Love Affairs with the Lonesome

In mid-2016, during the joint Syrian and Russian assault on opposition-held Aleppo, the UK-based  media company, Channel Four, published a moving video about a flower seller and his son.

During his casual chat with the filmmaker, the flower seller describes "the whole world" as "a flower", adding that “we, poor people, are the kings of the world here”. It seemed unique - this insight into the curly, metaphor-strewn, humorous yet hopeless optimism of the common Syrian. The Syrian who had no claim to any exemption from the realities on the ground on the basis of education, or scholarships, or costly postponements of military service. It felt like a break from the onslaught of educated, Anglophone opinions, and of a world-weary declaration of the kind of political affinity the international media understands.

The journalist went on to speak to one of the flower seller’s customers, who told her he was part of a team of volunteers who would plant flowers at roundabouts in opposition-held parts of the city, because: “the people, in all their suffering, need some optimism, some sense of the future, to show we haven’t given up”. Then the son told the interviewer he had quit school to spend more time with his father and help him with work. These snippets of conversation only reached global audiences because the journalist returned a couple of weeks later, and found the flower shop in a very different state. We're taken forward in time and find the shop abandoned and the son an orphan. We're told that a bomb had fallen on the house a couple of weeks before. The journalist asks the son, who grief seems to have made younger rather than aged, what he will do now. The son tells her he doesn’t know. She asks him whether he knew this might happen. He affirms. The clip finishes. 

The video was made in what seemed like a relieving, albeit momentary, period of media focus on the human plight inside Syria. After these few weeks, attention veered back to its old focus, that tiny minority of Syrians financially capable enough to make their way into Europe.

It brought me to tears, and still will. The smashed-up optimism in the father and son’s life. That trailing question about what the boy might do next. That onslaught on the majority, the ones who couldn’t be called “doctors and lawyers drowning in the Mediterranean”, whose pockets would never let them leave until their families were killed in front of them. It spoke a whole story. 

Meanwhile whole quarters of Eastern Aleppo, full of civilians, were being destroyed. International broadcasters and the Syrian state news showed pictures of women, children and the elderly being ushered away from their neighbourhoods by Syrian army soldiers, trembling, children screaming, fathers nowhere to be seen. 

The video about the flower seller and his son was enlightening, albeit on a purely human, rather than geopolitical level. But the superficial banter by commenters watching it on social media wasn’t. I gave them a chance - this was Channel Four, after all - which, as far as TV channels go, publishes some pretty insightful video journalism. At best, I didn’t expect many of the commenters to be of the reactionary Farage following variety. But, as is almost always the case, listening to English people’s “opinions” on what is happening in a far away and supposedly exotic land with a culture perceived to be “incompatible” with the reigning Anglophone, internet-mediated hegemony, was nevertheless not a very educational (or heart warming) experience. I was right, most of the commenters weren't waving Farage's flag. But I’m wondering whether what they said was direct fodder for the far right. In some cases, their reasoning seemed only a few steps away from the arguments peddled by UKIP and its ilk.

What I read were condolences, not to Syria or Syrian people in general, but to this boy in particular. Along with wishing him luck and their prayers, people were apparently seriously inquiring how they could send him money, and making numerous offers to adopt him. You might've thought they'd send a private email to Channel Four's production department before committing to such a serious endeavour, but it seemed some were too eager for others to read their pledges to refrain from publicising them. Probably because the comments section is at best a testing ground for what one isn't really sure one actually believes, and at worst it's a pretext for creating a completely alternate identity.

None of the comments expressed any desire to help groups working to alleviate the plight of people in the son's general situation. No one said they wanted to adopt someone else from Aleppo or the boy's neighbourhood, someone in the same shoes as the boy, perhaps. One commenter had gone a few steps further with his plan – the boy should be enrolled in a Horticultural school in the UK (he may have named a few and given recommendations). Many more echoed the opinion that the boy should be removed immediately from this horrendous situation and educated, like “normal” children are.

Of course, the evocation of the universal human right to live in peace and access education can’t be argued with. But there was something strange about the way these commenters – who you’d imagine at least watched sporadic news stories on the situation in Syria – were singling this boy out for special attention. It wasn't as if they really believed he was the only person that such a tragedy had happened to. Intellectually, at least, most of the commenters were surely aware it was happening everyday. But there was something about having to see the boy's face to "believe" or "feel" his story. And once that face had been seen, a sense that his was enough, that it satisfied some desire to "know", as if more faces would further complicate things, would bring a lack of clarity to their stark conviction and compassion. Part of it is the drive and desire we have for simplicity in the confusion of information we are bombarded with. But is there something deeper to the fact that his face was  the only face worthy (or capable?) of being seen in the quagmire of conflict. Are we unable to feel sympathy for groups, for more than one person? Have we lost all our sense of  the communal?

No doubt this phenomenon is something journalists already know about. This outpouring of a very blinkered sympathy for a particular individual whose story was presented in order to elucidate viewers about a situation in general, a communal, rather than an individual plight.

The same had happened with Omran a couple of weeks before. A boy removed from a collapsed building, dusty, as if from a completely separate world, but still alive. The day afterwards, his picture was featured on the front page of every British newspaper. Of course, there was little elaboration on which army had dropped the bomb and why, but there were a least a few sparse details, especially given the fixation on IS and the US assault on it in all media discussion on Syria for the previous year. What was strange was that Omran’s plight was seen as completely isolated from that of his surroundings. The fact his home had been destroyed, his brother killed by the same bomb, his neighbourhood flattened, other family members lost, wasn’t mentioned. There he was this image of purity, this transplantation of the “eternal child”, this instant icon, without any explanation or extrapolation of the horrendous circumstances that gave rise to his experience. 

For me, it brings to mind the equally heart wrenching line in The White Helmets, the movie made last year by a US filmmaker about the civil defence force of the same name that worked in opposition-held areas. At one point, a brigade watch footage of their village being bombed while they are away being trained in rescue methods by Turkish police. Their wives and children, mother, father, uncles, cousins, siblings all come to their minds as they rush back over the border to find out who has died. But as they are running, one says “and what difference does it make, whether my children or someone else’s has died? They are all somebody’s children”.  And the universality of conflict comes alive. It’s not about the particular character the filmmaker happens to have focused on. It’s about the fact that everyone is suffering. 

I saw something similar yesterday when the story of a 12-year old boy in a Manchester suburb receiving an award for “befriending a Syrian refugee in his class” went viral after being aired on This Morning with Richard and Judy.

What do the thousands of likes that the video got tell hopeful refugees dreaming of asylum in the UK? That a local befriending you is rare enough to win excessive public praise? As if the rewards of friendship were not enough, and medals should be bestowed on the befriender to compensate for his mate’s less-than-perfect English pronunciation? Can all this surprise, this outpouring of praise and singling out of the selfless befriender actually stoke on far right commentary?

Making such a friendship seem so out of the ordinary and unpredictable also creates a context in which insistence that focus should be on “the illegal refugees who rape people” and “the incompatibility between the refugees and white culture” sound less absurd.

Is there something about our era that lets these views flourish? Why does the media feel the need to isolate its characters so completely from their wider settings? Why does it presume we only relate to individuals? To us, the 30 somethings brought up on a diet of Titanic, The Truman Show and Coming to America, which we could surmise straight away told individual stories as a way of portraying the predicament of a much larger group.

Why should the wrath of the "complicated" situation be unleashed only on the body of the uncontextualised lone individual? Is there something implicit in the way we view "foreignness" which means victims from other places should be history-free, bond-less and isolated from their surroundings to win sympathy? Something which is so deep set in our culture and language that it has to be consciously climbed out of.

                 Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan (2017 population approx 70,000)