When Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, killed an unknown Arab on a sweltering summer day in Algiers, many said that it was easier for him to do so, for he did not kill an individual but an Arab. It would have been harder had he knew only the victim’s name. And, perhaps due to this reason, he was condemned for not crying at his mother’s funeral. The murder remained a trivial affair, used as an evidence to chisel out a behavior pattern. Implicitly he was absolved of the murder. It can be deduced that the judge saw himself, the lawyer, including Meursault, not as individuals but as French people pitted against the Arabs at large - the classical binary of ‘us versus other’. It can be further said that the Arab was killed as an identity, and not by Meursault alone, but by a collective French identity.
Contrarily another pattern emerges, involving mass violence, where victims are duly asked for their names. If the introduction does not proffer much credibility, a more intimate inquiry initiates, of looking into private parts. Sometimes, the victim may be asked to recite some religious verses. Depending on the outcome life is taken or spared. However, the clinical approach, so designed, despite collecting so much individual details, does not rescue the individual out of its bag of identities. Rather, the examination precisely delivers victims as the others shorn of all other identities including one of humans.
The narrative of ‘the other’, like any other narrative, survives on story-telling. However, it involves a failure, if not lack, of imagination. In popular imagination, contours of the other’s cultural mores are hardened, with no recognition of their inner fluidity or outer intermingling. The other, though possessing speech, is often voiceless, for his or her words are already painted with meaning disregarding any inherent one whatsoever. The other’s behavior is always anticipated, as one does for adversaries during war, thus creating and sustaining a sense of hostility, and waiting for the first sign of flare up. Sometime, the flare up, as in The Stranger, can just be an intensely warm afternoon at a beach.
However, every otherness exists inseparably with its selfness. This not only creates both in each other’s image but also a relation of interdependency and passion. Denying this amount to denying one’s own self and thus the fulcrum of reality itself. Therefore, in a narrative where the self is pitted against the other, and not as self and other, loss of individual behavior is universal. One, without fail, begins to imagine oneself as belonging to sets of identities. These identities form a tightly wound fabric around the self, and mummify the individual. And, when even a single thread of it is pulled or accidentally touched, whole of the fabric vibrates. It entails rage. And, what is rage? If not, some poorly expressed unbearable grief.
If only, We, both self and other, know to acknowledge each other’s sorrows, much of rage would be deflated of its destructiveness. If only we know that behind each identity lives an individual, a man or a woman, each different as snowflakes, each with its own way of laughing and living, it would be much harder to hate. If only we imagine a man or a woman carefully; if only the face, the freckles on the cheeks, uneven arrangement of the teeth, how the hair comes falling over the forehead, it would be impossible to hate. Hate is just a failure of imagination.
