Egyptian Scribbles: A Refugee Story from "Human Cargo" by Caroline Moorehead

Tuesday 23 October 2007

A Refugee Story from "Human Cargo" by Caroline Moorehead

One day a man in a country in Africa was arrested and accused of belonging to an illegal opposition group. He was sent to prison and tortured. In his cell was a very small window. By standing up very straight in the far corner of the room, he could just see a field outside. From time to time, cows came to graze in it. As the weeks passed, he grew to recognise their shapes and colours. One in particular pleased him, and he gave her a name. From that day on, whenever she passed his window, he talked to her. He told her about his wife and children who had disappeared, about his house and his parents, and the village where he grew up.
The day came when he was freed. He left his African country and went into exile, taking his cow with him. In his new country, he was offered an appointment with a doctor to talk through his experiences. On the first day, he arrived in good time, leading his cow behind him. When the receptionist ushered him into the consulting room, he made sure the cow had plenty of room to follow him. Week after week, the man and his cow attended sessions together.
Several months went by. One day, the doctor suggested that the moment had come for the man to bid farewell to his cow. He replied that it was too soon. Several more months passed. Then the morning came when the man accepted that he could keep the cow with him no longer. That day, he was extremely sad. He brought the cow with him as usual, and then, crying, told her that the time had come for her to go home. Saying goodbye to his cow made him weep more than he had wept for many years.

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."