The Human Stain

There is a stain on the road where a man used to be.

I think he survived, or at least my limited understanding of injuries suggests that the fact he was still conscious, moving and talking as they loaded him into the ambulance, after lying face down in the middle of Avenida Reforma for about 20 minutes, is a good sign. I should think that massive head trauma would have precluded consciousness.

The stain is from the substantial amount of blood that pooled from his head area. The blood is what brought me and my colleagues to the window to watch.

But it’s not the gawking or the poor pedestrian losing a gamble to run between the cars that any of us in this city has taken many, many times before that I want to talk about here. It’s the relief.

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the Mexican obsession with death, and the related corpses that are displayed without apology or demure angling on the front page of several different daily newspapers. Monday was a photo of decapitated heads in a row; today is someone in the front seat of their car, although I didn’t stop to find out where or why. I just don’t need to know, you know?

I became briefly, anonymously famous on Monday when a comment I made on the website Jezebel, related to said proliferation of images of violence in Mexico, got picked up and quoted in an article by the website Racialicious. The original article on Jezebel, which was expounded upon later at the other site, was related to the Mumbai images coming down the media pipeline: one editor believed that the photos of blood pools was exploitative and desensitizing, while the other argued that, no, we need more explicit photos than pools in order to truly drive the violence home. It’s a great discussion, actually. You can read it here: Questioning the Appropriate Imagery of Tragedy.

I left the following musing:

“Down here in Mexico, graphic photos are par for the course. This morning is an
excellent example: in the wake of news of a massive cache of decapitated narco victims being discovered in Tijuana, the front page of the famously graphic newspaper La Prensa showed, yes, a row of lined up heads with the headless
bodies beside them.

When I first arrived in Mexico several years ago, there had been another decapitation incident, this time five heads in Acapulco. I was sitting across from a guy reading the paper when I saw the photo of the heads, and I recoiled in horror, looked away, felt nauseous and violated. Now, this morning, I actually scanned the paper calmly as I walked by the stand.

I don't know if I'm a better, more realistic, eyes-open person for seeing this kind of graphic violence every single morning without fail (Mexicans do love their corpses - there are several papers that publish "nota roja" photos every day), but I do know that Mexicans have a MUCH more sensible and aware understanding of death and the implication of violence than any of us up in the Land of the Frozen North with our euphemisms ("she passed on") and quiet, mostly unvisted graveyards. Mexicans understand the fragility of life and the reality of violence, and the way they live their lives is evidence of this.

Yes, it's gawking, even for the Mexicans who giggle at charred corpses, but feeling cathartic relief that it was our neighbour who got robbed and not us is pretty much part of the human condition. Pretending that death - and especially violent death - is something clean and pretty and calm is pretending that we will all meet our end peacefully in our beds, surrounded by loved ones. Death is usually ugly. We need to stop being afraid of its realities.

All that being said, I still believe human decency must be followed. Recently, there was a photo of a teenage girl who had been raped, tortured and strangled, then left on the street with her shirt pulled up over her head. I couldn't look. All I could think about was how that poor girl had gone through this evening of incalculable suffering, only to have her poor nude body printed on the front page of a newspaper, in full colour, to be gawked at. Admitting violence is one thing; humiliating the dead is another.”

I actually thought, at the time, that I was arguing on the side of the editor who wanted more violence, but the editor from Racialicious pulled the comment as, “driv[ing] home the point I wanted to make.” (I’m totally honoured to be quoted by such esteemed thinkers, incidentally.) Full Racialicious post available here: How Should We Handle Deaths When Reporting Current Events?

The two sides of the argument stayed with me all that night, though. While I do respect the Mexican ability to see death as part of life and not something to be whispered and scented and covered with flowers until nary a bony white finger remains visible, I’m not a convert to the daily corpse offerings by any means. I do not think I am a better person for knowing what a high-speed vehicle accident looks like, or what happens to a human body trapped in a blazing house fire. I worry sometimes that our (being the entire human race) tendency to rubberneck comes less from Aristotelian carthasis than from some sick desire to gape and say “ooooooh blood!” in a way that completely removes what we should be feeling, which is a sense of shared humanity and shared loss.

Which is why I bring up the man on the road. When we first heard the scream, of course we all fled to the window to see what had happened. “Someone’s been hit!” a colleague cried out. “Oh my god!” cried another (probably me), as we fought for space along the glass like penguins. “Is that blood?” “Oh god, that IS blood!” “That’s a LOT of blood!” “Is he moving?” “I think he’s dead. He’s got to be dead.” “Which car hit him?” “That red one, look, with the clean spot on the hood.” “Oh my god, he’s totally dead. He’s not moving.”

And we clustered and we shared observations, and the Human Resource Manager was trying to lead us away one by one, telling us we didn’t need to see this, pleading with us to go back to our desks, but we’d sit down for a few seconds only to pop back up the moment one of the remaining gawkers shouted an update. “I think it’s coffee.” “Dude, it’s red, it’s blood.”

Yes, I looked, focusing mostly on the red spot, fascinated and horrified at the same time. Here was a La Prensa photo, but live. Wow. God. Ew.

But what is so so important about this story is, yes, yes, we ran to the window, and yes, yes, we argued about the blood, but the overwhelming sentiment being expressed?

“I just need to see him move.”
“Where is the ambulance? Why is it taking so long? Should we call, just to make sure?”
“What if he has a family, kids?”
“The police have a First Aid kit, thank god.”
“They’re rubbing his back! He must be alive!”

Not until we saw his arm move could we return to work. “He’s talking!” said one colleague, using binoculars. “He’s talking!!!” we crowed back, triumphantly.

None of us, not one among the thronging crowd, wanted to see Death down there on the pavement. The blood was titillating but more important than anything was that this poor man, with his grey tie and his black suit and his scattered papers, would get the medical treatment he obviously needed and would recover and would go spend the Christmas season (it’s a Catholic country so forgive my non-politically correct specification there) with his family and his kids, right as rain.

Anecdotal, perhaps, but I found it deeply comforting that, despite being surrounded by images of graphic violence beyond imagining, stories of massacres and suicides and traffic accidents and narco hits, and no matter how desensitized we may or may not become to the two-dimensional image, humanity is still stronger.

Thoughts?