Brief Notes: Mersault, Musa and the Paris attacks

This is making the rounds on Facebook and Instagram and is worth reading.

I woke this morning deeply disturbed by the news from #Paris, but more amazed by the attention it received on social media. I understand Paris is a beloved and familiar space for a lot of people, but it troubled me that #Beirut, a city my father grew up in, had received so little attention after the horrific bombings two days earlier. It also troubled me that #Baghdad, a place I have absolutely no connection with, received even less attention after the senseless bombing that took place there last week. Worst of all, I found the understanding of the refugee crisis skewed and simplistic. If you’ve been following the journeys of the people leaving their homes around the world right now, perhaps you’ll understand why the words #SyrianRefugeeCrisis are just as devastating as #PrayForParis. It’s time to pray for humanity. It is time to make all places beloved. It’s time to pray for the world.

A photo posted by Karuna E Parikh (@karunaezara) on Nov 13, 2015 at 11:05pm PST

I would edit it some — we should pray for Paris, if we are to pray, but also for Beirut and Baghdad, and the refugees fleeing violence, and the Jews being attacked in Jerusalem, and the Palestinians horded into camps, and African Americans who continue to be victimized by our racist past and present, and the Latinos who are viewed as somehow less valuable and who have been made the convenient scapegoats of American politics, and… and…. But I can’t pray. And not because I am irreligious. I can’t pray because if I were to pray, then I would do nothing but pray.

I am reading The Mersault Investigation, Kamel Daoud’s novel written as a response to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Daoud’s point of departure is the murder of the unnamed Arab on the beach and the conceit is that the Arab — actually, the Algerian — has a name and a family. It is written in the voice of Harun, the brother of Musa, and is an effort to reclaim a sense of humanity taken from not only Musa, but from Harun and from all of Algeria by the West. The Stranger essentially posits a hierarchy of importance, Daoud’s novel claims, placing the Frenchman Mersault above the Algerian, consigning the Algerian death to footnote status in a novel about the absurdity of life (the trial in The Stranger is only nominally about the murder and centers around the speaker’s alienation).

The response to the awful events in France is totally appropriate, but as this meme makes clear it is wholly insufficient and betrays a western chauvinism that is at least a part of what creates this cycle of violence. The French dead, for whom we should mourn and for whom we should seek justice, are like Mersault. The dead in Beirut and Baghdad and elsewhere, perhaps because of the regularity with which deaths occur in these places but also because too many of us think these dead lack the same humanity as the victims in France, also deserve justice. But they are no longer mourned in the west, no longer even mentioned. They have been stripped of their names. They are all Musa’s.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet