Why this boy?
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It feels like an obscene question to ask of the photographs of Aylan Kurdi,
the 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish child whose body washed up on a beach in
Turkey yesterday morning, images that have since appeared on the front
pages of the major American and European newspapers and flooded Twitter
with video montages and sorrowful memes,
the social-media equivalents of the stuffed animals and bouquets that
pile up at the sites where children have died in car accidents or
shootings.
But as human rights groups have grown hoarse reminding us, nearly 12,000 children have reportedly been killed so far as a result of the Syrian civil war. Nearly 2 million more are living as refugees, according to Unicef. Both the Islamic State and its enemies
have enlisted child soldiers in their causes. It’s not just the numbing
statistics that are familiar. The Internet is full of images of dead
Syrian children, and it’s hard to imagine that the people who were
transfixed by Aylan on Facebook yesterday had not seen at least some of
them. Why this picture? Why not all the others?
For
me, it was the shoes. Aylan appeared in my Twitter feed early yesterday
afternoon, and I spent the rest of the day wrecked by his image. More
than once I found myself staring out the window, thinking about the boy
on the beach. I have a young son, a couple of years younger than Aylan
but close enough to him in size that every detail of the photo — down to
the angle of repose that, as more than one artist noticed, so precisely echoes that of an exhausted child asleep in his crib — was terribly familiar.
Last
weekend, I was at the neighborhood playground trying to wrestle my
son’s feet into a pair of shoes — his first — that he was more inclined
to chew on than to wear. Which was fine, really. He doesn’t walk yet,
not quite; he mostly just shimmies along the edges of furniture like a
fisherman trying to negotiate the rail in a storm. After a few minutes, I
gave up. Forget it, I thought, as he cheerfully kicked the shoes off
into the weeds under the park bench. He has the rest of his life to wear
those things. He’ll have all the time in the world.
If
you have spent a Saturday morning like this, then this is what you see
when you look at the boy on the beach: Aylan’s mother (Rehan, who
drowned with him, as did Aylan’s older brother, Galip) or father
(Abdullah, who survived),
pulling the Velcro straps tight, in anticipation of a voyage they can
fathom and the boy cannot. There are many things separating your life
from theirs, of course. But from another angle — the vantage of the
still-new parent, who has recently learned to view the entire world
through the lens of the myriad risks it poses to a child — all that
really separates you are a few strokes of misfortune. On Wednesday
morning, someone like you was helping Aylan put on his shoes.
But
if you follow this emotional vector to its logical endpoint, you end up
in an uncomfortable place. The boy on the beach has little in common
with the other images of children in extremis that have caused the world
to pause, however briefly, and contemplate its brutality. I’m thinking
of Nick Ut’s napalm girl in Vietnam, Kevin Carter’s starving, vulture-stalked child
in Sudan. Both are scenes from the pits of what feels like a safely
distant hell. The children’s nakedness and emaciation attest to the fact
that they are already far removed from the experience of the intended
audience, already rendered alien by the debasement of war or famine.
What they evoke is less empathy — in the true sense of being able to
understand another’s pain — than pity. They urge Americans to use their
hegemonic privilege to alleviate suffering. Stop the war; send food.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
It’s
hard to imagine either of these images having anywhere near the same
impact today; there are simply too many like them. On a bad day, the
average Twitter user could encounter a dozen Syrian Phan Thi Kim Phucs without even looking for them. And then a boy in nice, clean clothes washes up on the beach near a resort town.
Is
it wrong to be more jarred, more ravaged by this image simply because
the child looks as if he could have wandered off your neighborhood
playground, because in one photograph the policeman tasked with
recovering the body — from the look on his face, it’s hard to imagine
that he isn’t himself a father — is cradling him the same way you’ve
cradled your own sleeping son, one Velcro strap flapping loose on his
left shoe? Because the beach, by the looks of it, could be Southern
California or Florida as easily as Turkey, could be the last place you
watched your own kid kicking around in the sand? Because this child,
unlike the anonymous, dust-shrouded corpses you’ve seen in other
photographs, bears all the outward signs of being cared for as you care
for your own?
But
we know we are like this — that empathy is, in practice, mostly a
measure of distance from one experience to another, reckoned by some
ancient tribal part of the mind. There’s ample psychological research
suggesting that people underestimate the suffering of those who look different from them, that the knowledge of another group’s history of suffering simply leads people to assume they have a higher tolerance for it.
The bodies of Syrian children scroll by in the Twitter feed,
interspersed with GIFs from old sitcoms and news about Tom Brady. You
feel something for them but not enough, and you move on, dimly aware of
amassing one more incremental unit of guilt for your acquiescence to the
world as it is.
But
in the geography of empathy, the boy on the beach occupies an unusual
position. He is at once an emissary from a distant war of unfathomable,
baroque atrocity and a figure of awful closeness. You look at the
pictures, and you want, more than just about anything, for him to get
up. You find yourself searching for more pictures, pictures of the living boy.
Is all of this worth anything, in any real sense? Maybe not. But for a
moment at least, you are looking at a photograph that hurts just as much
as it should.
