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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 long-suffering 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
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,
bullet-ridden 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 anti-clericalism
can be a joy to read, but he was also a committed anti-Semite, 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-striking-
illustrated-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
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
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.