In the her essay, “The Body Politic: The Bodies of Women and the Politics of Famine…,” Jo Ellen Fair discusses how the symbolic constructions of the body foment a language of famine through the somatic as a marker of sex, race, and class through which representation of the bodies of famine is carried out by: “defining the victim, inspecting the emaciated body, blaming the victim, and symbolizing the failure of the nation-state.” What I find interesting in Fair’s critique, is the focus on structure versus nature, on the body as a site of natural disaster versus the body as an object of structural disasters (war, drought, distribution). The body as a locus of disaster clearly desexualizes the woman’s body according to Fair, yet it also ossifies the body as a skeleton for understanding the very discourse of the somatic. The body becomes the medium for which the skin dried, the mouths open, and the eyes glazed over serve as allegories of previous media and anthropological representations of the conflated symbols of “third world,” famine, Africa, and more recently Syria, Yemen, and the South Sudan. Synchronous to this chain of signifying elements of the visualized body of famine is the shock value attributed to the body of hunger as helpless, lifeless, on show for the display of “development” politics.
I think of the image of the starving seven-year-old girl from Yemen who died last month. This is an image that is as haunting as that of the Kurdish two-year-old who died on a beach in 2015, Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body as the waves pass through him. And I wonder what the purpose is, fundamentally, of showing these images that I deem sacred due to the age of these children and their inability to consent to such photos cataloguing their lives as an iconic moment for people to feel badly about something somewhere. But fundamentally the technological reproduction of these images do nothing to change the reality on the ground for the very people suffering hunger or being forced into exile from their own countries due to war. Kurdi’s father said as much a year after his son’s death: “Everyone claimed they wanted to do something because of the photo that touched them so much. But what is happening now? People are still dying and nobody is doing anything about it.”
I ask myself what this means truly when media reports relate “the shocking image of Alan drew the world’s attention to the deadly journey that has cost thousands of migrants their lives.” Are such representations gratuitous, political versions of Fergie on the red carpet or might there even be a more cynical reading to why the dead and dying bodies of children are put into western media if not to objectify the deaths by rendering some of the dead (eg. women and children) as innocent, while so many are still brandished as either potential Isis fighters or unwelcome immigrants. While the rise of xenophobic political parties across Europe is a concern for those of us on the left from Germany’s Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), Italy’s the League, and Spain’s Vox, of equal concern is how to deal with rising immigration with dwindling resources and jobs while being unable to change the reasons behind why immigrants are coming to Europe in the first place. As the UK is flailing around Brexit, others are asking serious questions about what a European identity looks like, Brexit or not. And I have to wonder if we ought not to include the imagines of these lifeless bodies of children who died either as an indirect result of western policies or as a result of dangerous immigration patterns as part of European identity. For how can these dead not form part of this image today?
In 2002 many directly linked the IMF to the famine in Malawi and the EU and IMF were blamed from starvation in Niger. And pretty much everyone agrees that the IMF policies were what is turning Greece into a “third world country.” So we must wonder what the effect of publishing the photos of dead children will be for the average European reader of news. I mean it’s not that we will just discover tomorrow that the haves and have-nots are decided long before these humans drowned on as a result of a refugee boat capsizing or died of starvation in a hospital. What can such media representations do aside from sensationalize the already tragic death of a child? And ought we really to be surprised that nothing has changed in Syria for the millions who have been forced to flee their country or who remain and dodge bullets and bombs?
In an era where we are flooded with media images every second of our waking lives as algorithms ensure that these images come across our screen as frequently as customer care feedback pop-outs, we are reminded of the fragility of life and our comparative good luck in the west not to be that child dead of starvation, even luckier still that the child in the photo is not our own.
While JPGs and MP4 clips might seem to unite political forces for change, ultimately these images do little more than sell papers and vulgarize the death of a child who had no say in any of it. Meanwhile our governments continue to veer to the right as walls are built, xenophobic content abounds the Internet, and the resentment to the foreign worker rises. The average person does not understand the intricacies behind the IMF which operates, as Noam Chomsky puts it, as being “anti-capitalist” as its mandate is fundamentally “a method for paying off investors and transferring the risk to the taxpayers in rich countries.” Although these policies are robbing taxpayers in both wealthy and poor nations, the IMF policies wreak havoc throughout the developing world as it continues to maneuver fake debt as private investors grow wealthy.
The contemporary memento mori of the dead children of Yemen and Syria are symbols of the injustices that capitalism creates. International agencies like the IMF and World Bank need to rethink how debt is handled, how fake debt has become a form of economic control, and how the immigrant crisis should perhaps be rebranded as the "capitalist crisis." What the problem of starvation reveals is not only the crisis in capitalism, as food banks grow in number and necessity across the US and the UK, but very likely the increase of hunger and starvation throughout the planet reveals that we are face to face with the signs of the complete and utter failure of capitalism.
