Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole

Author:Teju Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

Death in the Browser Tab

THERE YOU ARE watching another death on video. In the course of ordinary life—at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park—you are suddenly plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror. It arrives absurdly, in the midst of banal things. That is how, late one afternoon in April, I watched Walter Scott die. The footage of his death, taken by a passerby, had just been published online on the front page of The New York Times. I watched it, sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, and was stunned by it.

A video introduces new elements into the event it records. It can turn a private grief into a public spectacle, and set popular opinion at odds with expert analysis. Within the space of a year, I saw too many such videos. I watched the fatal shooting of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun in a Cleveland park. I watched a police officer choke a protesting Eric Garner to death. I watched Charly Leundeu Keunang tussle with police officers on a sidewalk in Los Angeles before one of them unloaded six bullets into him. And there was much I could have watched but opted not to: the ISIS beheading videos, the various other clips of deadly violence from around the world. Even so, just from the grim catalogue of what I’d seen, I felt that death had come within too-easy reach, as easy as opening up a browser and pressing play. I recognized the political importance of the videos I had seen, but it had also felt like an intrusion when I watched them: intruding on the sorrow of those for whom those deaths were much more significant, but intruding, too, on my own personal but unarticulated sense of right and wrong.

For most of human history, to see someone die, you had to be there. Depictions, if there were any, came later, at a certain remove of time and space. The day after I watched the video of Walter Scott’s death, it so happened that I taught my students at Bard about a series of woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein’s woodcuts, designed around 1526 and entitled Pictures of Death, showed Death in the form of a skeleton arriving for each of his victims: a nun at prayer, a farmer plowing his field, a pope on his throne, a knight in full armor. Considering these prints made me understand something about videos like those of Walter Scott’s death: they are part of a long line of images of the moment of death, an engagement with that mysterious instant in which a self becomes permanently unselved.

The first photographs about death did not capture the exact moment of death’s arrival. They were postmortem pictures. The genre flowered in the nineteenth century, fostered in part by the technical limitations of photography: the dead don’t move, and a portrait of a corpse was easier to make than one of a living person. This was at a time when death still happened at home.

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