Storytelling In A Crisis When There Are No Words
During an on-going crisis, the power of storytelling cannot be overstated. While facts and statistics can be shocking, they don’t always stick with us like names, faces, and individual experiences. It is usually the human impact pieces that stop us in our tracks and stay in our collective consciousness (and conscience). But when there’s a crisis too large and horrific to comprehend, storytelling often feels incongruous because our language simply can’t keep up with the devastation.
During this past month, the horrifying images from Gaza have made most of the accompanying headlines feel subdued and crassly intellectual in comparison. Seeing these stories on social media has heightened the disorienting effect of the incongruous storytelling—war crimes and mass graves sandwiched between holiday promotions, happy couples, Halloween celebrations, and family photos staged in pumpkin patches.
The metalanguage of war—the words we use to describe and analyze it, especially from the outside of things—is rooted in our own self-preservation and denial, especially in the surreal circumstances of modern life. It is civilized and euphemistic: spoonfuls of flattened rhetoric to help the genocide go down, words like collateral damage, casualties, targeted attacks, detainees, enhanced interrogation tactics.
Last week, the term humanitarian corridor kept popping up in headlines. Its denotation describes a temporarily demilitarized zone (another euphemism) that allows civilians a chance to flee the fighting safely through an established area. The connotation, however, implies that these corridors are trafficking humaneness through little hallways of humanity that cut through a war zone.
These roadways were full of tens of thousands of Palestinians who’d just experienced the hardest, most dehumanizing month of their lives, all of them mourning someone recently killed in the attacks. They were huddled together holding children and bags in one hand, and their ID cards up in their other, while being corralled through the remains of their city. At one end of these humanitarian corridors are the lives that they’d built for themselves and their families, the homes that may or may not still be standing and that they may never return to. At the other end of that humanitarian corridor is an unknown future as refugees, which puts them at the complete mercy of others. They are leaving a familiar place that they no longer recognize and where they are no longer wanted or safe; they are going to unknown and unfamiliar places where they might never be wanted or safe. Humanity cannot be compartmentalized and shuffled through a heavily armed corridor of soldiers, but tens of thousands of human beings can. Currently, 1.6 million Palestinians have been displaced in Gaza since the fighting began in October.
I’m not blaming the disparity between words and reality on the quality of journalism–although there is a lot to be said about how different media outlets have handled this story. I’m talking more about the surreal structure of modern-day communication and the limits of our language overall. In the face of unfathomable violence and destruction, our language stops short. Maybe that’s one reason why people avoid thinking about war when it is happening but can spend hours and even lifetimes studying wars of the past. That gap between current and objective reality and where our language can take our understanding is too painful to face without knowing how to cross it.
When our children and our own minds ask us to make sense of something that is beyond human comprehension, those of us who aren’t in the middle of it lean on the distance and comfort provided by euphemisms. We can sit back and think, “At least among all this violence, there is a humanitarian corridor that will lead civilians out of the war zone and into safety.” That gap between our language and the devastation of the crisis allows us to tell ourselves a story that sounds humane but actually means nothing or worse than nothing. It doesn’t matter how passive our voices are or how deep we bury our subjects under helping verbs and prepositional phrases; our syntax and diction won’t change the connection between our tax dollars and the violence that we’re seeing. Our rhetoric won’t stop war crimes. Calling thousands of dead children collateral damage won’t make them any less dead or any less brutally murdered.
Many of these war-time euphemisms are identical to the terms that cover up the violence of fossil fuel extraction and production. The Industrial Corridor is the widely-accepted term for the banks of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where there are high concentrations of petrochemical complexes. Louisiana’s chemical corridor extends much further west than Baton Rouge, including the huge industrial complexes in Cameron and Calcasieu Parishes. But the people who live in the communities just beyond those industrial zones call the same areas Cancer Alley since cancer rates are significantly higher in those communities. Further downstream from Cancer Alley, just south of Louisiana’s coast, lies the enormous dead zone. It’s a 6,000 square mile area in the Gulf of Mexico where the waters are now too hypoxic to support most marine life thanks to all the industrial/agricultural run-off from the Mississippi River.
The pollution of industry cannot be contained to a zone or corridor any more than a war can. But when we use the term war zone or industrial zone, that’s exactly what our minds picture: a clearly delineated area with neatly drawn borders to keep all the awful and poison inside. These euphemisms allow us to live in that gap between our language and reality, to believe in necessary evils, and tell ourselves that there are civilized ways to fight wars and wage industries, despite all the violence we see.
Calling South Louisiana an industrial or chemical corridor also threatens its future to be anything else but that. Of course huge global companies will want to come in and build their enormous industrial complexes along Louisiana’s Industrial Corridor. Not only will Louisiana roll out a red carpet lined with industrial tax exemptions, but the area is literally called an industrial and chemical corridor. What else would anyone do here? Where else would these companies go?
By no means is this a “whataboutism” argument; I am not trying to draw attention away from the situation in Gaza to remind us that there’s still a climate crisis going on. But like every other issue facing our world’s single biosphere, the climate crisis and the Gaza crisis are related. Not only are wars horrible greenhouse gas polluters that destroy entire ecosystems on land and in the water, but war also means big business for big energy economies.
And one thing I realized these last few weeks was that my reaction to the crisis in Gaza has been similar to my reaction to especially devastating stories about the fossil fuel industry and the climate crisis. It’s that baffling sensation when I see or read about something so bleak and miserable and there are no words to match the dire nature of reality. It’s those stories and images that remind me that I can’t stand outside of these problems. That no amount of metalanguage, or rhetoric, or theorizing could disconnect me because I am already in it. There is no place I can go, physically or mentally, to separate myself from these wicked problems and hyperobjects that belong to all of us in some way.
And the enormity and nature of a wicked problem or hyperobject makes it hard to dive in, but also impossible to ignore. Not only are they leviathans, they are also thick, complicated, and viscous, so I can’t just dip my toe in without getting stuck. They are quicksand, the kind my 1980s-1990s childhood taught me to fear. (If only I’d realized that quicksand had been a metaphor all along.) I step one foot in and suddenly I’m drowning in images of devastation and human-impact pieces and the type of despair that is saved for endings.
Obviously this is not the whole story. None of us can tell the whole story, especially when the story is everything and happening everywhere. It’s too big for us to see the whole picture, especially when we’re sitting somewhere inside of the picture that we’re looking at. Plus, we keep forgetting that despite the way that we've curated and compartmentalized our individual realities, there is only one actual picture that we’re all sitting in together. (Even if you are a super-rich asshole who wants to escape that picture and go to Mars with all your money, you’d still be taking a thumbnail of that one picture with you.)
That’s also the problem of sharing one giant biosphere with 7.8 billion other people; it becomes really easy to forget and talk about what we owe each other, especially when we simply don’t have the words.
