I was on one of the first flights to take off out of Pakistan after its airspace opened (#neverforget). I had imagined arriving at the airports amidst great crowds of people beating up Emirates counter agents, but I was surprised to see that the airport was nearly deserted. The process of leaving was suspiciously easy, though I have been assured that in the weeks since, the Lahore Airport has resumed its regularly scheduled horrors. For my part I have spent the last two weeks in a cold and often snowy New York in a bit of a trance. I felt something break when the airspace was closed - something fragile, irreversible.
I was catching up with a friend who lived here and he said it’s probably a watershed moment that people would look back on and say “Ah, you see? It was never the same after that.”
But I am not so sure about that. Pakistanis have been through so many watershed moments in the last decade and a half that at this point it seems less shed and more water (a total shot in the dark as to what that inane phrase means).
Commentators have argued that violent Islamophobia had been simmering for decades in a number of Western countries
“Watershed moment” was also one of the phrases I read in a few of the American papers in their coverage of the recent terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. Most of the coverage I read tended to cover one of three angles. One was to explore the loner-loser-gunmen theory that white papers often use to describe such horrifying atrocities. The second was to wax lyrical (rightly so) about the earnest, measured and thoughtful way New Zealand’s leadership responded to the attack and its after effects. The third was an exploration of the many ways the terrorists were led to this course of action. Some were about Australians and their (frankly) extravagantly racist policies, but some were more insidious inquiries into the attack. Not about the logistics of the attack, mind you, about how and when they bought guns or broadcasting the massacre on social media, but veiled musings about the social issues that plagued these sick individuals’ mind.
A day earlier I had been giving a lecture at my alma mater on the subject of representation. We were talking about the ways in which journalism can mould a narrative, and how important it was to diversify one’s sources of information in days when most analysis can seem like ricochets off an echo chamber. One of the students asked me in the course of the dialogue what it is was like when I was their age and a student there. Did I know what I wanted to do? And for the first time in a long time I found myself feeling sad. Sad because it was only in hindsight that I can see what my 19-year-old self could not. Islamophobia was not a current topic in the early 2000s; there was no question of things like white privilege, neo-imperialism or Eurocentricity. When I signed up to study art history, for example, it was never a question that I was going to be taught European Art History for 98% of my courses. When I pitched in a journalism feature writing class that I would like to write an article on the racial profiling that American airports had essentially institutionalized because of the PATRIOT Act, I was told (by a liberal teacher) that the airports are just doing their job and that it didn’t warrant a story. His reply told me that the suspicion and outright hostility that people of colour faced during air travel was not a part of any larger problem.
Taken together, the idea - never declared but always implied - during my college years was that I wasn’t welcome until I proved otherwise. The kids these days call these things micro-aggressions and if I think back to it, there were lots of them
Friends - good friends, who I meet to this day – routinely made jokes about me being a “terrorist”, and at the time it never occurred to me that I could be offended because it seemed to be a joke at the expense of the dominant narrative that there was a war on terror and my country/religion/skin colour was on the wrong side of that war. But it wasn’t just a joke. It was a decision to believe the narrative. Taken together, the idea - never declared but always implied - during my college years was that I wasn’t welcome until I proved otherwise. The kids these days call these things micro-aggressions and if I think back to it, there were lots of them (Recall when “that’s so gay” was used as a slur by even the most tolerant of fashionistas). So when that student asked me what it was like back then, I told him how even a place like the college he’s in today was different back then in a thousand ways, despite the leftist, tolerant bohemian values it vocally claims to represent. I told him it was exhausting. That it often still is.
That’s why representation matters. More so today than ever before perhaps, because we can see that representation (or a lack of it) has consequences, oftentimes violent. The representation in mainstream media that Muslims are terrorists, somehow diametrically opposed to values of peace and democracy: this narrative matters. The representation of a white Christian who massacred 49 people during Jummah prayers and injured dozens more as an “angel faced baby” that went wrong in UK papers is not without consequences. And the representation in our own media here in Pakistan that it is only Muslim pain that should concern us has consequences.
By the time I was done, the student looked a bit depressed and I felt a little bad myself. So I smiled and told him things have improved. There is more colour on TV and in art; LGBT folks are more visible, and the hegemony of white, Western and male superiority complexes respectively are at the very least up for debate. These are massive strides. One of the only ways that we continue to improve on them is to commit to represent an increasingly diverse set of peoples. But then things like the Christchurch terrorist attacks happen and the conspicuous lack of Facebook’s profile badges and hashtags remind me of the biggest lesson: that the people who write the narrative often have the privilege not only of controlling it, but also of later absolving themselves of any part of its perpetuation.
