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  • Writing the Foreign in Canadian Literature and Humanitarian Narratives1Introduction
  • Smaro Kamboureli (bio)

I Training for the Responsibility to Respond to the Foreign

[T]here is no response to war. War is a cruel caricature of what in us can respond. You cannot be answerable to war.

Yet one cannot remain silent. Out of the imperative or compulsion to speak, then, two questions: What are some already existing responses? And, how respond in the face of the impossibility of response?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Terror: A Speech after 9/11’

This epigraph from Spivak reflects this special issue’s overall focus and encapsulates one of the primary questions examined by the contributors: [End Page 87] how to respond to the violence suffered by others without inflicting further violence on them. ‘Writing the Foreign in Canadian Literature and Humanitarian Narratives’ thus contributes to the discussion about bearing witness and the politics of empathy. Empathy as a word may be only a little over 100 years old,2 but as a concept it constitutes a fundamental aspect of human nature. David Hume and Adam Smith, two of the first philosophers to talk about it, use the word ‘sympathy’ to refer to the same condition,3 and both stress that it is located in the imagination. ‘Sympathy,’ Hume writes, ‘is nothing but the conversion of an idea into an impression by the force of imagination’ (474). And here is what Smith says: ‘Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers . . . It is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations . . . It is the impressions of our senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy’ (11–12). With the imagination being its primary organ, empathy registers a movement outward, beyond the self, albeit one experienced within a position of at least relative safety, if not privilege, that runs the risk of sabotaging its best intentions. As Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown state, ‘[t]he recounting of stories of suffering is not only beneficial for the moral and emotional education of the listener, but, it is argued, for the victim and teller also’ (21). Kim Echlin also makes the same point by drawing attention to the telling act that links the self and the other: ‘Our stories help us to explore our connectedness with each other, to witness each other,’ she writes, for they ‘document what humans do to each other when they see one another as less than human, as “other,” as “foreign”’ (130). Nevertheless, such stories can also be ‘vulnerable to appropriation and misrepresentation’ (Wilson and Brown 25) and thus may cause further pain to the very subjects whose suffering they record. This is one of the concerns with which Suzanne Bailey engages in her essay on Margaret Laurence’s The Prophet’s Camel Bell in this volume. Seeing the foreign ‘not as a static object or concept but as an embodied field,’ Bailey examines Laurence’s moral dilemma as to how to respond to the plight of the child prostitute, Asha, she encounters while in Somalia; Laurence has ‘the strong suspicion’ that she ‘might easily make Asha’s life worse by interfering. I could not take her away from the situation entirely, and what else would do any good?’ (qtd. in Bailey 180). Learning to ‘navigate[] a [End Page 88] particular complex sequence of potential outcomes to a decision,’ as Laurence attempts to do, ‘to intervene or not intervene’ (181), is a challenge that is not easily overcome. This special issue addresses the affective and material politics, as well as ambivalent effects, of compassionate response to the suffering of those reduced to bare life.4

In the epigraph to this introduction, Spivak refers specifically to the ‘war on terror’ (372), but her comment applies as well to other manifestations of violence and their lingering aftermath. Regardless of how it is mediated, witnessing violence inflicted on others, especially when there seems to be no end to its proliferation, may produce atrocity-jaded subjects who immure themselves against the affect the spectacle, never mind the reality...

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