Stealing The Pain of Others

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Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on Canadian Humanitarian Responses

Sherene H. Razack
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DOI: 10.1080/10714410701454198
Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections

on Canadian Humanitarian Responses
Sherene H. Razack1
There is always something mysterious about human empathy, and when
we feel it and when we dont. Its sudden upwelling at this particular
moment caught everyone by surprise. Slaves and other subjugated peoples
have rebelled throughout history, but the campaign in England was something never seen before: it was the first time a large number of people
became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone elses
rights. And most startling of all, the rights of another people of another
color, on another continent.
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains. Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free
an Empires Slaves.2
What makes us care about the rights and the pain of others is
something all activists think about. When will the moment come
when we become outraged about someone elses rights, the rights
of people of another colour? Judging from the spate of films in
2004 on the Rwandan genocide, and in particular Canadian productions, it might seem as though the moment of massive public
outrage has arrived or at least, is not far off. Yet I want to propose
that we could not be further from outrage than we are now. After
the documentaries, books, and news reports featuring General
Romeo Dallaire as he describes his encounter with the devil in
Rwanda and his own subsequent post traumatic stress syndrome,
we, those of us who have consumed his story, are supposed to feel
the horror of a moment in history when a genocide unfolded and
the West did nothing to stop it. We are supposed to never forget,
and to never let it happen again.
In this article I argue that outrage has not followed from our consumption of the horrific images and stories that filled our screens
about the Rwandan genocide. Rather, we have engaged in a
peculiar process of consumption, one that is the antithesis to genuine
375
376
S. H. Razack
outrage and which amounts to what I call stealing the pain of

others. I see this process as a national one. Believing ourselves
to be citizens of a compassionate middle power who is largely uninvolved in the brutalities of the world, we have relied on these
images and stories to confirm our own humanitarian character.
However, I suggest that our witnessing of Rwandans pain has
mostly served to dehumanize them further, and in the process, to
reinstall us as morally superior in relation to them. How does it
happen? Can it be otherwise? That is, how do we feel their pain
and see their humanity? Most of all, how do we recognize our
own complicity and move through outrage to responsibility?
Part one discusses race and the slipperiness of empathy, the
ways in which the pain and suffering of Black people can become
sources of moral authority and pleasure, obscuring in the process
our own participation in the violence that is done to them. Part
two considers how, through the figure of the traumatized peacekeeper, recent Canadian productions, in particular the prize winning documentary Shake Hands With the Devil, based on General
Dallaires book of the same name, invites us into stealing the pain
of others. In the conclusion I explore what it might mean to remember the Rwandan genocide in ways that take us closer to outrage
and to action.
PART ONE: RACE AND THE SLIPPERINESS OF EMPATHY

In Saidiya Hartmans excellent work Scenes of Subjection: Terror,
Slavery, and Self-making in 19th Century America, Hartman discusses
the philosopher John Rankin describing, in a letter to his slaveholding brother, the evil of slavery.3 Rankin describes to his brother
a coffle, the chaining together of slaves who are then paraded
through the town and forced to dance and sing their way to the auction block. Observing the scene, Rankin strives to render it fully,
despite his feeling that the horrors of slavery defy description.
What does Rankin accomplish in his graphic descriptions of the
horror of slavery, a description ostensibly intended to convert his
slave-holding brother?
Rankins narrative has one obvious purpose: to consider the
slave as a person who suffers: Pain provides the common language of humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and,
in turn, remedies the indifference of the callous (Hartman 1997, 18).
Stealing the Pain of Others
377
Rankin is so intent on communicating the pain that at one point in

the narrative he imagines what he would feel like to be a slave in a
coffle. He slips into the captives body and unlatches a Pandoras
box, writes Hartman. The Pandoras box reveals the slipperiness
of empathy (18): In making the slaves suffering his own, Rankin
begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in
imagination presumably is designed to reach (19). In other words,
the story Rankin tells is about him and not about the slave.
Hartman asks a difficult question (19): Can the white witness of
the spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of black sentience
only by feeling for himself?
Put differently, the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to
black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the
black body in order to make this suffering visible and tangible. (19, emphasis
added)
This makes empathy a double-edged sword: in making the

others suffering ones own, this suffering is occluded by the others
obliteration (19). The pain can only come into existence at the
expense of the slave as subject. Rankin engages in a facile intimacy, identifying so readily with the slaves pain that he exists
in place of the other and his own complicity and privilege is thereby
obscured.
Why is pain the conduit of identification? (20). Why not the
petty everyday humiliations of slavery instead? Hartman supplies
the answer: the shocking and ghostly presence of pain effaces
and restricts black sentience (21). The nearer you bring the pain,
the more the pain and the subject who is experiencing it disappears,
leaving the witness in its place, suggests Hartman relying on
Zygmunt Bauman (20):
Moreover, we need to consider whether the identification forged at the site
of suffering confirms black humanity at the peril of reinforcing racist
assumptions of limited sentience, in that the humanity of the enslaved
and the violence of the institution can only be brought into view by extreme
examples of incineration and dismemberment or by placing white bodies at
risk. What does it mean that the violence of slavery or the pained existence
of the enslaved, if discernable, is only so in the most heinous and grotesque
examples and not in the quotidian routines of slavery? (20).
The slave owner who actually owns the captives body, and
Rankin who must occupy it metaphorically, are kindred spirits,
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S. H. Razack
Hartman argues. Each comes into being through the objectification

of the slave. It is the slaves status as object and not subject that confirms both the masters and Rankins disembodied universality
(21). By disembodied universality, Hartman means Rankins position as a moral subject who is not of the landscape he is surveying.
It should be clear that to don, occupy, or possess blackness or
the black body as a sentimental resource and=or locus of excess
enjoyment is both founded upon and enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery (21). A material system underpins Rankins
appropriation of the slaves suffering. The slaves body is fungible,
Hartman observes, in that it can simply be used as a unit of
exchange, a coin that buys, in this case, Rankins humanity. If the
slave were of equal legal status as Rankin, he or she could speak
for themselves. Instead, Rankin gets to play both slave and master,
a situation enabled by the slaves legal incapacity to act as witnesses
against whites. Blacks are not to be believed, Hartman reminds us,
and only their scarred bodies or the white observers vicarious
experience of cruelty will be allowed to stand as testimony.
Rankin gains from speaking for the slave. His encounter with the
coffle offers him both moral authority and pleasurethe pleasure
engendered by this embrace of pain (21). Think of the masochism
in imagining oneself as the slave, or the sadistic pleasure in recalling the pain. Hartman highlights the role of spectacle. Her book
explores the many instances in which blacks were envisioned as
vehicles for white enjoyment, forced to dance their way to the auction block and to eternally confirm that they were in fact enjoying
slavery. The invisibility of the violence of slavery becomes complete
as violence becomes conflated with pleasure. To enjoy is to possess
and use with satisfaction, Hartman reminds us, turning to the definition of the word enjoy in Blacks Law Dictionary (23). Spectacle
may entail slaves dancing for the masters enjoyment but it also
entails, as Toni Morrison shows, the image of a black man on trial
for murdering his white wife, or the videotaped beating of Rodney
King.4 In each instance Black bodies provide whites with a form of
race pleasure, to use Anthony Farleys words, confirming white
superiority through images of Black suffering.5
To Become without Becoming

For Sara Ahmed, reflecting not on the slave but on the figure of the
stranger, the move to appropriate the others pain can also happen
379
when we think we are recognizing not only the others pain but his
or her difference.6 Difference becomes the conduit of identification in
much the same way as pain does. Discussing the movie Dances With
Wolves, where the white male character (played by Kevin Costner)
is fascinated with, and comes to respect, the Sioux to the point of
being able to dance their dances, Ahmed succinctly captures how
it comes to be that the white man in this example is able to become
[Sioux] without becoming.7 It is the white mans agency that is the
point of Dances with Wolves. He alone is transformed through his
encounter with the Sioux, while they remain the mechanism for
his transformation. He becomes the authentic knower while they
remain what is to be known and consumed, and spit out again,
as good Indians who confirm the white mans position as hero of
the story (there are also bad Indians). These processes of recognition and expulsion, she writes, produce the figure of the stranger in the first place.8 But the significant point here is not only that
the Sioux remain objects, while Kevin Costner is able to go anywhere and be anything. It is also significant that his love of the tribe
handily displaces violence. As Ahmed suggests, his transformation
is a gift to the Sioux and we cannot then remember the ongoing
violence that structures their relationship with white people. Violence becomes love, she concludes.9 The body of the slave, or the
stranger, to use Ahmeds term, is being used to establish the white
mans humanity. It is our own national participation in such
processes that I now want to consider.
PART TWO: NATIONAL WITNESSING

In Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping
and the New Imperialism, I discuss how we as a nation have come
to occupy the position that I am comparing to John Rankin and to
the hero of Dances with Wolves.10 In the case of the Rwandan genocide, CBC and the Canadian military produced a number of documentaries that conveyed to the public the figure of the traumatized
peacekeeper whose trauma occurs on the killing fields of Rwanda.
Witness the Evil and The Unseen Scars depict a genocide
whose victims are first and foremost the peacekeepers who witness
it, most of them after the killing had stopped.11 It is their pain and
not the Rwandans that we are invited to listen to, and it is injustice
directed against them that we must consider. Injustice revolves
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S. H. Razack
around the inefficacy of the military for not paying attention to

peacekeeping traumas, the UN for producing the helplessness of
the peacekeepers, and, for Dallaire at least, other Western governments who had no interest in stopping the genocide.
As Liisa Malkki has suggested, the erasure of the experience of
Rwandans themselves, and their speechlessness in the stories
that are told of the genocide, should greatly concern us.12 It signals
our investment in understanding ourselves outside of history. We
come to know of the Rwandan genocide as a horror that is unknowable and unthinkable. The flood of terrifying images tells us all
we need to know, and in place of history and context, the very
information needed to consider the future,13 we install absolute
evil and the good soldiers overwhelmed by it. Throughout Witness the Evil, the act of aggression that is the source of trauma
remains amorphous, overwhelming and African. Visually, it is
hacked up Black bodies on an African landscape. These images
do not only displace narrative testimony of the Rwandans themselves but actively silence and dehumanize Africans by presenting
them as a mere, bare, naked, or minimal humanity.14
As witness, the peacekeeper is not personally implicated in what
has traumatized him. He stands in the place Dana Nelson has
described as the objective and disembodied space of the universalist standpoint. From this vantage point, he is witness to a
depravity that can be named but is no less mystical. His is an
occulted standpoint, the viewpoint of the observer who is not
himself of the landscape, yet who is able to understand hidden
things (the presence of the devil) that the Rwandans themselves
presumably cannot see.15
The story of an encounter with unfathomable evil is only intelligible through race. It is perhaps no accident that so many writers of
Dallaires story compare Rwanda to Joseph Conrads Congo in
Heart of Darkness (1901), and Dallaire to Marlowe, the narrator of
Conrads novel. Edward Said, in discussing Conrads understanding of imperialism in Heart of Darkness, points out that Conrad is
largely unable to think outside of imperialism.16 For him there
are no subjects who inhabit Africa.17 Chinua Achebe put it more
forcefully: Africa, for Conrad, is a metaphysical battlefield devoid
of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European
enters at his peril.18
Witness the Evil and the news features on Dallaire invite us to
understand ourselves racially as well as nationally, that is as good
381
people forced to stand helplessly by as evil unfolds, and as more

powerful nations refuse to help. To be invited, as these documentaries do, into the abstracted space of universalizing authority
over others is to join a fraternity, the fraternity of those who are
neither of the hacked bodies on an African landscape nor of the
unscrupulous U.S. or incompetent UN. Before long, we begin to feel
the bond that comes from sharing such high moral ground.19 An
international thus constituted is an affective space, a place where
middle-power nations can experience belonging.20
Canadians have turned with alacrity to the vision of ourselves as
a good nation overwhelmed by the brutalities of the New World
Order. Our engagement with the world is everywhere depicted as
the engagement of the compassionate but uninvolved observer.
We come to know ourselves as a compassionate people; indeed,
trauma suggests that it is our very vulnerability to pain that marks
us as Canadians. From our position as witness, we help to mark out
the terrain of what is good and what is evil. Possessed of unique
sensibilities, sensibilities that take us to the depths of grief and
trauma, we can diagnose the trouble and act as the advance scout
and the go-between. In this way, trauma narratives furnish middle
power nations such as Canada with a homemade, that is to say a
specifically national, version of the politics of rescue.
Shake Hands with the Devil

Since the production of these first documentaries, a virtual industry
has sprung up around General Romeo Dallaire. His book Shake
Hands with the Devil, published in 2003, has stayed on the bestseller
lists for months and it has won several prestigious prizes.21 Documentaries have been made about General Dallaire, and the book
itself has now inspired a prize-winning film by the same name.
The producer of another successful film of the same genre, Hotel
Rwanda, is now developing a film about general Dallaire.22 In
March, 2005, Prime Minister Paul Martin appointed General
Dallaire to the senate.23 I am not concerned to evaluate General
Dallaires personal story, nor even the artistic merits of his book
or the films. My interest is in what has been done with his story.
Through the public narrative of Rwanda, we Canadians come to
experience ourselves as national, as citizens, and indeed as human,
all through the anonymous corporeality of the Rwandans themselves. I want to suggest that the suffering of the Rwandans has
382
S. H. Razack
been transformed into our pleasure, the good feeling that we get
from contemplating our own humanity. We have yet to emerge
from this pleasurable state.
Sitting in the audience at the Toronto Film Festival in 2004, I
could feel the palpable pleasure in the air as Shake Hands with the
Devil was screened. The audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, enjoying the sense of having been a witness to great evil. (The
same was true of the audience at the screening of Hotel Rwanda, sentiments clearly in evidence on the red carpet at the Oscars.)
Throughout the film, we learned little of the Rwandan genocide
itself, except that it was great evil, and that Africa had mysteriously
descended into savagery. We may have learned that the West was
racist not to help, and that there was some kind of colonial history
to consider (happily not ours), but we did not have to consider our
own economic or missionary complicity, and we spent little time on
how responsible we are for the little help that was offered. More
than all of this, however, is the fact that we left the cinema warmed
by our own capacity to care.
Shake Hands with the Devil is a film of Dallaires return to Rwanda
on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the genocide. As the movie
opens, his plane is about to descend into Rwanda. Visually, literally
and figuratively, the hero descends from on high, a descent into
hell, the film critic Geoff Pervere revealingly suggests of the opening scene. Dallaire is a man condemned to peer into the heart of
darkness, the films text informs us, and Dallaire himself confirms
that he is entering paradise assaulted by the devil. The storyline
remains the same as the one we have become used to. The Rwandan genocide was simply the work of the devil. Asked by Rwandan
radio to explain his books title, Dallaire recalls that when he looked
into the eyes of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that did much of
the killing, their eyes reflected the most evil I could imagine. We,
the viewers, offered close-ups of such eyes, understand that the
genocide was indeed an event of cataclysmic proportions, an event
in which we can have no involvement other than that of fascinated
onlookers. While the camera roams over the eyes of the devil, bringing us as close to evil as it is possible to be, it also offers what Pervere describes as the Generals own incredible eyes. The film
maker makes things matter to us through these shots of Dallaires
eyes, he suggests, the eyes that see and reflect such pain.
Unlike many early efforts, Shake Hands with the Devil includes
some historical context. Dallaire himself tells us about the actions
383
of the Belgians as former colonial powers, and the anthropologists

who declared Hutus and Tutsis different, something Dallaire
himself did not know when he was given the mission. There is,
as well, a naming of Western racism. In a passionate speech to
the Rwandans, Dallaire suggests that they were abandoned by
the world because they were Black, whereas everyone went to assist
in Kosovo because the Eastern Europeans are white. We come to
see Dallaire and his small peacekeeping force of 450 as victims of
this very racism, the U.N. having abandoned them to their fates.
Canadian experts such as Stephen Lewis explain that the fires
of ethnic hatred were stoked by the imperial powers and that
the French and the Belgians gave the killers the clear impression
that they would get away with genocide. Powerfully, we see
the Belgians leaving and taking their nationals with them, abandoning the Rwandans to their fate with a careless you guys sort out
your own quarrels. Gerald Caplan confirms that the Hutus grew
up learning to hate the Tutsis in church-owned schools and he suggests that the Catholic Church could have stopped everything. It is
clear here who the villains are. When Rwandans speak in the film, it
is often to confirm that the church, the Belgians, and the Catholic
Church are greatly implicated in evil.
If we know who is implicated, we also know who is not. Drawn
powerfully into General Dallaires suffering, we the viewers understand ourselves to be him. The disembodied observer who is not of
the landscape but who hovers over it, Dallaire is the body who suffers and is transformed by it. His is still the principal story of the
genocide. When Rwandans speak of their own loss, as they do only
very occasionally in this film, the camera pauses briefly, and moves
on to the close-ups that inform us who has really been shattered.
Even the president of Rwanda, Paul Kigame, has the role of telling
Dallaire that the genocide was not his fault, that he could do
nothing to prevent it. There is something so good about Romeo
Dallaire, concludes Stephen Lewis. Dallaire is the only reasonable figure in all this chaos. His goodness becomes our goodness,
as the film reviews all make abundantly clear.
The film, one reviewer opines, is not meant to be a history or
even a character study. Rather, it is intended to be a testimony
and a warning.24 The testimony is intended, as the title of Laceys
article indicates, to provide us with a firm grip on tragedy. We
(must) see Dallaires jaw clenching and hear his voice cracking,
writes Sandra Martin.25 And just as Dallaire was transformed,
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S. H. Razack
so too, we will be moved and changed from watching the film. The
film maker, Peter Raymont, himself acknowledges that he had to
decide how much horror to show us, how many bodies, how many
skeletons. He decides to show us just enough horror to punctuate
memories Dallaire describes as he revisits the killing grounds, and
no more.26 The film moves us by inviting us into the body of the
Rwandans, as Rankin saw himself as the slave but only so far as we
can make their pain our own. We become the Rwandans through
the understanding that what has happened in Rwanda is a human
thing, devoid of historical specificity, devoid, in fact, of Rwandans.
One reviewer aptly illustrates this conceptual move. Heather
Mallick writes, Look, a map of the murderous mind . . . . Genocide
is a human problem, not an ethnic or religious one.27 In evacuating
the specificities of the Rwandan genocide, the Rwandans themselves simply come to stand in for the worst that is human, while
we in Canada, stand in for the best. We literally absorb or consume
what has happened to them, and become the humanitarians we say
we are.
On the witness stand at the war crimes tribunal, Dallaire testifies,
and journalists gleefully repeat his portrayal of white skeletons on
their backs with their legs bent and apart. Between them would lie
an object, a broken bottle, a rough branch or a knife, long after the
flesh had rotted and the sperm had dried. What happens to us
after we read of such pornographic details? What has happened
to you as I say them or you read my repetition of them? These
details become a fast-flowing river that sweeps us to the final conclusion: We can only conclude that genocide is inbuilt in the
human brain. Heather Mallick writes and she soon reaches the
crescendo of the story:
In honour of those humans going up in smoke at 11.a.m. on August 23,
1944, could we listen the next time a Dallaire calls out? We can achieve
individual love. But when individuals are endangered en masse, could
we love them as well, and for once, after civilizations century of genocide,
do something to help?28
Jeffrey Simpson echoes her cry: The displaced and the dispossessed want some Western presence. How can we say
no?29 There is now an interactive learning module for senior
high-school and university students which invites students to
be Dallaire, and to consider what they would do in the same
situation.30 At the moment of crisis, humanitarians must help.
385
Terrible things happen. But what do we do about the crises we

cause or provoke?
Why dont we love them before they are endangered en masse?
Who endangers them? We think we know. They endanger themselves. In any event, such questions fall by the wayside in the frantic celebration of one of our own [who] had acted very nobly and
bravely in the face of horror and tragedy. His story is meant to
leave us shaken and changed.31 But how have we been shaken
and changed? Consuming the story of extraordinary courage
and monstrous collective and institutional evil, we learn only
about the powder keg of tribal and political unrest in that littleknown central African country.32 We learn of one mans return
to his past, and a brave attempt to put a logical explanation on
illogical, completely inexplicable events.33 Significantly, we learn
about ourselves. Critic Pervere, featured on the DVD of the film,
declares the film unabashedly Canadian, and takes care to
inform us that the film maker has impeccable National Film Board
credentials. He has had the foresight to use only establishment liberal Canadian critics, Pervere adds, making this truly a Canadian
story.
We conclude that the movie is genuinely life-affirming.34
Genocide, far from depressing us, uplifts us. It uplifts us because
the hero of the story is us. The director, Peter Raymont, believes
that part of the reason why Canadians make such compelling documentaries is because we see the world from a very unique
perspective . . . I think Canadians see the world more as anthropologists. We see ourselves as part of the larger world community. I
think were not burdened by the weight of being a superpower,
and that gives us the chance to listen and understand different
issues around the world. If we had been in Iraq, he continues
(forgetting about the Somalia Affair), things would have turned
out differently. We would have been committed to U.N. protocols
and taught their [the Americans] troops about different cultural
traditions that exist in that country.35
Don Cheadle, the star of the film Hotel Rwanda, commented to a
journalist that upon receiving the script for the film Rosewood, the
true story of a racist lynch mob that burned a Black Florida town,
he wondered who would want to see such a film.
I said white people dont want to see themselves being portrayed as
purveyors of this violence and black people dont want to see themselves
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S. H. Razack
portrayed as victims of this violence. So I dont know who the audience is.36
(emphasis added)
Cheadle was less insightful about Hotel Rwanda, at least on the

red carpet of the 2005 Academy Awards, where he willingly
obliged journalists asking him to speak to the way the film moves
us by solemnly asking viewers to remember the Rwandan genocide. We must never forget. What must we never forget? Perhaps
the answer lies in Cheadles earlier point. How do white people,
Westerners in general and Canadians in particular, like to see themselves portrayed? The answer is simple: as heroes, but in our case,
as sensitive humanitarians who feel the pain of others deeply.
So have we virtually inhabited Rwandan bodies and become
without becoming, as Sara Ahmed puts it about the hero of Dances
with Wolves.37 Such narratives of proximity, Ahmed writes,
become authorized as knowledge:
Not only do such multi-cultural fantasies of becoming involve releasing the
Western subject from responsibility for the past, but they also confirm his
agency, his ability to be transformed by the proximity of strangers, and to
render his transformation a gift to those strangers through which he alone can
become.38
Dallaire bestows on the Rwandans his transformation in Shake

Hands with the Devil. This is all we have had to give them. If we
need to know more about Rwanda, we have only to ask Dallaire
or the films director, as audiences happily did at the Film Festival.
Thats reality.
Many critics and experts have made the connection between
Darfur and Rwanda and have warned that we are in danger of letting another genocide occur. We must not forget. We must not let it
happen again, but we do. Ironically, film critics suggest, as Geoff
Pervere did, that the media bears much of the blame as it draws
us to simple pleasures while such horrors unfold. The trial of O.J.
Simpson filled our television screens while the Rwandan genocide
was occurring. I want to suggest that it is also true that we can be
drawn to the simple pleasures of genocide. Preoccupied with our
own goodness, we can let the crisis in Darfur happen, as we lazily
debate if we should or should not descend into hell. The details
necessary to take action are simply unnecessary in the simpler story
of a world of evil doers, and one good brave nation. The absence of
these details is what enables us to forget.
387
In her discussion of Rankin, Saidiya Hartman emphasizes the

slipperiness of empathy.39 Megan Boler correctly identifies that
the slipperiness begins in the act of identification with the other,40
an act that involves a consumption of the other, and thus the others
obliteration, as Saidiya Hartman showed. Sympathy is different
from empathy, Boler clarifies. Sympathy is the feeling of there
but for the grace of God go I, whereas empathy involves experiencing what the other is suffering and becoming the sufferer. Boler succinctly concludes:
Passive empathy produces no action towards justice but situates the
powerful Western eye=I as the judging subject, never called upon to cast
her gaze at her own reflection.41
Susan Sontag makes the same point another way, collapsing

sympathy and empathy:
Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that
extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinentif not an inappropriateresponse. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset
by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are
located on the same map as their suffering, and mayin ways we prefer
not to imaginebe linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may
imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring
images supply only an initial spark.42
As a nation when contemplating humanitarian gestures, we have

not moved beyond this initial spark and it is my conviction that our
consumption of individual experiences of trauma have effectively
blocked any movement. We have too often felt, rather than thought,
and very little has changed. Is the answer to abandon feeling? To
look away from the corpses? To stop making the documentaries
that feature our horrified and traumatized faces?
CONCLUSION: THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

In a chapter entitled The Problem of Evil, J.M. Coetzee creates a
woman writer of international reputation who is often invited to
conferences to deliver keynote speeches.43 Now approaching old
age, Elizabeth Costello finds herself having things to say that her
audiences do not necessarily want to hear, things specifically about
the problem of evil. Costello, a writer who spent much of her life
388
S. H. Razack
on the executive of PEN Australia fighting for writers freedom of

speech, no longer believes that writing or reading about evil is
necessarily a good thing. We cannot write or read of evil and
emerge unscathed, she declares. The writing itself, as a form
of moral adventurousness has the potential to be dangerous
(Coetzee 2004, 162). Costello, the former advocate of freedom of
speech, ends up concluding: certain things are not good to read or
to write (173). Costello suggests that we look away from the horror.
Using as her example a book published on the gruesome hanging of the men who had plotted to kill Hitler, Costello proposes
to give a lecture on why some things are better left unsaid. To
her dismay, she finds that Paul West, the writer of the book in question is actually at the conference. Costello begins to try to articulate
both to the author and to her audience why Paul West ought not to
have written so graphically of the hangings in the cellar, hangings
that Hitler ordered should be as cruel as possible. The event is
obscene, and to write of it is also obscene. Absolute evil is
something that can only be experienced, not reproduced. As she
concludes her keynote address, Costello repeats her position:
I am recommending to you that you do not try it out. You will not
learn from such an experience. It will not be good for you (176). It
will not be good to try to enter the cellar and to try to live the last
humiliations and terrors of the men who were hanged by Hitler.
Why is reading or writing of such evil not good for us? Costello
goes back in her mind to the Saturday afternoon when she had
begun to read the book. Terribly reluctant to read it, she remembers
with shame that the author nevertheless had made her excited to
read (179). He possessed the craft to make her feel excitement, just
as she herself as a writer does. Costello reads the book and feels
the flap of Satans leathery wing, a literal brush with evil itself
(179). Aware that the majority opinion will be that we must know
the horrors of the Nazis, Elizabeth Costello remains adamant: it
would have been better for Paul West to have stayed home and
not ventured into the labyrinth of Europes past. He has only
revealed things to us that ought not to be shown, things that have
the power to make us both better people and worse people. Coetzee is tantalizing in the extreme in this chapter, and if we could never quite
pin down why it is best not to let the horrors surface in all their
gruesome detail, we are at least clear that Elizabeth Costello does
not merely wish to bury the past and forget it. She is not engaged
in denying what the horrors are. Rather, her preoccupation is with
389
how remembering and revisiting evil changes us, not always for the
better.
Costellos hesitations reminded me of the words of Charlotte
Delbo, a French resistance fighter interned at Auschwitz. Delbo
warned that what happened to her at Auschwitz was useless
knowledge which we should not be tempted to use.44 As with
Costello, Delbo is asking us not to sentimentalize suffering, not to
use other peoples pain and suffering to say or believe something
about ourselves, not, in sum, to take any pleasure from it,
especiallyto use the late Susan Sontags phrasethe pleasure
of flinching.45
Sontags book Regarding the Pain of Others inspired the title of this
article. I hoped to show that the theft of pain with which Sontag and
others are concerned is an act supported by a racial logic and
underpinned by a material system of white privilege. Sontag clearly
shares with J.M. Coetzees Elizabeth Costello the sense that revisiting evil can change us for the worse. She writes of war photographs
of wounded soldiers:
Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this
extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate itsay the
surgeons at the military hospital where the photographs were takenor
those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we
mean to be.46 (emphasis added)
Watching (or looking away because we cannot bear it) can help
to convince us that whatever is happening cannot be stopped, that
there is an inevitability to the horror that absolves us of further
responsibility.
Her acute awareness of the risks of regarding the pain of others
notwithstanding, Elizabeth Costellos answer is a problematic one,
as Coetzee undoubtedly meant to show. How else to change the
world and stop the horrors if not by first bringing them to light?
If the solution is neither to stop looking nor to stop feeling, then
it is clear that something else must accompany looking and feeling,
something that has so far been little in evidence when we have contemplated the Rwandan genocide.
Wrestling with the place of feeling and its connection to action,
Elizabeth Spelman turns to Hannah Arendt and to Harriet Jacobs
slave narrative Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl.47 Spelman notes
that Arendt was uncompromising in her position that the suffering
of others cannot become public without becoming dangerously
390
S. H. Razack
distorted. Compassion nearly always amounts to pity, Arendt felt.

Harriet Jacobs, however, writing as Linda Brent, and confronting
the dilemma that her narrative of her life as a slave was likely to
produce in her readers pity and pleasure at the expense of the slave
as moral agent and critic, (a problem Hartman noted in Rankin),
believed (in Spelmans words) that compassion could be finetuned through a process of exchange between the non-sufferer
and the sufferer.48 Brent assumes that contest over the meaning
of pain and suffering of slaves is central to the moral and political
life around her and that the way to avoid the risks yet enjoy the
benefits of becoming the object of compassion is to try to add her
voice to that debate.49 Harriet Jacobs=Linda Brent is assuredly a
different kind of witness than are Paul West, Elizabeth Costello,
or Romeo Dallaire. Jacobs is a survivor witness while the others
are observers once removed. And we, in turn, as consumers of their
narratives, are once more distanced. Jacobs advises that we negotiate these distances, even as we remain clear about the gaps that
can never be breached.
Fine-tuning exchanges between sufferers and non-sufferers
might perhaps yield documentaries that seek to centre the voices
of the Rwandans themselves. Drawing on the work of Shoshana
Felman and Doris Laub, Boler suggests that we move beyond the
individualist response (how am I feeling) to a collectivist
account50 We ask such questions as who benefits from the production of empathy? Who should feel empathy for whom, and
what has been gained other than a good brotherly feeling?51
We need, in her view, a recognition of power relations, questioning
on every turn the feelings of familiarity and intimacy (we know
the Rwandan genocide, the slaves suffering, the Siouxs culture).
We should consider the text, the film, the reviews in the paper, as
an encounter, meeting the text with our own testimony of the collective history in which we are embedded.
Efforts to do all of these things have consistently run aground on
the shoal of race. First, we continue to maintain a willful blindness
about our collective history, unable to call up, for example, anything that might show us how we are implicated in the Wests
power over the non-West. Do we know about our support for the
Catholic Church in Rwanda, about our economic activities there?
Do we know about the bullets we make for Iraq, about the mines
we invest in Sierra Leone that seriously destabilize human rights?
We cannot know this if our national mythology is that we are
391
completely innocent, as a middle power and as nice Canadians.

Second, race has handily enabled us to pursue the path of innocence, offering its well-worn tracks to make the journey speedy. If
it has been easy to believe in tribal, genocidal Rwandans and good
Canadians who try to save them, it is surely because Africans have
no personhood and no history. We cannot render the Rwandan
genocide thinkable as Mahmood Mamdani advises, because we
would have to grant to the Rwandans the status of subjects, rather
than objects who are simply the conduit to our own sense of self as
compassionate.52 From captive bodies, to Rodney King and O.J.
Simpson, North Americans have a long history with Black bodies
in pain, as Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Alexander, Saidiya Hartman,
and others show us.53 We rely on the spectacle of such bodies to
forge a national and white consciousness.
How do we give up racial power? By naming it as our own (we
who consume the narratives) and by understanding that power
has a material base. We can steal the slaves pain, and the pain of
Rwandans because they have no personhood that stops us, and
because we continue to benefit from their resources. We can mourn
with them and avoid any responsibility for the past or implication
in the present. Wole Soyinka, contemplating the moves to truth and
reconciliation in South Africa, suggests that reconciliation has both
moral and material ingredients. For whites to redeem themselves,
they must acknowledge the past, Soyinka concedes, but perhaps,
he suggests wryly, there should also be a collective levy on South
Africas white population.54 Along the same lines, we in the West
must feel the pain of the Rwandans and pay up, acknowledging
how we benefit at their expense. Let me end, then, with an instructive quote:
In old times, when it was asked, How can we abolish slavery? the
answer was Quit stealing.Frederick Douglass, 1894.
NOTES
1. I would like to thank Gada Mahrouse, Carmela Murdocca, and Leslie ThielenWilson whose discussions helped to develop my thinking considerably. I thank
them also for their outstanding research and editing skills.
2. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains. Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empires Slaves (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 5
3. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in 19th
Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.)
392
S. H. Razack
4. Toni Morrison, The Official Story: Dead Man Golfing. in Birth of a Nationhood:
Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1997), xv.
5. Anthony Paul Farley, The Black Body as Fetish Objects, Orlando Law Review 76
(1997): 457530.
6. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London and
New York: Routledge, 2000).
7. Ibid., 132.
8. Ibid., 140.
9. Ibid., 125.
10. Sherene H. Razack Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia affair, Peacekeeping,
and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
11. Witness the Evil. Produced by the Department of National Defence, 1998. (Video,
30 minutes). The Unseen Scars: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. CBC Television, This
Magazine (25 November 1998). Accessed on line, 23 June 2003. CBC TV at http://
www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/ptsd/wounds.html
12. Liisa H. Malkki, Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and
Dehistoricization, Cultural Anthropology 11.3 (1996): 392393.
13. Ibid., 393.
14. Ibid., 390.
15. Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of
White Men (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1011.
16. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1993).
17. Ibid., 25.
18. Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness,
in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 19651987 (London: Heinemann,
1988), 8, 139.
19. Nelson, 1011.
20. Ibid, 16.
21. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (2003). Directed by Peter
Raymont. (Documentary Canada 2004, 91 minutes). This documentary won the
Governor Generals award for non-fiction and the Writers Trust Shaughnessy
Cohen Prize for political writing.
22. Sandra Martin, The Globe Review, Globe and Mail (31 January 2005): R1.
23. Jane Taber, Dallaires Frenzied Quest for Land, Globe and Mail (25 March,
2005):A1.
24. Liam Lacey, A Firm Grip on Tragedy, Globe and Mail (18 February 2005): R14.
25. Martin, The Globe Review.
26. Patrick Evans, Behind the Scenes of a Genocide, Kingston Whig-Standard
(29 January 2005): 1.
27. Heather Mallick, Look, a map of the murderous mind, Globe and Mail
(31 January 2005): F4.
28. Ibid.
29. Jeffrey Simpson, Rwanda, Darfur . . . What are We Waiting For? Globe and Mail
(27 August 2004): A15.
30. Available on line at www.paxwarrior.com as cited in Martin.
31. Film maker Michael Donovan, quoted in Canadian Press, Dallaires Rwandan
Tale Slated for Film, Globe and Mail (25 September 2003): R3.
32. John Griffin, Dallaires Demons, The Montreal Gazette (11 February 2005): D12.
393
33. Alex Strachan, Fine Tuning, Regina Leader Post (31 January 2005): D7.
34. Ibid.
35. Katherine Monk, Dallaires story wins top doc award at Sundance Festival,
Kingston Whig-Standard (31 January 2005):12.
36. Jay Stone, The Road Less Traveled, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (28 January 2005): D1.
37. Ahmed, 132.
38. Ibid., 125.
39. Hartman, 18.
40. Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999), 158.
41. Ibid., 161.
42. Sontag, 102103.
43. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Vintage Random House, 2004).
44. Charlotte Delbo was a non-Jewish French member of the resistance who survived
Auschwitz. See Jennifer L. Geddes, Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah
Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust, Hypatia 18.1 (2003): 113.
45. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003), 41.
46. Ibid., 42.
47. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing our Attention to Suffering (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1997).
48. Ibid., 87.
49. Ibid., 88.
50. Boler, 164.
51. Ibid.
52. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and
the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2001), 10.
53. Elizabeth Alexander, Can you be BLACK and Look at This?: Reading the
Rodney King Video(s), inThe Black Public Sphere Collective: A Public Culture Book,
ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 8198.
54. Wole Soyinka, From The Burden of Memory: The Muse of Forgiveness, in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, eds. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe
Bourgeois (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 475477.
REFERENCES
Achebe, Chinua. (1988). An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness.
In Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 19651987 (pp. 139) London:
Hienemann.
Ahmed, Sara. (2000). Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London
and New York: Routledge.
Alexander, Elizabeth. (1995). Can You Be BLACK and Look at This? Reading the
Rodney King Video(s). In The Black Public Sphere Collective. A Public Culture Book,
ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boler, Megan. (1999). Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge.
Canadian Press. (2003). Dallaires Rwandan Tale Slated for Film. Globe and Mail,
(25 September), R3.
394
S. H. Razack
Coetzee, J. M. (2004). Elizabeth Costello. London: Random House.

Conrad, Joseph. (1966). The Heart of Darkness. 1901. Reprint, New York: Harper and Row.
Evans, Patrick. (2005). Behind the Scenes of Genocide. Kingston Whig-Standard,
(29 January), 1.
Farley, Anthony Paul. (1997). The Black Body as Fetish Object. Orlando Law Review,
76, 457530.
Geddes, Jennifer L. (2003). Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and
Charlotte Delbo on Evil After the Holocaust. Hypatia, 18(1), 104115.
Griffin, John. (2005). Dallaires Demons. The Montreal Gazette, (11 February), D12.
Hartman, Saidiya V. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in 19th
Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hochschild, Adam. (2005). Bury the Chains. Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empires Slaves. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Lacey, Liam. (2005). A Firm Grip on Tragedy. Globe and Mail, (18 February), R14.
Malkki, Liisa H. (1996). Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and
Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology, 11(3), 392393.
Mallick, Heather. (2005). Look, a Map of the Murderous Mind. Globe and Mail,
(31 January), F4.
Mamdani, Mahmood. (2001). When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and
the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Martin, Sandra. (2005). The Globe Review. Globe and Mail, (31 January), R1.
Monk, Katherine. (2005). Dallaires Story Wins Top Doc Award at Sundance Festival.
Kingston Whig-Standard, (31 January), 12.
Morrison, Toni. (1997). The Official Story: Dead Man Golfing. In Toni Morrison (Ed.),
Birth of a Nation hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. New
York: Pantheon Books. viixxvii.
Nelson, Dana. (1998). National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined
Fraternity of White Men. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press.
Razack, Sherene H. (2004). Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Said, Edward. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire 2003. Directed by Peter
Raymont. 2004. Documentary Canada, 91 minutes.
Simpson, Jeffrey. (2004). Rwanda, Darfur . . . What Are We Waiting For? Globe and
Mail, (27 August), A15.
Sontag, Susan. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Stone, Jay. (2005). The Road Less Travelled. Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, (28 January), D1.
Strachan, Alex. (2005). Fine Tuning. Regina Leader Post, (31 January), D7
Taber, Jane. (2005). Dallaires Frenzied Quest for Land. Globe and Mail, (25 March), A1.
Witness the Evil. (1998). Produced by the Department of National Defence. (Video 30
minutes.)
The Unseen Scars: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 1998. CBC National, This Magazine,
November 25. http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/ptsd/wounds.html
(accessed June 23, 2003).

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This article was downloaded by: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network]

On: 8 December 2008

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies

Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on Canadian Humanitarian Responses

Online Publication Date: 01 September 2007

of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies,29:4,375 394

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections

outrage and which amounts to what I call stealing the pain of

PART ONE: RACE AND THE SLIPPERINESS OF EMPATHY

Stealing the Pain of Others

Rankin is so intent on communicating the pain that at one point in

This makes empathy a double-edged sword: in making the

Hartman argues. Each comes into being through the objectification

To Become without Becoming

Stealing the Pain of Others

PART TWO: NATIONAL WITNESSING

around the inefficacy of the military for not paying attention to

Stealing the Pain of Others

people forced to stand helplessly by as evil unfolds, and as more

Shake Hands with the Devil

Stealing the Pain of Others

of the Belgians as former colonial powers, and the anthropologists

Stealing the Pain of Others

Terrible things happen. But what do we do about the crises we

Cheadle was less insightful about Hotel Rwanda, at least on the

Dallaire bestows on the Rwandans his transformation in Shake

Stealing the Pain of Others

In her discussion of Rankin, Saidiya Hartman emphasizes the

Susan Sontag makes the same point another way, collapsing

As a nation when contemplating humanitarian gestures, we have

CONCLUSION: THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

on the executive of PEN Australia fighting for writers freedom of

Stealing the Pain of Others

distorted. Compassion nearly always amounts to pity, Arendt felt.

Stealing the Pain of Others

completely innocent, as a middle power and as nice Canadians.

Stealing the Pain of Others

Coetzee, J. M. (2004). Elizabeth Costello. London: Random House.

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