Dear Reader,
Exposure to the “reality” of war culture and being fed snippets of authentic experiences through literature and cinema is truly and inherently conflicting. My recent encounters with narratives surrounding the Iraq War has evoked a completely new and foreign perspective on life. Not the way we – us commoners – view life, but how certain lives are determined to be valuable, specifically in war. This initially became apparent to me when reading Chapter One of Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? She describes a phenomenon that nearly everyone experiences in all circumstances, a lens in which people develop through belonging to a community, nation, culture, or language; these are our “frames of recognizability.”. We decipher ourselves from others through determining if they are similar to us and if we feel a sense of responsibility to them. Personally, this was a shocking realization that immediately delivered me to the doorstep of war and combat between humans, between the same species. This was something I have always been skeptical of but had no idea (or place) to question it – how do you decide that it is morally okay to kill another human being different from you? Are their lives not grievable?
The theory of “grievability” was also an idea emphasized by Judith Butler, “we mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” (36), and this was perfectly depicted in the movie American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood. It all begins with the 9/11 attacks and the loss of valuable American lives. A patriotic citizen, Chris Kyle, decides to fight back and kill the “savages” responsible. While deployed in Iraq, his only responsibility was to his comrades, people that would willingly die for him, and die for their country. This is a normal and popular belief in the United States and arguably any nation involved in combat – to die for your country is right because you died by protecting it. “Us versus them” continuously drifted through my mind while watching the movie. We purposefully train soldiers to kill other humans that we believe are not worth our consideration, not worth grieving. Those lives are deemed invaluable to you because the ones that truly “matter” are the ones at home, the ones like you. For days, these thoughts resonated with me. The scene that had the greatest effect on me depicted a young boy running toward an American tank with a bomb in his hands. He was carefully followed by Chris Kyle’s sniper-rifle and shot to protect US soldiers. I realized, he was destined to die for his country. The moment he took his first breath, he was born into a nation with culture and language that differed from the United States. He was socialized to believe Americans were the enemy, to do anything to kill them because their lives were not valuable. Meanwhile, the same socialization was happening on American grounds – kill the Iraqis, they are the enemy. The boy’s entire life built up to a moment that defined the “frames of recognizability”; running down the street, looking into the face of death, his life determined ungrievable by humans who decided his existence was not worth the risk of losing their own.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2016.
