Event

Zahra had not seen her husband in over a year when he texted her urgently, telling her she had to get to the airport in Kabul to evacuate. As a Western-educated woman and the wife of an official in the Ghani government, Zahra knew immediately she was in grave danger. The president had fled the country and the Taliban were about to take the capitol.

The chaos at the airport was disorienting – it was hard to know how to get in as people desperate to leave mobbed the fences around the runways. Zahra, her mother, and six-year-old brother, and her sister and her family fought their way through the crowds to a gate guarded by American servicemen. Just as Zahra and her sister passed through, a bomb went off. Rubble and smoke were everywhere and people were screaming. In the chaos, Zahra was separated from her mother and brother. Later, she was also separated from her sister in another rush of crowds. When I was first introduced to her, she was at Camp Atterbury, near Edinburgh, Indiana, completely alone in a sea of over 8000 other evacuees, with no idea what was going to happen next.

Image 1: Afghans trying to evacuate crowd the Kabul airport as smoke rises from the explosion of a Taliban-set bomb. Credit: Nahid Sharifi.

Volunteering for the Red Cross, I saw hundreds of Afghans like Zahra, who had been unloaded from planes at Indianapolis Airport, loaded onto buses, and then unloaded again into a gigantic hall to be ‘processed’. Exhausted, disoriented, confused, and grief-stricken, they shuffled through the line where I passed out hygiene kits, trying to figure out where they had landed and what would happen next. Even basic problems were difficult to solve, without objects, languages, and procedures that were familiar. I watched a mother, frustrated by the lack of diaper wipes, grab a stray container of Clorox wipes to clean her child. Without the ability to decode the label, she had no idea that they contained bleach that would disintegrate her child’s already-raw skin. Another mother, crying, showed me the video of her sobbing two-year-old left behind in Afghanistan, begging me to tell her when I would bring her child to her. She had no idea where her child was, how she would be protected, or if they would ever see one another again. Children peeked hesitantly at the stuffed animals I offered them, confused about whether they posed a threat. Nobody seemed to know what to do, other than slump on the cold metal folding chairs and wait.

Image 2: Afghan women line up to board a military evacuation flight and depart into an uncertain future. Credit: Nahid Sharifi.

Like many people who survive war, the refugees at Atterbury experienced the vertiginous sensation of the world coming apart at the seams, exploding into shards and fragments¹.  The advent of war destroys the familiar; it doesn’t just rip apart bodies and buildings, but also families, known landscapes, daily routines, and time itself (Dunn, 2017, Ramsay, 2018). It shatters psyches, ravaging sense itself and the wholeness of thought. But the disorientation does not stop at the end of the war, or upon fleeing the war. Rather, the fog of war produces a chaotic, bewildering experience, one that does not end the moment the bullets stop. Even when people are moved to safety, the disorienting sensations can endure for months or years; although war can become a chronic and normalised state, each flare can provoke sensations of radical rupture and a swirling loss of sense-making.

It might be easy to medicalise this condition, reducing it to generic ‘trauma’ and prescribing individualised therapeutic interventions. But in my years working with the victims of war, I have come to see this as something else: as what Alain Badiou (2006) has called an Event, a moment in which the oneness of the world is broken into a dizzying multiplicity. For Badiou, the fact that the people and objects in our world – an apple, an airplane, a person – appear to us as one, as whole and identifiable things, is an artifact of culture. Fundamentally, he argues, these items in experience are multiplicities, grouped together and structured as a single entity (see also Humphrey, 2008). This presentation of wholeness, according to Badiou, is the ‘suture to being’, a process of structuration that makes acting in the world possible because it makes the results of action relatively predictable.

But there are moments of epic change – capital-E Events – when the stable structure of multiplicities is blown apart, when the relationships among people and things are radically destructured and when common sense itself is fragmented and reduced to unrelated shards. People experience the event as vertiginous precisely because the parts and pieces of everyday life have their bonds severed and become unrelated to one another in the usual ways.   People affected by war often experience the destruction of common sense and the resulting interval when the rules of everyday life as dizzying, frightening, disorienting, nauseating and exhausting all at once.

The result is profound uncertainty.  In the wake of the Event, it is difficult to know how to act. The rules and habits that once made the consequences of actions predictable are now gone, and the unknowability of the future colours even the smallest of choices (Dunn, 2017). Whether things will once again cohere in recognisable forms is itself uncertain: one of the most confusing and frightening things about the vertiginous is not knowing whether it will pass or become an enduring condition.

There is a Polish proverb that says, ‘it is easier to make fish soup out of an aquarium than an aquarium out of fish soup’. But the world that refugees find themselves in is fish soup; refugees must somehow make it back into an aquarium. They must take an existential world that is crazy, fragmented, and multiple and make it into a whole and stable ‘one’ again. This process is long and tortuous; it requires systematically reconnecting the fragments of the world left behind, the new objects, people and words of humanitarian aid, and the new environment of wherever they are resettled. This is not just a problem of finding a space free from violence, or replacing things that were lost (although these are the two goals of humanitarian aid agencies). For the Afghan evacuees, like for the rest of the world’s 83 million displaced people, the question isn’t whether they will sink to the bottom of an existing social order, but whether, after the Event and its vertiginous aftermath, there will ever be order again at all.

Endnotes

1. This sensation has been best described in fiction. Ismet Prcic´’s 2011 novel Shards centers on a character, also named Ismet Prcic´, who has survived the Bosnian War and is literally cracking up, his personality fragmenting into other, more fearful and more violent, beings. In Kevin Powers’ dramatic novel, The Yellow Birds (2012), a soldier recently returned from Iraq begins falling apart. The novel flickers between Kentucky and Iraq, Virginia and Germany as the main character seeks to make sense of his fragmented experiences and a world that has been violently blown apart. [↩]

References

Badiou A (2006) Being and Event. London: Continuum.

Dunn EC (2017) No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Humphrey C (2008) Reassembling Individual Subjects: Events and Decisions in Troubled Times. Anthropological Theory 8(4): 357-380.

Powers K (2012) The Yellow Birds. New York: Hachette.

Prcić I (2011) Shards. New York: Black Cat.

Ramsay G (2018) Impossible Refuge: The Control and Constraint of Refugee Futures. London: Routledge.