Why Hate comes Easy
Personal notes on the Politics of now (and the always)
Hurried, urgent knocks on the window panes. It is usually around six in the morning when I first hear them. The sun is then only a soft blotch in the room and everyone at home is mostly asleep. It’s the birds. The birds with their yellow beaks violently hitting against the glass.
They have seen something on the window panes, and are either terrified or angry by it. What’s the difference?
They have seen themselves but since they can’t tell, they immediately draw to their survival instincts. Predator stance. And try their best to protect their territories. Even with all of the skies at their disposal, they feel as much threatened as any of us.
It might be the times that we are living in, so exacerbated by identity politics, and horrors of fascist regimes that I can’t help but look at how a simple violent act of these birds capture best what’s come to be the human behaviour.
In the year of 1936, in a conference at some town of Czech Republic, Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst spoke at length on something called a Mirror stage. The Mirror Stage is when a human infant recognises oneself in the mirror and develops a sense of ‘I’ or ego. Although scientists have argued that seeing our self doesn’t simply translate to self awareness, a case in point is to be made that the ability of seeing ourselves as an image outside our self does play a huge role in most of our lives and in the making of our identities. Of what we deem to be our identities. Our safety net, our sense of neat understanding of who we are and our belief system.
But it’s not only about the seeing but also the seeing in a certain way. When you are steeped into a fixed identity, you are refusing to learn, or to make mistakes. A very human condition is change, so when we refuse it we are inviting nothing but hate into our lives. A constant violence.
Like hard knocks on glass, attacks on those before us, outside of us without ever realising that it is in turn on ourselves. We have seen ourselves, and are terrified or angry. Mostly, both.
Interestingly, it is not just our chosen inability to understand that the violence, intrinsic to our cultures and everyday realities is actually perpetuated by us. That perhaps we are all the terrorists we have feared. It is our need to separate it, deem it as ‘the other’. The evil forces as that outside of your religion, outside of your gender, outside of values, relationships and self is a carefully orchestrated idea that we have built on over years to grant ourselves into “human civility”, “society”, and the great thirst trap of stability.
‘You can love your kids but do you like them?’
Lynne Ramsay posed this simple question in her interviews in 2011. This was in reference to her newly released film, We Need to Talk About Kevin. The film was based on a book authored by Lionel Richer who had also mentioned in her interviews how she can’t understand the want for children that people have. The film has been reduced as something of an issue based film on rising school shootings, or antisocial personalities quite often. But the film does so much more. It’s an exemplary work, showing through a mother-son relationship portrayed by Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller, not so much the consequence or the cause of the cold, violent relationship they share but the experience of it. Much of Ramsay’s work does just that — draws us viewers into a strange yet familiar vulnerable place, through characters who are experiencing some sort of monstrosity within themselves and allows us to simply experience that through them. Is the mother the monster, or the son she births?
The son is a monster.
The mother is a monster.
The son sees the mother as a monster.
The mother sees the son as a monster.
They are both the self, and the other. Or The ‘othered’.
In an iconic scene at the end, the two are sitting by each other but not necessarily with each other. It’s a simple frame made extraordinary by the sameness of their stiff, inward moving body postures. The mother is visiting the son at jail (as much as she is visiting herself). Despite the fact that the two characters are essentially separate two strong character identities, yet they become the hurt, hurting and the one who caused it all at once — singular event in a way, and this event is the span of their relationship, marked by various forms of violence.
If only we could carry this understanding that all of our ‘relations’ are marked by violence of some degree — including to our collective self, which is the other (other-ed) and vice versa earmarked by that which we hate or cannot understand.
It is only natural that we arrive at certain ideas, certain identities, but it is very important that we also leave them just after we do. At the heart of fascist nations are all those who have arrived at something, and never known departure.. Perhaps, that is why migrants are never a part of Fascist nations. All they do is depart, or be deported. They know what’s built can be easily lost. They know that we must still keep going despite it.. They experience the world as ‘other’-ed. Their ‘self’ as other-ed.
The idea of other-ing is so essential to grounding a sense of ‘self’. This act of separation is what births violence into our lives.
It is foundational to our families, groups, circles, communities, nations and so on. An act of transgression, betrayal that is at the heart of ‘moral storytelling’ that has been reiterated to us to ensure of patriotism, religious fidelity and loyalty is what we need to actually turn ourselves to. We need to defy these blinded forms of loyalty, forms of violent relationships.
The fierce feminist, Dalist leader, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was as ready to burn the Constitution despite having written it because he could still see how it aided the majorities. The Savarnas, the men, the rich, the exploiters.. How that which was to help as some tangible guide for a Nation so diverse, could easily become a tool, a weapon misappropriately used by those in Power through politics of hate, against the marginalised and the minorities.
As of now, as in many parts of the world, India is being so strongly led by politics of hate, with the rise and rule of the fascist forces (Hindutva forces).
Perhaps now is when we need to remember that — it is what we hate that is more telling of who we are as people and not what we claim to love.
