In the face of the pain of others

I discovered Christian Boltanski in a museum in Paris. As the son of a Jew, he was always haunted by terror and obstinacy to rescue from oblivion the anonymous people erased by barbarism. The sight of immense facilities where he displays kilos of clothing from Holocaust victims and shoes piled up without owners overwhelmed me more than the visit to the gas chambers itself. A few years after this first contact with the artist, I was lucky enough to see a retrospective, also in the French capital. I was surprised to find an installation whose title managed to evoke, so far from home, the spirit of the kiosks of my childhood: Archives de l'année 1987 du journal 'El Caso'. The work brought together photos of victims of kidnappings, rapes and murders taken from the missing news newspaper. Hung on the wall and illuminated from above, these images conveyed something macabre and existential at the same time, a kind of scream from the autopsy table. This work disappointed my still post-adolescent and prejudiced self. Boltanski, a prestigious artist, fell into sensationalism and the popular taste for chronicling events.

A few days ago I was discussing with a friend the list of the most listened to podcasts of last year and I told her that, like a large number of listeners, I had also recently become fond of those of true crime. For some time now, podcasts and series of this genre have achieved notable popularity to which I have contributed in some way. At my confession, my friend raised her eyebrow and said: “But how can you listen to such morbid things?” I felt guilt and shame, and I couldn't answer her because she had no answer. On the way home I remembered that Boltanski installation, how despite my youthful arrogance those faces, which made up a kind of mortuary border caused by violence and its biases, managed to leave a mark on my memory.

The attraction generated by 'true crime' can serve to denounce the roots of the violent crimes it narrates and, instead of isolating the damage, explore its complex impacts on the community and over time.

I pulled the thread and discovered in a magazine article Pikara, signed by Berta Comas Casas, we are precisely the women who are behind this rebirth of one of the genres with the worst reputation. 80% of the audience for this type of podcast is female, although in most cases we are also the victims of the violence reported in them. And it must be recognized that this violence is generally narrated from sexist stereotypes, where the female body and its torture are exhibited as a spectacle, without any reflection on the misogyny that causes it, where it is even glamorizes the criminal or, as a lesser evil, he is treated as a monster alien to social ethics.

Nerea Barjola has explained better than anyone how narratives of sexual violence have been used to teach women, and how they have been an instrument to maintain the status quo of a sexist political regime. I was the same age as the Alcàsser girls when they disappeared, I had also hitchhiked. I listened glued to the TV to the series of torments to which they were subjected, grateful to be alive, fearing not to be in the future, thinking that for a while I would not wear that denim miniskirt that I had fought so hard for my mother to buy for me. Reading Barjola's book, Sexist microphysics of power, in which she re-signifies the story of Alcàsser's crime with a feminist perspective, it was for me a healing book, a tool capable of giving vent to those fears of an entire generation that, in some way, still live in the terror of the infamous landscape of The Roman.

In that same oppressive framework of the nineties, The pain of others, a kind of true crime literary that moved me like few other books. Its author, Miguel Ángel Hernández, evokes in the title the famous essay by Susan Sontag. And it is no coincidence, because although Sontag does not specifically address the genre, her analysis of our relationship with horror images is revealing. I am aware that my consumption of podcasts from true crime It contributes to the perpetuation of those narratives of terror that Barjola denounces and directly clashes with my feminist spirit. But Sontag, in addition to carrying out a genealogy of the human attraction to the spooky, from Christian descriptions of hell to the contemporary parade of dismembered bodies, offers clues to how this attraction can be mobilizing. “We must allow the atrocious images to haunt us,” he goes so far as to say. Sontag knows there is something incomplete about it. In the end these images are nothing more than parts of reality, which never encompass it. But at the very least they expand our notion of how much suffering there is in the world.

Surely there is some justification on my part in establishing these relationships, a desire to alleviate that guilt that we women know so much about. I know well that narratives not only recreate, they also create. But I think that even from contradiction we can appropriate them, at least partially. This will already timidly appears in some creative women. It is clear that sensationalism is part of the essence of the genre, but at this point I have assumed that there is no reality without taint. The attraction generated by true crime It can serve to denounce the roots of the violent crimes it narrates and, instead of isolating the damage, explore its complex impacts on the community and over time. Sontag believes that compassion is too unstable an emotion, capable of withering quickly. Faced with this, perhaps we can claim the sisterhood that contemplation of the pain of others can awaken, and turn it, at the very least, into reflection.

Mar García Puig She is a writer, philologist and editor. Her latest book is 'The History of Vertebrates' (Random House).

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