Photographic Ethics of Coexistence

My interest in the subject matter of photography was spurred by an elderly Afghan woman named Ayesha. Seated on the floor of her home in September 2009 she asked me if I would take her photo. She said,See the wrinkles on my face. Each wrinkle forms part of a tapestry that the women of Afghanistan are weaving so that the world will remember what we are going through. Sit with the women and listen to their stories. Each woman will tell you how violence has impacted our lives. Once you have collected their stories, imagine them as forming part of a tapestry. The tapestry will not be complete until Afghanistan is rebuilt by its people, not outsiders.Her words remained with me in 2020 as I viewed three dozen photos I took during my ethnographic research in Kabul (in the fall of 2008 and fall of 2009), and Vancouver, Canada (intermittently from 2004 to 2021).1 My research trips to Afghanistan were prompted by violence that my family was subjected to during the Asian exodus from Uganda in 1972. At the time of our departure, my family was separated. My sister and I, along with my grandparents, had been admitted to Canada. My parents and younger brother were sent to a refugee camp in England by the British embassy. The separation was painful and difficult. My grieving grandmother passed away in Vancouver after five years. My mentally challenged brother, who had been left in a hospital in Uganda, died at the age of thirty from choking on a banana skin. There was no room for him in a country such as Britain and Canada where the refugee/immigration policies are shaped by the needs of the labor market.2Being given ninety days to leave Uganda by then-President Idi Amin, we barely had time to collect photos of a place that had been home to us for three generations. Yet, I have photographic memories of life in Uganda: walking to school with friends, celebrating life events with family, everyday visits to the mosque with my grandmother, and family picnics. Making a home in the settler society of Canada was no easy matter. As a racialized minority, the violence of structural racism was never far from our lives.It is only when I came to Canada that I realized how British colonization of Uganda (1894–1961) had led to our displacement. Given the colonial policy of divide and rule, the Asian people in the country were rendered vulnerable by being allocated the middle position, below the British and above the Africans. This narrative is barely remembered in the wake of the realization that the Ugandan Asians were considered in Canada as hardworking and "assimilable." This is on account of the fact that we had been acculturated into the British system of education where English was prioritized. In other words, in Canada, Ugandan Asians were considered as desirable newcomers despite being racialized as the Other. The colonial script is muted and barely remembered. If you were to look at Amin's photograph in military uniform, you would notice numerous medals awarded by the British.My reflection on the subdued narrative of the correlation between colonization and displacement resonated with the situation in Afghanistan where there is barely any public mention of the role of the West in "wounding our people and destroying our country," as Afghan women expressed it in muted voices. Mainstream media and stakeholders hold the Taliban regime responsible for undermining the work of the West in such areas as education, governance, health, and livelihood opportunities.3How do we remember and reverse a situation where the complicity of the West in disrupting lives in countries such as Afghanistan and Uganda is unacknowledged? My point of intervention is to work toward an ethics of coexistence whereby we recognize that what is happening in distant places is not far from occurrences in Canada (as a representative of the West). Photography enables us to address this goal.The metaphoric act of weaving a tapestry, as Ayesha noted, is akin to engaging with photography, which allows us to see, hear, imagine, and feel the story relayed by the photographic subject, including inanimate objects. Photographs are not static, and neither are they frozen in time. My interest in an ethnographic reading of selected photos of Afghanistan and Canada is spurred by the need to tell a story that the world has forgotten: violence in Afghanistan is not an internal affair. Its origins are traced to the Cold War fought on its soil over the decade from 1979 to 1989. The rivalry between the former Soviet Union and the United States led to arming of different factions, resulting in civil war from 1992 to 1996. It was during this time that the Taliban came to power with the outcome that we are familiar with—September 11, 2001. Following this event, the US and NATO forces occupied Afghanistan for two decades, from 2001 to 2021. The collapse of the Afghan government, which had been sustained by the US-trained local military personnel, led to the humanitarian crisis that ensued in the wake of the establishment of the Taliban regime. The failure of foreign powers to rebuild Afghanistan following landscapes of destruction is barely remembered. The origin moment of violence has been rendered into political amnesia.4Given the destruction of Afghanistan by foreign powers I explore the question: How do we work toward an ethics of coexistence, the starting point for dismantling politicized boundaries between "Them" and "Us," the global South and the global North? I argue that photography embodying the "living language of people"5 is one means through which this task can be addressed. Photographs position us to ask questions such as how violence and suffering impact victims as well as perpetrators. I am reminded of a course I taught from 1994 to 2020 in the Department of Sociology at Simon Fraser University titled Violence in War and Peace. We explored key questions such as what is at stake for local communities following traumatic violence and social suffering? How are various social actors, ranging from global institutions to modern states, implicated in the production and actualization of structural violence? What is the political significance of the lived experience of suffering? How do we resolve the tension between an "official version" of violence, and personal narratives? Can the human experience of suffering ever be fully documented? We discussed the case study of a grieving American mother who had lost her soldier son during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. She was advised by an American soldier to go to Iraq and grieve with other mothers. She would then recognize the interconnectedness of our world. Working with the Inuit, Lisa Stevenson observed in 2014 that it is only when we make common cause with others that "we allow ourselves to be shaken, displaced from our customary dispositions and beliefs."6 Elaborating on this insight, she notes:We are left to work out new ways to love, new ways to imagine the other that take this observation, that life is beside itself, seriously. Therein lies the ethical work of caring for ourselves and for others as imaginative beings, a task whose outline cannot be traced in advance.7On another front, Catarina, João Biehl's socially abandoned interlocutor (residing in a zone of abandonment in Brazil, she is left to die on account of what is perceived to be mental illness) expresses the point: "And all of us together, we form a society, a society of bodies."8 It is within such spaces of coexistence that we can affirm our humanity as people inhabiting planet Earth along with nonhuman species and nature. Judith Butler puts it this way: "The beginning of such alliances can be found in ethical formulations such as these: even if my life is not destroyed in war, something of my life is destroyed in war when other lives are destroyed in war, and when living processes and organisms are also destroyed in war."9My goal is to capture constitutive moments of opportunities of what could have been otherwise: shared and interconnected lives, across space and time. Photographic ethics of coexistence affirms our humanity at a time when violence and conflicts have made inroads into our lives. This situation must be corrected even if this is done in the form of small steps: tipe tipe sarovar bharay (a stream is filled with drops of water).10 The stream as it runs over rocks and landscapes leaves footprints. At the same time, it is part of a river that ultimately joins the ocean. The image of a stream, flowing and interconnected, holds promise for transformative change encompassing the world. Photography, I argue, facilitates this process as photographs too flow like a stream, open and expansive.Making a case for the social lives of photographs, Elizabeth Edwards, in her role as an anthropologist, an historian, and a curator observed,But they are nonetheless objects created with a clear biographical intention: they are inextricably linked to the past, but they are also about the future—a moment, fixed and active in the present, specifically to communicate the past in the future. Such a desire is fundamental to the act of photography.…photographs remain socially and historically active within these contexts; indeed, arguably they are more open to the generation of multiple performances and the making of multiple meanings.11It is in this vein that I present illustrations of interconnectedness between Afghanistan (there) and the settler society of Canada (here).The withdrawal of US troops led to the collapse of the patchwork infrastructure that it had put into place in alliance with foreign-based NGOs. Most telling was the nonexistence of governance. In its place, the US had trained and armed 300,000 Afghans to ensure the security of those I refer to as "militarized peacekeepers."12 Local projects that could have helped Afghans rebuild their country were barely in place.Activist Malalai Joya writes, "my story is the story of a generation."13 This is a call for collective action of benefit to all, leading to the question: How do we work toward creating an interconnected world free from violence? Photographic intervention brings to light perspectives that call for reflection, allowing us to see that what we consider to be separate entities (the Other) and Us (the West) are indeed connected.An Afghan guard is protecting the residence of expatriates. In case of an attack, he would be the first one to be killed. Yet, the expatriates have come to believe that they are risking their lives to protect the people of Afghanistan. This widely held perception misses the irony of the situation: their presence is the result of militarized occupation. They left the country at the time of the US troop withdrawal on August 30, 2021.Viewing the image, we are struck by the fenced compound, concrete wall, steel structure, and barbed wire—but these elements are not protecting the tree, an iconic representation of not sparing nature from protracted violence. The guard is wearing loose-fitting clothes, discarded by foreign military personnel. Disposable clothes equal disposable Afghan lives. The diminutive figure of the guard, compared with the massive built structure, suggests that his life does not matter. This is indeed the case. Looking straight in our eyes, the guard seemingly speaks to us, saying: "See what has happened to the people of Afghanistan?" Such is the ethics of seeing and reflection.A gated house in Burnaby, Canada, is not an unusual site. The gate guards a large and luxurious house with an electric garage door. Once again, we see the entrapped tree, symbolizing our disregard for nature. The global phenomenon of gated homes, popular among affluent communities, has been critiqued in the literature. Setha Low identifies several characteristics. First, "gaters" pay a heavy price as they settle for reduced social capital through limited interactions with the outside world. Second, they live under a falsified fear of crime that does not exist on the scale portrayed by the media. Third, designed to keep out the Other (racialized minorities, low-paid workers, and immigrants), the gates compromise our humanity.14 We are lesser persons if we do not recognize the personhood of others: this is a counter-image of coexistence whereby we can live together despite sociocultural differences. These characteristics lead to a loss of sense of place and belonging, also depriving children of social interactions with neighborhood kids. Restrictive sociocultural space is not conducive to feeling at home in the world. Gates and walls are visible markers of exclusion. They diminish our humanity "here" and "there."Photography allows us to witness two scenes. In the first, we see a young woman learning the age-old art of pottery that would enable her and her peers to earn an income for their families, impoverished by protracted violence. Through my everyday work with these women, I learned that an older woman (Gulalai) had opened her house for female neighbors to make pottery together. As she expressed it, "I want to assist them financially so they can send their children to school. This is what I can do for my country." In the second scene, we see items of pottery piled on top of each other. If the pottery were to speak, they would "protest" to the effect that:We are meant to aesthetically decorate people's homes and make them appreciate our culture and history. This is the purpose of artwork. Instead, we remain hidden in the basement of a home. Piled on shelves does not do justice to what we represent: our heritage. We are unhappy for not being recognized for what we are: embodiment of an artistic tradition.Pottery's collective protest can best be understood in the context of foreign intervention that has "destroyed Afghanistan and wounded its people," to reiterate Afghan women's refrain. European and North American tourists no longer visit the country for fear of violence caused by their respective countries. Hence the pottery remains unsold except for a few pieces purchased by expatriates who left the country following the withdrawal of US troops.As a recent immigrant from Sudan, Fatima is keen to enhance Canada's image of multiculturalism. To this end, she has set up a shop in Burnaby, British Columbia, that is multicultural, filled with goods and packaged foods from different countries. Visible in the photograph is the "Welcome" sign in both English and in her native language. In a conversation in her shop in September 2021, Fatima told me,We welcome people in our country: in the shops, neighborhoods, the streets, and the marketplace. I wish to do the same here in a small way. But it is not working. The other day, a white man asked if he could speak to the owner. When I told him I am the owner, he left.Traditional female attire (khanju) is barely visible as Fatima has placed those items at the back of the store. She feels that she needs to "hide" items depicting her culture. The irony needs to be spelled out: Canada professes to be multicultural, yet the khanju is not placed in the front. If the khanju were to speak, it would bemoan the fact that it is displayed only at the back of the store, cramped like the pottery of Afghan women. Fatima's multicultural store is not doing well.Visible display of another culture in the public arena is not well received and neither are racialized immigrants compelled to integrate, albeit unequally, into mainstream society. Fatima is barely breaking even for the simple reason that the multicultural image of her store, located in a popular spot, does not draw in a lot of customers except for the few who are originally from Africa and the Middle East. Women in Afghanistan are not able to sell handmade pottery owing to protracted violence. Fatima is not able to sell certain products owing to systemic racism. Geopolitically, Afghanistan and Canada are interconnected, as poignantly illustrated through these photographs.We are struck by the beauty of the two landscapes in these photographs. They help us to see a connection that we would otherwise miss. The soldier with the gun captures two decades of military occupation of Afghanistan by US and NATO troops. Its effects are felt through loss of lives and livelihood, disruption of local worlds, and rupture of infrastructure. Suffering endured by the people of Afghanistan has yet to be acknowledged.Submerged under the photograph of pristine prairies is the violence of setter colonialism, the hallmark of which is structural violence encapsulated by the subordinate status of Indigenous people. Sherene H. Razack puts it this way, "As it evolves, a white settler society continues to be structured by a racial hierarchy. In the national mythologies of such societies, it is believed that white people came first, and it is they who principally developed the land." She continues, "A quintessential feature of white settler mythologies is, therefore, the disavowal of conquest, genocide, slavery, and the exploitation of the labour of peoples of color."15 Once again by means of photographs, we can see that "here" and "there" are interconnected. Violence undermines our lifeworld, leaving us devoid of epistemological and ontological tools through which we construct our place in the world. Photographs beacon us to work toward an ethics of coexistence.We see two photos: Afghan children are heading home from school and girls are seated on the floor attending a class. When I took these photos in 2009, an NGO teacher commented, "This is what the West has done for the people of Afghanistan. You know the Taliban did not care about education. They stopped girls from going to school. The international community is rebuilding Afghanistan." Although they acquire some education, it is important to note it is only within the span of half a day: from 8:00 a.m. to noon or 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. One wonders how much the children can learn within the time frame of four hours. Most children have a second shift at home: girls help with household work while boys go into the streets to sell small items such as cooked snacks and newspapers to earn "money for naan bread," as one mother, Rehima, stated it. School and home are linked disparately: the first one is for learning to the extent possible and the second one is allocated for minimal earning. This situation is an outcome of protracted violence in the country.If you were to talk to the children, they would share a collective story: namely, that their mothers' care work (sewing clothes, cleaning homes, raising chickens in their backyards, among other activities) has made it possible for them to attend school. They would relay the point that their lives have not been easy due to the violence in their country, yet they work hard to move forward. The students have hope, aspiring to learn like other children in the world. This is what they would share with their counterparts in Canada. At a deeper level, they affirm our humanity in relation to our common concern to learn and move forward regardless of where we live.In this essay, I have made a case for critical viewing and reflection of photos, showing that what is deemed as distant is here in our backyard. It is only then that we are moved to act as people inhabiting planet Earth rather than residing within politicized boundaries of "them" and "us." Through photography as a reflexive praxis, I argue that the histories of Afghanistan (the South) and Canada (the North) cannot be told separately. Their interconnectedness holds possibilities to think differently about mapping an alternative world where we can live together, ethically and humanely. This is what constitutes photographic ethics of coexistence, ultimately leading to peace.16