7/1/20

By Josh Rubin

Witnessing is the politics of seeing. To witness is to participate in the unmasking of the obscured, the hidden. We start by noticing the ragged threads of the shroud covering the inevitable consequences of the hoarding of the material underpinnings of life. We use our eyes to tease the threads from our field of vision, and we see enough, after some time on the ground, to turn these glimpses into narrative. Who is doing what to whom.

And then, we tell the story to whomever may listen. And a few of those we tell become witnesses themselves, feet on the ground, eyes searching for signs of those tears that leak the light. Witnesses of light. Sometimes the story we can tell resonates with many, often with only a few. Our work does not rely on success, although we welcome it. Our work rests on the simple act of seeing, and what we are called on to see is what the status quo would hide. That is what makes witnessing an act of subversion. The cloak we would lift tells us that the world must be the way it is, that some great force would doom us to living with injustice. We are told, for instance, that there will always be poor, so that we must be content with that sad state of affairs. Tug at those threads and you will see the privileged mouthing those words.

Witnessing is best done on the ground, near to places where the fabric is shredding. That is why we go to prison camps for children. Why we go to the border, the margins, in the liminal zones where the suffering is sharp enough to give us an opening. That is only because our vision is so poor. Our eyes have been so dulled by the pressure of normalcy that they require obvious atrocity for them to start functioning. And we must see it for ourselves to learn to see.

And once we see we can no longer unsee. And once we see, we see it everywhere, and we learn that those lines, that those borders that are drawn to defend privilege, are everywhere we look. As if, as they say, the scales have fallen from our eyes.