on pain

what happens to pain that goes unwitnessed?

The obligation to witness pain comes with somewhat dangerous territory, but I believe it bears reflection. Fundamentally, there is an evolutionary reason and benefit for pain. Both in the physical and metaphysical sense, pain and its counterparts of trauma and grief are crucial to the longevity of a species. Pain teaches us not to engulf ourselves in fire, to not go after larger predators, to create the appropriate surroundings to protect ourselves from climate or each other. Pain has been proven to be stored in the body to the point of altering genetic material so that lineages of species retain the lessons and continue to evolve. So in a much larger sense, the metaphysical lessons from pain are just as crucial and necessary for species development , innovation, and longevity. To some basic degree, we grew to witness pain to teach one another lessons and further our development without literally experiencing the pain ourselves. But here lies the dangerous territory of stating that pain is fundamental to evolution and therefore witnessing pain is tied to our survival as a species, because a claim blanketed without sociopolitical or economic context is why we are at this confused point of history today. Pain witnessed from a voyeuristic, sympathetic perspective does not progress  our species development, but hinders it.  Witnessing pain must incite empathy in order to serve its evolutionary purpose. 

The dangers of witnessing pain purely to witness pain come from so many different colonising civilisations. Not all---but most---used religion and morality as the scapegoat for making examples out of fellow human beings through public executions to keep a Hierarchy of Humanity in place. Those deemed human are allowed autonomy, authority, and agency. Those deemed inhuman get horribly murdered as such for an audience. As time waged on, those with the greatest humanity are in the minority at the top, while the majority of human populations are perceived in varying degrees of deservedness because they are less “human”. The  inhuman tend to be slaughtered, put into captivity, forced into labour, removed of education, resource, and healthcare; and ultimately used for the whims and pleasures of those who consider themselves the best and brightest, most humanest, most peoplest people. Of course, such justifications led to enslavement, genocide, and mass incarceration for centuries and so they taught each other and the people they brutalised through force that those in power  enjoy watching suffering because it supports their imagined Hierarchy of Humanity, it glorifies the tastes of the coloniser, and largely operates only within the colonisers’ imagination. 

The imagination of the coloniser and its offspring is the foundation for dangerous art, leisure, and entertainment making. When we operate within the confines of such an imagination, we limit ourselves not only as oppressed peoples but as a species as a whole. In our technological age, we love to pride ourselves on our growth, but the reality is we are barely even into the adolescence of our species and have not formed a unifying principle where we can enter, as adrienne maree brown has so aptly named, the adulthood of our beliefs. 

Furthermore, the centuries of conditioning that violence and pain are to be witnessed for the comfort of those who quite literally will never experience it not only stunts our collective development, but purposefully enables us to maintain and exist within a coloniser’s imagination, even as oppressed peoples. Bluntly, the coloniser’s imagination is the root of what’s wrong with our current state of performing arts and entertainment, no matter how diverse we may appear to be. What is the purpose of creating more space for us to be oppressed by those who look like us? All I see are more of us entertaining an imagination and dreamscape we were never conceived to exist in, engaging and maintaining its life as if our only purpose is to shepherd the whims of a system meant to harm us.

We know intimately that whenever a movement becomes either successful or too threatening to the mythos of white supremacy in the united states that it becomes sanitised and commercialised to the point where it cannot even recognise itself. If you don’t believe me, look at how this country vilified John Brown but not the Klu Klux Klan, creates more and more films about the surprisingly kind white people during the Civil Rights Era, refuses to teach children about internment or the Vietnam War in public schools, hunts Assata Shakur in the same year two films about the Black Panther Party make their rounds at the Oscars, continues to use the caricature of indigenous people as entertainment to further an idea that there are no indigenous people left to listen to or support, turns Black Lives Matter into a slogan instead of an actionable ideology, and barters radical, anti-capitalist queer imagery in the marketplace and within its militia in an effort to make “gay and trans” sell at a higher rate than we bleed (which is still, frankly impossible). It is still fashionable to see and thank your belief system that you are more human than someone else, “safer” than someone less human than you. The current state of media and entertainment comforts that worldview the way it always has. When we do not witness pain the way it is evolutionarily intended, we remain stunted, adolescent, and doom ourselves and our posterity to the curse of repetition. 

To save the arts and more specifically save the theatre and the film/television industry, we have to remember our history. We have to unfurl the knotted legacy of our ancestors; we have to witness the truth of their experience in an embodied, empathetic state of knowing we will never understand and can never hope to understand, but we can witness. We can hold more than what those who harmed our ancestors ever did, and most importantly, we can do what bystanders of their time refused: we can learn. From our history, we can move towards a state of relating to time differently. We can be both within our personal timelines of grief and without it, seeing time as a series of cycles laid over top of another, where the past, present, and future inform each other. From this duality of knowing and seeing, we witness with empathy in the past, in conversation with the present, and in preparation for the future. We learn, we perceive, we build upon our embodied and intellectual knowledge to maybe, simply, expand ourselves into the next critical stage of species development: adulthood.