The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

coming to our senses 371
Denial is a prerequisite of mass violence and genocide. In Death without Weeping
(1993), I explored the social indifference to staggering infant and child mortality in
shantytown favelas of Northeast Brazil. Local political leaders, Catholic priests and
nuns, coffin makers, and shantytown mothers themselves casually dispatched a multitude
of hungry “angel-babies” to the afterlife each year, saying: “Well, they themselves
wanted to die.” The babies were described as having no “taste,” no “knack,”
and no “talent” for life.
Medical practices such as prescribing powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully
hungry babies, Catholic ritual celebrations of the death of “angel-babies,” and
the bureaucratic indifference in political leaders’ dispensing free baby coffins but
no food to hungry families and children interacted with maternal practices such as
radically reducing food and liquids to severely malnourished and dehydrated babies
so as to help them, their mothers said, to die quickly and well. Perceived as already
“doomed,” sickly infants were described as less than human creatures, as ghostly
angel-babies, inhabiting a terrain midway between life and death. “Really and truly,”
mothers said, “it is better that these spirit-children return to where they came.”
The ability of desperately poor women to help those infants who (they said)
“needed to die” required an existential “letting go” (contrasted to the maternal work
of holding on, holding close, and holding dear). Letting go required a leap of faith
that was not easy to achieve. And these largely Catholic women often said that their
infants died just as Jesus died so that others—especially themselves—could live. The
question that lingered, unresolved, in my mind was whether this Kierkegaardian
“leap of faith” entailed a certain Marxist “bad faith” as well.
I did not want to blame shantytown mothers for putting their own survival over
and above that of their infants and small babies, for these were moral choices that
no person should be forced to make. But they resulted in “bad faith” whenever the
women refused authorship of their acts and blamed the deaths of their “angelbabies”
on the desire and willingness of the doomed infants themselves. I gradually
came to think of the shantytown angel-babies in terms of Rene Girard’s (1987)
idea of sacrificial violence. The given-up, given-up-on babies had been sacrificed
in the face of terrible conflicts about scarcity and survival. And it was here, for example,
that peacetime and wartime, maternal thinking and military thinking, converged.
When angels (or martyrs) are fashioned from the dead bodies of those who
die young, “maternal thinking” most resembles military, especially wartime, thinking.
On the battlefield as in the shantytown, triage, thinking in sets, and a belief in
the magical replaceability of the dead predominate.
Above all, ideas of “acceptable death” and of “meaningful” (rather than useless)
suffering extinguish rage and grief for those whose lives are taken and allow
for the recruitment of new lives and new bodies into the struggle. Just as shantytown
mothers in Brazil consoled each other that their hungry babies died because
they were “meant” to die or because they “had” to die, Northern Irish mothers and
South African township mothers have consoled each other at political wakes and
funerals during wartime and in times of political struggle with the belief that their