drinking, I'm supremely envious. Your insightful comments are always appreciated and this blog will make as much space as you need for them whenever you see fit to share. I don't blame everyone for not wanting to follow - I'm not especially looking forward to it either. *laughs*
B-Roc - Maybe Patrick is a monster. I don't know. The point is, if he is, I am too, so I prefer to believe he's not, if only for the sake of a healthy self-image.
Heather, I’ve generally taken your approach as well. North American newsrooms, and in this case, houses full of journalists, are the only places I allow my dark jokes to leave the confines of my mind and spill out of my mouth.
And Trish, to be fair, I think the reason the murder received no coverage was not that it wasn’t deemed newsworthy, but rather that the mechanisms aren’t in place to get the information out. I texted one of my reporters to investigate, but she didn’t get the message for four hours and didn’t find out anything. There was no police press briefing last week, so the news just faded away – that is, if the police even knew about it. It’s possible, if not probable, the second crowd I encountered simply sorted the matter out themselves and saw no need to involve the police. This is not uncommon.
For example, just before Christmas, my roommates and I were waiting for our Canadian soldier friend Denis to pick us up at a roundabout when a truck driving erratically plowed into a crowd of young guys; he sideswiped one guy with enough force to tear the side mirror clear off the vehicle.
The crowd reacted swiftly, descending on the vehicle and kicking the sides of the truck menacingly. The driver was pulled from the vehicle, while one of the young guys hopped into the truck and circled it around, out of the way of traffic. Within 15 minutes, the driver drove off, having made monetary amends for his vehicular carelessness, and the matter was settled.
Standing 5 meters away throughout this process, albeit with a gate as a buffer, I was impressed by the startling efficiency in settling disputes and the incident served as a vivid reminder to stay alert near traffic, as it would've been very easy for one of those guys to have been pulled under the wheels and killed.
Anyway, I've rambled on (no wine needed in my case), but the point is that there could be any number of reasons why no one reported on the murder.
Mike,
You are not insensitive to your surroundings. You are just using a great coping mechanism which is humour. So people do not fully appreciate it, but you have to do what you must to get through each and every day.
I myself use humour alot. Not only with family situations but at work. In working as a nurse for many year my sick sense of humour is all that has got me through.
We too experience death alot and I do strongly feel that all people deserve death with dignity and the right to prolong things or not based on their own values and beliefs.
Our hospital thought it would be nice and continue to play a lullaby on the overhead paging system every time a baby is born. My sick sense of humour thought that if we are celebrating birth then why not celebrate death. I thought the song "Another bites the dust" might be in order. Mangement I am sure would not see the humour in this but I sure hope that when it's my time someone plays it for me.
Take can and keep that sense of humour. Whatever gets you through each day!!!!
Aunt Judy
Well said, aunt Judy - that made my day.
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