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CULTURAL COMMENT
JANUARY 9, 2015

Unmournable Bodies
BY TEJU COLE

The Eiffel Tower after its lights were shut off in memory of the victims of the attack on
Charlie Hebdo; January 8, 2015.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DURSUN AYDEMIR / ANADOLU / GETTY

A northern-Italian miller in the sixteenth century, known as

Menocchio, literate but not a member of the literary lite, held a
number of unconventional theological beliefs. He believed that the
soul died with the body, that the world was created out of a chaotic
substance, not ex nihilo, and that it was more important to love
ones neighbor than to love God. He found eccentric justification

for these beliefs in the few books he read, among them the
Decameron, the Bible, the Koran, and The Travels of Sir John
Mandeville, all in translation. For his pains, Menocchio was
dragged before the Inquisition several times, tortured, and, in 1599,
burned at the stake. He was one of thousands who met such a fate.
Western societies are not, even now, the paradise of skepticism and
rationalism that they believe themselves to be. The West is a
variegated space, in which both freedom of thought and tightly
regulated speech exist, and in which disavowals of deadly violence
happen at the same time as clandestine torture. But, at moments
when Western societies consider themselves under attack, the
discourse is quickly dominated by an ahistorical fantasy of longsuffering serenity and fortitude in the face of provocation. Yet
European and American history are so strongly marked by efforts
to control speech that the persecution of rebellious thought must be
considered among the foundational buttresses of these societies.
Witch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the
Inquisition shaped Europe, and these ideas extended into American
history and took on American modes, from the breaking of slaves to
the censuring of critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
More than a dozen people were killed by terrorists in Paris this
week. The victims of these crimes are being mourned worldwide:
they were human beings, beloved by their families and precious to
their friends. On Wednesday, twelve of them were targeted by
gunmen for their affiliation with the satirical French magazine
Charlie Hebdo. Charlie has often been aimed at Muslims, and its
taken particular joy in flouting the Islamic ban on depictions of the
Prophet Muhammad. Its done more than that, too, including
taking on political targets, as well as Christian and Jewish ones. The
magazine depicted the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in a
sexual threesome. Illustrations such as this have been cited as
evidence of Charlie Hebdos willingness to offend everyone. But in
recent years the magazine has gone specifically for racist and
Islamophobic provocations, and its numerous anti-Islam images

have been inventively perverse, featuring hook-nosed Arabs, bulletridden Korans, variations on the theme of sodomy, and mockery of
the victims of a massacre. It is not always easy to see the difference
between a certain witty dissent from religion and a bullyingly racist
agenda, but it is necessary to try. Even Voltaire, a hero to many who
extol free speech, got it wrong. His sparkling and courageous anticlericalism can be a joy to read, but he was also a committed antiSemite, whose criticisms of Judaism were accompanied by
calumnies about the innate character of Jews.
This weeks events took place against the backdrop of Frances ugly
colonial history, its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression,
in the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions,
such as the hijab. Blacks have hardly had it easier in Charlie Hebdo:
one of the magazines cartoons depicts the Minister of Justice
Christiane Taubira, who is of Guianese origin, as a monkey
(naturally, the defense is that a violently racist image was being used
to satirize racism); another portrays Obama with the black-Sambo
imagery familiar from Jim Crow-era illustrations.
On Thursday morning, the day after the massacre, I happened to be
in Paris. The headline of Le Figaro was LA LIBERT ASSASSINE.
Le Parisien and LHumanit also used the word libert in their
headlines. Liberty was indeed under attackas a writer, I cherish
the right to offend, and I support that right in other writersbut
what was being excluded in this framing? A tone of genuine
puzzlement always seems to accompany terrorist attacks in the
centers of Western power. Why have they visited violent horror on
our peaceful societies? Why do they kill when we dont? A widely
shared illustration
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/banksys-strikingillustrated-response-to-the-charlie-hebdo-attack-9964198.html),
by Lucille Clerc, of a broken pencil regenerating itself as two
sharpened pencils, was typical. The message was clear, as it was with
the hashtag #jesuischarlie: that what is at stake is not merely the
right of people to draw what they wish but that, in the wake of the

murders, what they drew should be celebrated and disseminated.

Accordingly, not only have many of Charlie Hebdos images been
published and shared, but the magazine itself has received large
sums of money in the wake of the attacksa hundred thousand
pounds from the Guardian Media Group and three hundred
thousand dollars from Google.
But it is possible to defend the right to obscene and racist speech
without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. It is
possible to approve of sacrilege without endorsing racism. And it is
possible to consider Islamophobia immoral without wishing it
illegal. Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor
absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions. The
A.C.L.U. got it right in defending a neo-Nazi group that, in 1978,
sought to march through Skokie, Illinois. The extreme
offensiveness of the marchers, absent a particular threat of violence,
was not and should not be illegal. But no sensible person takes a
defense of those First Amendment rights as a defense of Nazi
beliefs. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were not mere gadflies, not
simple martyrs to the right to offend: they were ideologues. Just
because one condemns their brutal murders doesnt mean one must
condone their ideology.
Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in
free speechas so many commentators have doneit is necessary
to understand that free speech and other expressions of libert are
already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated
by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated
its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big
data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that
violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate
this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.s
abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower.
Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about
mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year

sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but
they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of
Charlie Hebdo.
The killings in Paris were an appalling offense to human life and
dignity. The enormity of these crimes will shock us all for a long
time. But the suggestion that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists
is the only threat to liberty in Western societies ignores other, often
more immediate and intimate, dangers. The U.S., the U.K., and
France approach statecraft in different ways, but they are allies in a
certain vision of the world, and one important thing they share is an
expectation of proper respect for Western secular religion. Heresies
against state power are monitored and punished. People have been
arrested for making anti-military or anti-police comments on social
media in the U.K. Mass surveillance has had a chilling effect on
journalism and on the practice of the law in the U.S. Meanwhile,
the armed forces and intelligence agencies in these countries
demand, and generally receive, unwavering support from their
citizens. When they commit torture or war crimes, no matter how
illegal or depraved, there is little expectation of a full accounting or
of the prosecution of the parties responsible.
The scale, intensity, and manner of the solidarity that we are seeing
for the victims of the Paris killings, encouraging as it may be,
indicates how easy it is in Western societies to focus on radical
Islamism as the real, or the only, enemy. This focus is part of the
consensus about mournable bodies, and it often keeps us from
paying proper attention to other, ongoing, instances of horrific
carnage around the world: abductions and killings in Mexico,
hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in
Gaza by Israel last year, internecine massacres in the Central
African Republic, and so on. And, even when we rightly condemn
criminals who claim to act in the name of Islam, little of our grief is
extended to the numerous Muslim victims of their attacks, whether
in Yemen or Nigeriain both of which there were deadly massacres
this weekor in Saudi Arabia, where, among many violations of

human rights, the punishment for journalists who insult Islam is

flogging. We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every
corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it
is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent
deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration,
than others.
France is in sorrow today, and will be for many weeks to come. We
mourn with France. We ought to. But it is also true that violence
from our side continues unabated. By this time next month, in all
likelihood, many more young men of military age and many
others, neither young nor male, will have been killed by U.S. drone
strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. If past strikes are anything to go
by, many of these people will be innocent of wrongdoing. Their
deaths will be considered as natural and incontestable as deaths like
Menocchios, under the Inquisition. Those of us who are writers
will not consider our pencils broken by such killings. But that
incontestability, that unmournability, just as much as the massacre
in Paris, is the clear and present danger to our collective libert.

Teju Cole is a photographer and the author of two works of fiction, Open City and Every Day Is
for the Thief. He contributes frequently to Page-Turner.

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