File Note 122: Beatrice Gibson

Who gets to name a disaster? Who can define its duration, and say when it has come to an end? Breaking news favours the event, the crisis. But what of slow, plural catastrophes, the ones that seem to stretch on without the singularity of a time and a place? In news cycles, there is little drama in the narrative of managed decline, the slow desertion of justice, conflicts that begin and end and blend with others. These things extend beyond the conventionally compressed time of disaster, and they occupy something more diffuse than tragedy. 

If one can even speak of a ‘natural’ disaster (of which there are few in comparison with its opposite), such a catastrophe often serves to brutally expose pre-existing social and economic rot within sites already so decayed that their messy deficiencies defy the ‘eventfulness’ that allows an ensuing disaster to be named. In such instances, the oft-attendant word ‘tragedy’ can sometimes be deployed to obscure or delay charges of criminality, as if such lamentable and numbing things might be fated rather than structured. 

Natural or not, the onset of disaster often sets in motion events unlike social life. Declaring a state of emergency enables the triggering of predetermined sets of actions usually hidden from daily operations: rapid response units, exceptional procedures, disaster protocols, emergency powers. These things can be activated by ruling forces who also endow pre-selected groups with unique and extraordinary abilities to intervene into the democratic order of civil life to deploy strategies already anticipated for future textbook disasters. In her book Thinking in an Emergency (2012), philosopher Elaine Scarry notes the tendency to create a binary between ‘acting’ and ‘thinking’ in moments of disaster, where acting is immediate, and thinking too slow and ponderous to deal with problems effectively. This binary exists to forestall responsibility when things go wrong within a disaster response. “There was not enough time,” or “we had to do something”. Of course, in practice, thinking and acting are not so easily disentangled. 

What are the ethics of distributing languages and openings into the experiences, sufferings, and grief of survivors of disaster? Quoting and paraphrasing the event ventriloquises its harm anew, creating a reductive loop wherein the disaster is simply replayed rather than transformed. Poet and writer Patricia Smith describes the need to ask each time “whether I have the right to enter other lives.” Her collection of poems Blood Dazzler was inspired by 35 elderly residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, just outside New Orleans, all of whom died because the facility did not evacuate them before Katrina arrived “You can either call it exploitation or you can call it witnessing.” Here, Smith points to the thin line between simply appropriating violence, and reimagining it into a new, strange form that might offer a space of reflection and ritual healing. Blood Dazzler tirelessly occupies the latter terrain, opening with the voice of Katrina herself: “I will require praise, / unbridled winds to define my body, / a crime behind my teeth”. 

Battle cries and poetry can sound the same. Plato was acutely aware of such power when he banished poets — “the eulogists of tyranny” —  from his Republic. “Can poetry mourn in a spirit that does not lead its audience toward the thirst to punish someone?” asks activist and poet Alicia Ostriker. Indeed, thinking and speaking through disaster can be an attempt to articulate a desire for as-yet undelivered justice, but it is simultaneously an act of collective grief. Crucially though, this grievance is not procedural, legal or bureaucratic. It does not speak in the form of the manager; it speaks in the form of the catastrophe. This form, this thinking, has the ability to harness asymmetrical voices into a chorus that argues against the repetition of manufactured disaster. Therein lays the rage and capacity for action. And, after action, the possibility of healing.