Y U NO PAINT SHIPWRECKS RE

So Western Feminist lady wrote disaster porn. Thurs and I couldn’t not comment, of coursely!

The earthquake happened while I was in Boston. By the time I came home, it was already huge news. The only thing that seemed to matter, that seemed at all meaningful, was footage of the catastrophes. When I had a spare moment, I’d watch it. Sometimes just the same video, on a loop, over and over. And I’d wonder what I was going to say.

Jaded: Western Feminist Trope # 1: Re-center a national disaster unto self. Check.

Thurs: So this disaster has nothing to do with me? JUST YOU WAIT O READER! As a Nice Imperial Peep, I haz magic wand that I will use shortly… don’t adjust your screen.

The earthquake, the tsunami, the volcano, the maybe-meltdown. So many people have lost their homes; so many people have died; the danger is so far from being over. And, thanks to 24-hour news and amateur YouTube videos, nearly all of these events have been captured on film. Thanks to the Internet, nearly everyone has blogged about them. There’s something uncomfortable about watching that footage. It draws you in; it refuses to let you stop watching. You click “replay” compulsively, hoping that the next time you see it, you’ll comprehend it all. The shaky camera, the kitchen drawers falling open, the cloud of ash, the supermarket aisle covered in shattered glass and spilled wine: It seems almost ordinary, especially if you watch it (as many people do) on tiny, low-resolution YouTube windows. But you know that something beyond your experience, something massive and with unimaginably awful consequences, just occurred. You saw it. But you didn’t see it. You didn’t understand.

Jaded: Western Feminist Trope # 2: Invoke loss that goes on an epic scale to your experience. Then again center self in discourse, focus on your discomfort. Jane Eyre taught everyone well, no? Check.

Thurs: Thurs: My feelings! Y U NATIVES NO CARE ABOUT THEM RE!

There are moments when it feels like you’re gawking. You gasp at the sight of the tsunami tossing boats and cars around as if they were toys, at how impossibly tiny these human artifacts seem compared to that mass of water. But you are also aware that you’re watching with the same sick fascination that makes people stare at car crashes and post celebrity death photos to the Internet. At these moments you’re a monster, a voyeur. But at other times, watching seems compassionate, necessary, the only connection you have with all that suffering. You can send a few dollars to the Red Cross, as is typical in these situations, but while that might help, it won’t bring you any closer to the actual experience. You want to see what happened, to feel — as much as it’s possible to feel — what it would have been like to be there. It’s not enough to give financial aid; you have to know, or try to know, what these people are going through. Even though you never really will.

Jaded: Western Feminist Trope # 3: Repeat Tropes #1 and #2. Now, use this knowledge to know, to cut and subtly castigate and carve the Other, because neo-colonial heritage would be a *shame* to squander. Check.

Thurs: On a serious note, I find the privileged gaze of white people wanting to have some connection to a disaster than happens to an ethnic minority (thereby erasing anyone else who may have been present), and by extension wanting to ~experience~ something that happens to an ethnic minority so much that they rehash and rehash these tropes endlessly in writing and books; this to me is symbolic of something very, very disturbing.

on a less serious note: Y U NO PAINT SHIPWRECK WHEN I TELL YOU TO RE

And you have to weigh in. You have to Tweet about it, or write blog post, or at any rate say something. You have to express compassion aloud; who are you, talking about all your tiny little hurt feelings and minor victories, if you’re not taking a moment to cry here? If you’re not taking even a moment to recognize how many thousands of lives just ended? And then there’s the guilt of doing this, of advertising how truly compassionate and aware your Internet presence is, as if the most important thing about all this horror is how thoughtfully you, personally, are dealing with it. And then there’s the guilt of not saying anything at all: You tell people everything. If you don’t tell them about this, they won’t know that you care. And if you tell people you care, you’re only promoting yourself. And long after you’ve said something, long after everyone’s #prayersforjapan have been registered, there’s the pull of the footage.

Jaded: Western Feminist Trope #4: Ignore abilities of many, many people who may not be able to speak, write, tweet or even think about it — geopolitical location to said disaster notwithstanding — and subtly guilt people who can’t. Lol silly pesky people with disabilities that you hadn’t *intended* to hurt but did anyway. Check.

Thurs: Y U NO APPROPRIATE SOMEONE ELSE’S TRAGEDY RE. EKDUM KAMAAL, I WILL DEMONSTRATE HOW FOR YOU.

Maybe watching catastrophe is just a basic human need. Long ago, when I was in college, I took an extremely boring class on “Art and the Sublime,” which consisted mostly of reading Kant and looking at 19th-century paintings of shipwrecks. The professor, a lovely German woman with an incredibly heavy accent, kept trying to impress on us all the human imperative to depict the immensity and terror of the natural world: To confront, through art, forces that are large and inhuman and capable of destroying us all without feeling or regret. It compels us, she said, because it points us to the limits of human understanding. I didn’t fully understand her until I watched the footage of the disasters in Japan. This was not art; it was just reporting, just raw footage, sometimes just a blur of light and noise captured by somebody’s camera phone. But I understood, finally, why so many people painted shipwrecks. Reducing this sort of death and destruction to something visible, recordable, is the only real control we have. A tsunami is more powerful than any human. But a recording of a tsunami — a human creation, dependent on human understanding and human technology for its existence — is the only way that the power of a tsunami can be known.

Jaded: Western Feminist Trope #5: Further your agenda, by pantlessly turning lives of people in said natural disaster with anecdotes of a Tsunami you didn’t experience! But it’s a okay, because imagination is errything okay? Okay. Also: Check.

Thurs: All I need to do is wave magic wand and Privileged Voyeurism becomes ok! I will now make sweeping assumptions about the human psyche using this here convenient disaster. (Also: a lovely German woman with an incredibly heavy accent? Srs?)

The fact is, we are all very small. Everything we build, everything we have, everything we know, exists at the mercy of large and inhuman forces that can destroy us, at any moment and for no reason. This fact cannot be bargained away. All we can do is record it; claim it, somehow, by showing people what we see. And when we’re on the outside and safe, all we can do is keep watching.

Jaded: Western Feminist Trope# 6: Wax on philosphical so much and so think that Quaint And Exotics Native doesn’t see when or how ze is now under spell of #global sistersong and suddenly struggles are stolen ahem sympathised with because disaster is socoolthing, no? Also: REPEAT WITH ME: CHECK!

Thurs: Oh, what did I tell you, it’s jadu! THIS is how you do disaster porn with ableism on top. CURTAINS PLZ, I will be here all weekend!