Deep Field (18 page)

But what I assumed had been the roar of victory—the cockfighting equivalent of scoring a goal, a kill—was in fact the round of betting before the next fight. A sandpit stained with blood and covered in feathers stood at the centre of the Gallera, while advertisements for chook feed and rising politicians adorned the walls. Rising steeply on each side surrounding the pit were the packed stands, with special ringside seats for dignitaries. I took my seat at the back, in the ‘gods’ of the cockfighting world, peering down at the diminutive chickens below. Suddenly the roaring started again and the stadium erupted, everyone on their feet waving their hands and offering ten-fingered odds to everyone else in the stadium, attempting to find a series of betting partners who would offer compatible odds for opposing roosters in a kind of chook-centric version of traders on the floor of a stock exchange. Fearing that if I waved my hands around I might end up owing thousands of dollars to the rest of the crowd, I made a quiet bet with the man next to me—100 pesos for a large white rooster with an imposing manner against a smaller but potentially more agile darker bird.

The bout was almost over before it had begun. After the roosters were paraded for the betting public, they were then ‘aggravated’ by being held down while other roosters pecked at their heads. Once sufficiently annoyed, both roosters were placed on the sand and pushed encouragingly towards each other. The dark agile one moved immediately, leaping high above the head of its larger and more threatening foe and kicked back with its right leg in a single elegant leap. A five-inch stiletto razor (sharpened only at eclipses and the dark of the moon) attached to the rooster’s heel sunk deep into its opponent’s neck and the white bird, without having moved a step, sank lifelessly to the sand in an instant kill. The death of the rooster came as a shock, and I immediately regretted the bet that I had so cheerfully and unthinkingly entered into a few moments before.

The subsequent bouts were neither quick nor pretty. There was no majestic athleticism to the fight or the ritual of sporting bravery that provides a thin veneer to the brutality of blood sport. Following each round of crazed betting, more roosters would be ‘tooled-up’ with vicious spikes, tormented and set against each other in contests than usually resulted in a lethal stalemate in which both animals, hacked and bleeding, would collapse alongside each other only to picked up, roused and set against each other again. Outside the cock pit, trails of blood led to teams of men trying to stitch up wounded birds that could be repaired for breeding or to return to the ring again.

But there was more to the fights than the numbing succession of death and gore. As I left, crowds of beggars asked if I’d been successful with my betting and pointed to their stomachs for food. Inside, the betting, while complex, saw the exchange of small amounts of currency in minute bills folded many times so they could be kept between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. It was, in a phrase of Jeremy Bentham, made famous by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, an exercise in ‘deep play’—a game in which the stakes were so high that no rational person would play it. They played nonetheless, because the deep play represented not only a need for cash by people who had little and in the typhoon had lost much, but a cultural interpretation of reality. Gone were the sanitised shopping malls. The tiered walls of the Matina Gallera were themselves a cyclonic formation around the still eye of the cock pit as the commotion of the betting formed a wall of sound around the death ritual at the centre. This was, in a way, an avian passion play in which the (known) outcome was less important than the performing of it.

In a country where newborns are carried until they are six months old because they are thought to be come not from the prosaic act of birth but descended the from the heavens, the cockfight is counter-reality, the experience that underpins, and is the frightening opposite of, the sterile aspirations of economic and social progress. As the crowd roared, pitiful amounts of money changed hands and, in the still of the storm, animals in a way more valuable than their owners fought to the end. The intensity of the betting, the socially hierarchical tiered stands and the concentration of the crowd during bursts of feathered fury stripped back the layers of interpretation, and began to merge in my imagination with the cyclonic churning of mud, stone, water and earth, where poor villages paid the ultimate price for being at the bottom the economic and status pyramid and thus at the front of the destructive social power of natural disasters.

DISSONANCE IS A FEATURE
of humanitarian work—both in the field when international aid workers are dropped into emergencies in countries and during circumstances that are very different from the comfortable homes they have left, and when viewed from afar. Most of us are aware of emergencies and humanitarian crises through papers, the internet and television, and are confronted on an almost daily basis by the realistic, yet constructed, images of suffering in distant places. Generally, these are not images of the dead or those who have paid the ultimate price for the catastrophe that has engulfed them, but of the living. In the words of a French war correspondent, ‘I think we have gone beyond the stage where it had to be the bodies and the blood. What is required today is suffering—particularly the suffering of women and children because it moves and mobilizes people more easily.’ For some humanitarian workers, however, living amid the suffering can be almost the opposite. One of the most bizarre and disconnected moments I have witnessed was seeing the aid workers in Darfur watching Milan Fashion Week late in the evening on satellite TV—images of wealth, glamour and desirability that were the polar opposite of the locations in which we found ourselves. In some ways these oppositional images—suffering brought to stable domestic households on the evening news, or fashion shows beamed into an unstable desert war—reinforce the prevailing order. Aid workers can escape to a more glamorous reality via a short flight to consumerist civilization in London or Dubai (or even Milan), while the horrific nightly vision of suffering reminds viewers of the comfort of home and relative political and economic stability. Suffering prompts compassion and, as aid agencies hope, potential donations from an audience whose power to give funds for distant crises is itself a luxury.

We are moved, and often intentionally so, to sympathise with and assist as much as we can the ‘survivors’ whose ‘stories’ are briefly told—stories that make a claim for an entire life in a moment of suffering as if this is all that we need to know. Emergencies, taking aside for a moment the reality for those who experience them directly, can also be ‘consumed’. It was no coincidence, as Susan Sontag observed, that Robert Capa’s famous photograph in
Life
magazine of a Republican soldier in the Spanish civil war taken at the precise moment he was shot was positioned next to an advertisement for brilliantine with which an elegant city gent could slick his sophisticated hair.

Wars and crises draw the lens like nothing else, perhaps with the exception of sex. But in doing so, emergencies are presented in humanitarian terms. It is the life caught in the moment of suffering that becomes the ‘story’ and is often all that is told, or known, or thought necessary to know, about a given situation. It has become commonplace, for example, when seeking to understand what is happening in ‘Africa’ (as if the continent itself were a single country) to interview an aid worker. ‘Africa’—the focus of so much of our contemporary images of suffering—becomes reduced to just that: a place whose history is a series of unconnected catastrophic dots whose totality, one is lead to believe, is history. This is the ultimate irony of working in crisis—the people whose stories are in fact history are those who cannot be helped. The dead cannot speak and we cannot know what they experienced, no matter how realistic the presentation of the crisis may be. The role of journalists and aid workers then becomes one of witnessing in difference ways—speaking for those who have died, representing the suffering of those who remain and interpreting, in messages designed to induce action, the meaning and response to these events.

This is a process that can be strange, especially for those not accustomed to media performance. While in the Philippines, I was asked for an interview by a Spanish TV crew who were covering the aftermath of Typhoon Bopha. While the majority of my work took place in government offices and meeting rooms trying to coordinate the response and help develop strategies for recovery, the TV crew had other ideas. They wanted images of action and for an hour I rehearsed with a colleague a series of made-up dialogues that featured us pointing at maps, moving pins, and posing in various stages of intense discussion. With the sound off, our improvised discussions turned to Spanish football and the relative merits of Barcelona verses Real Madrid, Lionel Messi against Ronaldo, while we simulated the frenetic activity of a relief command centre. In the end, only a thirty-second clip was used and clearly my acting skills needed improvement. Similarly, during a radio interview to describe the overall situation and give my observations from a recent field visit, I was asked by the interviewer what the public could do to help. At the time there were no appeals, and no organisations in Australia were taking public funds to support the Philippines response. The immediate answer, in short, was ‘nothing’, although this was not what I said. As I contemplated, with a sense of deflation, the reality of a media interview that did not end in an appeal for funds, it occurred to me that this had not been a waste of time. Rather, the absence of an appeal was part of something that I think is of longer-term importance, at least in the West—informed public discussion and understanding of history, politics and current events that is not necessarily reducible to an appeal for cash (useful as this is) or the manipulation of images of suffering.

Eglantyne Jebb, who founded the British NGO Save the Children in 1919, abandoned an earlier career as a teacher in part because of her dislike of children. ‘I suppose it is a judgment on me for not caring about children that I am made to talk all day about the universal love of humanity toward them,’ she wrote. She realised, however, that the suffering of children was one of the most powerful statements of vulnerability and apolitical humanitarian need—and, cynically, a brilliant marketing tool. Her ‘starving baby’ leaflets showing the dire conditions in post-war Germany were instrumental in raising funds and in changing commonly held attitudes that there should be no sympathy for the people of the country with which Britain had been at war. The idea that humanitarianism was beyond politics and cared for the defenceless was further reinforced by her supporter George Bernard Shaw, who famously wrote, ‘I have no enemies under the age of seven’.

Images of children in crisis have remained the mainstay of the wider humanitarian ‘pitch’. Depictions of such abject vulnerability demand immediate action and are imbued with moral, even parental, urgency. Children are not political, have limited agency, and strike at the heart of conceptions of family and community—a sense of empathy because everyone has, or at least once was, a child. They also raise money: a large number of NGOs, including World Vision and CARE, use images of children or some form of ‘child sponsorship’ to fund their broader operations under the logic that good development or humanitarian programs that assist a community will also benefit its younger members. How conflicts and disasters are witnessed domestically in the West through television and marketing campaigns is consequently a major and at times problematic component of humanitarian action itself—as ideas of innocent suffering and victimhood, in place of agency and local resourcefulness, are transposed onto societies in crisis. More specifically, organisations focusing on people who have not experienced picturesque suffering, such as the elderly, often struggle to raise sympathy and resources.

LEAVING THE PHILIPPINES,
I headed straight for the Republic of Palau—a minute Pacific Island state a few hours’ flight from Manila, which had also been hit by Typhoon Bopha. In contrast to the massive scale and energy of the Philippines with its megacities and huge extremes of wealth and poverty, Palau seemed to doze in a well-heeled Pacific torpor. Until 1994 Palau had been an American Pacific territory before signing a Compact of Free Association that granted it nominal independence in something resembling a condition of sovereign dependency on the United States. Prior to this Palau had been a German, then Japanese and, following World War II, an American territory. Influences of these multiple colonial masters lingered on. Palauans with names like Siegfried Nakamura hung out in well-chilled American diners musing over the gridiron with a Bud Light while being served by Filipina waitresses and kept afloat by US aid grants (including an additional $250 million to accommodate former Guantanamo Bay inmates from China’s Uighur minority). In town, the most substantial-looking buildings were in fact Japanese air-raid shelters with metre-thick walls. On the adjacent island, the government of Taiwan had constructed an enormous replica of Washington DC’s Capitol Hill in gratitude for diplomatic recognition. Shimmering white buildings arose from the surrounding paddock, crowned with domes and connected by sweeping colonnaded walkways that linked the legislature, the judiciary and the executive. Here a congress and a senate met while each of the sixteen state governors, answerable to their own state legislatures, had offices in the executive building—all for a total national population of around 20,000. Amazingly, in this relatively wealthy island-microcosm of the US, the civil service was run on a patronage basis, just like on the ‘mainland’. The effective functions of government stopped every four years as one rent-seeking group of politically connected administrators replaced another with each turn of the electoral cycle following campaigns that emphasised, in the slogan of one candidate, ‘honor, family, military’.