Experiences of continuous structural violence

Antjie Krog followed the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa during the mid-90s as a reporter. In her book Country of My Skull she tells about her embodied experiences of listening to the violent stories of oppression and violence almost beyond what is comprehensible, and how she starts to get physical symptoms of her reaction to what she hears. While I’m looking out at the beautiful and peaceful garden that surrounds the house where I’m living in Santa Cruz, I am thinking about the continuous violence, direct and structural, that surrounds us in the world, and what mechanisms that we use to keep on living with this knowledge in order not to get insane. This was emphasized specifically during this week’s Israeli government violence against the activists at the Ship to Gaza convoy. I look for answers in the book Precarious Lives: the power of mourning and violence by Judith Butler. She considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. What Butler argues is thus that in order to keep on living our ’good’ lives knowing that other people are suffering form war and environmental deterioration, is to make these very same people undeserving of grief. Since I am interested in what mobilizes people to act on injustices, instead of looking the other way, this is vital information.

I would like to connect this to the rage that I feel when reading the commercial slogans by the agribusiness companies Syngenta and Monsanto, and GM researchers. My experience makes me think about being emotionally polluted. How do we deal with these experiences of direct violence, structural violence and mental violence? How do we engage with these experiences without letting them consume us, and inform our political practices instead? Someone has actually suggested that it is more difficult to reconciliate experiences of loss caused by human factors, than those caused by “natural” factors. This do of course neglect that people who live with structural inequality like poverty or marginalization are more likely to suffer from the ”natural” disasters like floods, earth quakes or drought. Thus, when people start to conceptualize environmental deterioration as caused by other humans, they are likely to start to feel ‘violated’.