NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A GHOST, PART TWO

by Salma Shamel

The doctor advised my parents to regularly jerk off my brother to reduce his screaming fits. My mother, who turned religious after his birth, strongly resisted. The barrier, the split, al-faraj, that which exists in between and separates the legs, is sacred. Inna le feroujehem la hafezoun, the Quran prohibited, my mother cited. “But faraj is not only the sacred split,” my father was frustrated, “it also means solace, relief, succor, and ease. Solace and ease for god’s sake.” He slammed the door of our apartment. She slammed the door to her bedroom. In the corridor between divine devotion and primal relief, I had no door to slam and no belief to declare as they argued and departed.

This was in 2001 when the Egyptian government had recently installed the fatwa hotline, one of hundreds of 1-900 numbers. Callers phone those who have been called by God and when they leave a recorded question, they receive a code, and the next day, when they leave the code, they receive a recorded answer. Bureaucracy promised my mother morality and she liked the idea of receiving religious advice unmediated by human faces. Can one touch those who cannot consent? Where do the disabled get their ethics from? Four out of five questions were about sex and breastfeeding, studies stated. After September 11th, questions turned political. I regularly turned to another hotline, the horoscope line, to ask about the fate of a Sagittarius and Libra relationship. These 1-900 numbers produced appalling phone bills and led to a public outcry. The horoscope line was suspended, but the fatwa line remained.

My mother has a passive-aggressive relationship to language that only Wittgenstein can explain when he says that statements are not necessarily what they appear to be. She would say, “Isn’t the weather glorious today,” and when no one responded, she would get angry, insisting that this was a question when everyone knew it was a statement. “You will fail your exams” is not a prophecy, but a command. My mother was not proficient in verbal language because she was fluent in scream language.

She is a scream translator, a fluent interpreter of preverbal helplessness. This is the case with most mothers, though usual- ly only briefly. Most mothers are scream translators, analysts of shrieks, wants, and pains from the imprints left by life on life-becoming bodies. “Ah, he must be hungry”; “Oh, it’s time to change your diaper.” Scream-solving is about prediction and uncertainty: Is it want x, or is it pain y? This is why screaming is a universal language. Not only because it’s the expression of emotions and feelings but also because it’s premised on a tension between the known and the unknown. One doesn’t run to a man screaming at the subway entrance to say, “Hey, I feel for you.” Rather, one runs to ask, “What’s going on? Are you okay? Is it pain x or suffering y?” One stops running to help a man who is screaming daily at the subway entrance. With an unchanging source of suffering, a buffer zone, a neutralized distance, is asserted between ourselves and our emotive capacity.

What are you going to do? our neighbors asked, which was actually a command; my parents had to do something about the screaming. First, we went to bed with earplugs and soon we stopped talking to each other. Interpretations of my brother’s screams hovered between the mind and the body. Doctors could not decide whether to reduce his screaming fits with anesthetics aimed at numbing the mind or to alleviate his body by releasing its piled-up tension. One prescribed sedation, another recommended masturbation, and all was equally rejected by my mother, whose practice of motherhood appeared sacrificial but was in fact a laissez-faire attitude based on the fantasy that my brother, like nature, might self-regulate. My father, on the other hand, was into most forms of numbing and deadening of the senses. This is how my parents found themselves in one of humanity’s earliest dualities. One argued for the sacredness of the body and the other for its profane functionality. One said don’t dare touch it and the other said who fucking cares?

The sacred has its authority in withdrawing: from the Latin sacrare comes “to consecrate,” to remove from the sphere of human law and commerce, to set aside from the continuum of circulation. Perhaps my mother did not know that, in Roman law, homo sacer was a contradictory figure designated for those who, in response to some wrongdoing, were cast outside the city, abject, degraded, and negated. They cannot be sacrificed, yet they may be killed with impunity. She didn’t know that the sacred was both a curse and a relief.

The lack of sleep crept in between the moral, sexual, and medical worlds, changing the ways they were kept separate. Masturbation moved from being a sexual act to a medical one, and soon, my mother slowly approved. Harmony no sooner arose before it dissolved into disagreement, and in a moment, my parents were arguing about who was more appropriate to consecrate the act. My father claimed gendered similarity, that he and my brother had a penis in common and, therefore, he was more familiar with the male body. My mother disagreed, she was closer to my brother as a whole via the act of maternity, which does not differentiate gender. Do you think about bricks, mortar, and timber when you think about a house? Between part and whole, I anyway had no position in this masturbation triangle. I neither had a penis nor did I give birth to a being who possessed one.

Yet, I had a position in a different tripartite family structure. The first position, which my parents fought over, was the position of the agent: Who will relieve the suffering? Who will operate on the body? The second position, occupied by my brother, was that of matter: the docile body, a fertile ground for contestation. The third position was that of the spectator: the observer, myself, who perceives the accomplished result. As Susan Buck-Morss argues in her 1992 essay “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” there were times when such separations did not exist, but our experience of suffering radically changed with this tripartite division. In fact, this division converged with another separation between cognitive and bodily experience. What would the world look like if we had a thinking body and a feeling mind? A world of agential docility, docile agency, and a spectator who keeps the tension between both.

In New York City, looking at the Dean Street soccer field, I sat on a bench next to a friend who studied programming and read a lot of Jewish theology. We compared our religious families like the rich compared their standalone villas. The villain who spilled his semen in the Bible, he told me, unlike in Islam, was a complicated figure. After Onan’s oldest brother Er died, Onan’s father, Judah, ordered him to procreate with his brother’s widow, Tamar, to give her offspring. This was a custom among the ancient Hebrews called levirate marriage, by which a man may be forced to marry his brother’s widow. This type of marriage had economic consequences. Anyone born to Tamar would be deemed the heir of the deceased Er and could claim the firstborn’s double share of inheritance. However, if Er had no sons or only had daughters, Onan would have inherited everything as the oldest surviving son. The story goes that when Onan had sex with Tamar he withdrew as he was ejaculating and “spilled his seed on the ground.” Apparently, he spilled his seed because he did not want offspring that would not be his. The Bible says that this act of spilling seed was an evil act and so God slew him. Interpretations of the spill were split, my friend said, as I watched one of the soccer players spit on the plastic, green turf. Some claimed that spilling was a form of wasting because semen is the source of life and, thus, sacred. Others said this had nothing to do with semen or life, that this was, in fact, about his refusal to include Tamar in inheritance. Denied the right to be the mother of the inheritor, Tamar would then be excluded from the family. While my friend talked, I daydreamed of quitting my job and becoming an award-winning theologian who wrote a bestselling book entitled The Inseparability of Reproduction and Inheritance.

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If my family had a compass, anesthesia would be its rose. Hold the compass horizontally close to your body and turn it until the magnetic needle aligns the north towards feeling, the south towards hills of unfeeling. My mother often tells me that, if she hadn’t been wrongly anesthetized, then our family would have lived a different life. If she had not been absent during my brother’s delivery, she would have been more present as a mother. My mother passed out 39 years ago, when her gynecologist, tipsy at a Christmas gathering, mistakenly directed the nurse over the phone to give her a general anesthetic instead of a local one. For around four decades she cared for my brother, who did not walk, talk, or recognize her, or anyone. Perhaps this is why she wanted the scream to unfold indefinitely without repression or intervention to return and pierce through the original act of numbing. But what is the value of an individual scream in a world where screaming has, for decades, been repressed?

The value of a scream has changed as our world has gone through a sharp shift in the experience of suffering. In a book about anesthesia, I highlight a passage stating that doctors were “uniformly horrified” by the gruesome body count of the industrial revolution. In hospital reports, “machinery” was a category of disease. Injuries of factory workers made surgical wards look like field hospitals. There appeared the surgeon, the composer who put together the fragmented limbs of industrialism. And there was anesthesia, which not only relieved the patient but also relieved the surgeon from experiencing the suffering of the patient. There was no need to desensitize oneself against the experience of seeing another suffering; a surgeon can confront an insensate mass to be cut and manipulated without emotion.

Buck - Morss’s 1992 essay surveys the early history of surgical anesthesia:

In 1639, the British naval surgeon John Woodall advised prayer before the “lamentable” surgery of amputation:

“For it is no small presumption to Dismember the Image of God.” In 1806, the era of Charles Bell, the surgeon’s attitude evoked Enlightenment themes of Stoicism, the glorification of reason, and the sanctity of individual life. But with the introduction of general anaesthesia, the American Journal of Medical Sciences could report in 1852 that it was “very gratifying to the operator and to the spectators that the patient lies a tranquil, passive subject, instead of struggling and perhaps uttering piteous cries and moans, while the knife is at work.”

At this point, the perception of suffering was transformed, and it happened both within and beyond the surgical room: to unfeel self-suffering, to unfeel another’s suffering.

Last November, I spent some nights smoking cigarettes outside the GeorgesPompidou hospital in Paris. I had never before experienced knocks at doors as the knocks of French nurses at the doors of end-stage cancer patients. They storm into the room so brave and confident, as if their optimism might reverse the effect of the opioid they administer. “Regarde tout cet amour,” they tell my friend while looking at his friends, who flew in from three continents to make him mint tea, peel a clementine, help him get dressed to smoke his last cigarettes. “You see, this thing, it’s important to learn its name: bolus,” my friend told me the first day I arrived, grabbing his analgesia control with the square blue button. Morphine, I read in the middle of the night in a sleeping bag next to my friend, did not have practical implications for surgery until mid-century. In fact, it was a “leading children’s drug” throughout the 19th century. Mothers working in factories drugged their children as a form of day care. I wanted to tell the working mothers of the 19th century that my mother, having been wrongly drugged during childbirth, ended up in eternal day care. That I can hear the screams of their children in the screams of my brother. Morphine, I read in the middle of night, was originally named Morphium after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. Morpheus was able to shape, form, and morph the minds of dreamers, sending them human shapes and forms of every kind.

We come into life in different forms but leave in similar ones. I saw my friend morph into my brother as they started to resemble one another. Their stomachs swelled, their muscles disappeared, and care continued. The form was the same, but I felt a lot more pain toward my friend than I had ever felt toward my brother. What does language do to make us relate more to the suffering of a friend than the suffering of a brother?

“I need your help to find her a psychoanalyst,” a friend in Egypt texted me while I waited at the Rue Leblanc bus station. He said that his wife woke up in the middle of the night to pee but never returned to bed. She snapped at her kids when doors were slammed and gasped when they called her name. Her brother was sentenced to ten years in prison for a social media post he had not written. He said she was suffering but unfeeling, that someone had to convince her of her own suffering.

Can you relieve someone from unfelt suffering? [No.]

To suffer, for Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, is to be “corporeal, sensuous […], conditioned and limited […] like animals and plants.” In a way, to suffer is a condition of inescapability, a form of objective truth that weighs heavily upon us. Marx distinguished man from other living things such as animals and plants, in that man “feels that he suffers,” and because he feels that he suffers, he is a passionate being. Suffering is an essential passage towards passion, a central category for any revolution. Animals and plants, on the other hand, are in a condition of oneness with their suffering. They may indeed defend themselves, but they do not feel that they suffer.

By historically relativizing the human, Marx argues that, despite workers’ daily experience of suffering and pain (exhaustion, boredom, depression, and anxiety), they do not feel suffering for what it is. The capacity to feel one’s own suffering is dulled by capital’s obsessive, objective tendencies. Strangely enough, one of the gravest mistranslations of Marx is in this realm of feeling. In the English version of Capital, translated by Ben Fowkes and published by Penguin Books, Selbstgefühl der Arbeiter is translated as the “class-consciousness” of the worker. But Selbstgefühl is not Klassenbewusstsein, as Robert Scott has brilliantly argued in his 2020 essay “Suffering and the Feeling of Suffering in Marx’s Capital”: it neither refers to class nor to consciousness. Selbstgefühl is Selbst [self] and Gefühl [feeling]; it is the “self-feeling” of the workers. Not the worker who is “conscious” of her place, but the one who radically feels her own self-suffering. The worker who has not been numbed, dulled, and anesthetized. The one who, in consciousness, feels and, in feeling, is conscious of herself. The much harder work is not exposing capitalist relations but making them felt.

There is nothing redemptive or emancipatory in suffering. Suffering, in and of itself, will not produce anything. To lend a voice to suffering is not to speak on behalf of the other, not to give bandwidth to those marginalized, or create platforms for those unheard. To give voice to suffering is to create the psychological and material conditions whereby suffering itself can speak, can be felt by others. It is to make those numbed to their self-suffering feel their self-suffering.

Nobuo Sekine fabricating Phase of Nothingness, 1969 / 1972, in preparation for the 35th Venice Biennale, Italy, June 1970.