The child victim’s body is the moral Ground Zero of conflict and the global silence around conflict.
The Afghan Girl (2015), the vulture and the little girl (2013), Aylan Kurdi (2015) and now Yazan Kafarneh (2024). Media photographs of the impact of armed conflict on children, arguably the most vulnerable in any condition of conflict and the ‘ideal victim’, have marched endlessly through the years.
The famous social documentary filmmaker Jacob Riis captured New York’s poorer neighbourhoods in his The Children of the Poor (1892) as a mode of raising awareness of the social state of the expanding city.
Even the United Nations employed such photographs for its own ends. UNICEF began by capturing child victims of poverty in the late 19th century, and employed the pictures to solicit sympathy and contributions but also ramp up a humanitarian morality around the figure of the child and uneven development.
For example, as Paula S. Fass has noted in her essay, the UN’s Children’s Rights Convention adopted in 1959 made use of such pictures to underline its point. Collections such as UNICEF’s Under Siege: The Devastating Impacts on Children of Three Years of Conflict in Syria (2015) were put out for later too.
No longer recognisable as persons, given their ruined state, the children look out from the UNICEF photographs, or do not in the case of Kurdi and Kafarneh.
Yazan Al-Kafarneh, 13, died of malnutrition today. He was killed by Israel through starvation. Many more children are dead or dying. What more horrors need to occur before putting an end to this genocide?!! pic.twitter.com/khpCGDAQe2
— Ambassador Majed Bamya 🇵🇸 (@majedbamya) March 4, 2024
Beyond the extreme vulnerability of Kurdi and Kafarneh, beyond their fragile bodies, the photographs achieve something else.
First, children traditionally associated with not just innocence but embodying potential are captured embedded in a context in which no future can possibly unfold. Starvation, absence of healthcare and unrelenting conflict are the contexts in which a Kafarneh-with-potential becomes a victim, one whose potential has been erased fully.
Which means to say, the sites, whether bombed ruins or hospital beds, are sites where no future abides. If potential and capability require a sustaining environment in which to reach fruition, then the context in which Kurdi or Kafarneh are embedded ensures that no potential is ever likely to be fulfilled.
These photographs then are not of the children alone: they point to the material conditions in which a certain kind of future alone rests. The pictures are not about the present: they are about a future in which, possibly, there will be no children left.
Then, the scenes of destruction that we see unfolding on our screens today, whether of barren lands or devastated lands, force us to shift from ruin to rubble. The ruin, which has its own melancholic appeal and sense of mystery, is now just plain rubble.
The child victim does not connect to the ruin: s/he is of the rubble, a part of it, broken, dismembered and poignantly separated from a context in which s/he would have otherwise lived.
The landscape of conflict where Kafarneh is to be ‘found’ (a wholly inappropriate word, given that he starved to death in his ‘home’) is a place where matter has lost its form. The hospital, the home and the school are no longer the same: their form has been broken down into bricks, mortar and steel due to the bombings.
Material matter, which had been formed into structures for a Kafarneh to live in, play in and study in, has returned to a pre-form, by which I mean a state prior to all form state: rubble. The ruins of buildings may still be functional, at least minimally. But their intended service and purpose are altered once the ruination has set in.
It is this loss of form and function – of the hospital, the home, the school – that produces the child victim. Kafarneh died in a hospital bed, but he arrives via a landscape smashed to smithereens and in a state of advanced starvation, according to reports.
The hospital is of no functional use because life among the rubble has made it impossible that the new matter (the form and function of the hospital) can revive that life. Just as the hospital, home and school are rendered into waste, so is the child’s body that occupies those spaces.
There is, therefore, a tragic correlation between the wasting – intended, of course, through bombings – building and the wasted child. In these spaces, the human form, particularly of the child, is inverted into mere flesh.
The ruined body of Kafarneh, within the precincts of the hospital where he died, does not point to the hospital. It points to the landscape he came through. The ruined or damaged hospital is newness because the original hospital is only in the past. Likewise is Kafarneh lying in bed, emaciated to a point where there is little matter (flesh) on him (and the eyes seem overly large as a result).
The conflict and the bombing therefore produce new matter: the ruined hospital of the present and the starving body in the present.
Traditionally, the dissolving human body – the liquefaction – is the stuff of nightmares and much Gothic and neo-Gothic horror. But neither Kurdi nor Kafarneh are dissolved bodies. The horror we see is the corpus intacta but diminished. It invokes greater horror, one could argue, not because it is broken but because it is whole and yet not-alive.
Also read: The World’s Indifference to Palestinian Genocide Will Cost More Lives
Writing about the Abu Ghraib visuals, the critic Susan Sontag said:
“To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose.”
In some sense, Kurdi and Kafarneh are posed: captured on camera in a particular state. Except that this state is not a pose emanating from life. It is a record, to adapt Sontag’s words, of how a life could not be lived any more.
The photograph captures a body transitioned from the living to the non-living: just inert matter on a beach (Kurdi) or a bed (Kafarneh). The human descends, reversing the normative of life lived towards a future, into the abhuman (starvation, in this most recent case) and eventually the non-living.
In his 9/11 novel, Falling Man, Don DeLillo writes:
“It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash.”
Yes, it is another landscape: a once-pulsing, thriving land is transformed into unrecognisable forms of rubble.
In an essay titled ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, this same Don DeLillo wrote: “For all those who may want what we’ve got, there are all those who do not.”
People did want the same thing for Kurdi and Kafarneh: life. So we know the meaning of things buried beneath the ash of this smoking rubble: a future ended there.
And then there will be none.
Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.
