I started writing this post a few weeks ago. But every day, I have had to start over again.
My new book, Crossing the Farak River (Hasina: Through my eyes in Australia), tells the story of Rohingya crisis from the perspective of a young girl. The book is for readers between 11 and 14 years. Originally, this post was going to be about how a novel can move the reader from pity to compassion and how the lessons I learned during the writing process might be applied in a classroom.
But the Covid-19 pandemic stopped me in my tracks. Suddenly, I wonder whether anyone will care about some faraway conflict when things are so frightening here at home. Around me people are losing their jobs. People are dying from a lack of medical resources. Day to day, things like going to the gym or having a coffee in a café, are now deadly dangerous. No one knows when this will end. Or when we will be back to normal, if we ever get back to normal.
These past weeks, as the world around me changed, I have written about what life is like right here, right now – and what life was like (and continues to be) for the Rohingya. There are many parallels between the two. Yet, I continually asked myself, why should people spare a thought for those suffering in Myanmar when people are suffering right here?
The sociologist Luc Boltanski sets out this exact dilemma in his book, Distant Suffering: Politics, Morality and the Media. He asks, are we only touched by suffering that is close to us? When we are moved by terrible suffering far away, does it prevent us from seeing what is under our noses? How can we even act to help alleviate suffering when there is so much of it? What is the right thing to do?
Questions like these went through my mind when I was asked to write Crossing the Farak River.
Like many of us in 2017, I watched and read coverage of the crisis as 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were forced them from their homes in Rakhine State, Myanmar to hastily erected refugee camps in Bangladesh. It was impossible not to feel pity for their suffering. But writing a book requires more than pity. It requires commitment.
That commitment means time and emotion spent on research. Reading harrowing firsthand accounts of the attacks. Imagining myself in the position of all the characters in the book, from parents forced to abandon children, to children who were suddenly responsible for keeping their families alive, to profiteers making money from the crisis. Even those masked-men tasked with burning people out of their homes.
The deeper I delved, the better I understood the complexity of the situation. That included the emotions that were involved and the histories behind those feelings.
I learned about the difference between pity and compassion. Pity is a very particular response to suffering. It requires a sense of distance to observe suffering. Compassion is different. While pity acknowledges suffering, compassion is defined as pity with help or mercy attached. Compassion allows for action.
Action itself can take many forms. We don’t have to be heroes, parachuting aid in. An effective action can be simply to find out more. This may seem small, yet it is a form of commitment. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it. And that changes your perspective on the world forever.
I’m not saying that knowing as an action will solve a crisis as complex and long-standing as what is happening to the Rohingya. But I do think that compassion can only help bring people closer to finding solutions for intractable problems. It is a form of action that anyone can take.
Our lives, the world we live in, have been ripped open by the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, the shocks we are experiencing now, are the same shocks experienced by Hasina, protagonist of Crossing the Farak River: grief over the loss of the everyday activities that make us who we are; fear for our livelihoods, fear for the survival of those we love, fear for our own survival.
We are all vulnerable to suffering because we are human. Because we are human, we are also all capable of compassion.