Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

Seven Levels of Despair (November 2001)

IWOULD LIKE — simply as a storyteller — to add a few short remarks to the current debate.

Being a unique Super-Power undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically one has to imagine oneself in the enemy's place. Then it is possible to foresee, to make feints, to take by surprise, to outflank, etc. Misinterpreting an enemy can lead, in the long run, to defeat — one's own. This is how sometimes empires fall.

A crucial question today is: what makes a world terrorist and, in extremity, what makes a suicide martyr? (I speak here of the anonymous volunteers: Terrorist Leaders are another story.) What makes a terrorist is, first, a form of despair. Or, to put it more accurately, it is a way of transcending and, by the gift of one's own life, making sense of a form of despair.

This is why the term suicide is somewhat inappropriate, for the transcendence gives to the martyr a sense of triumph. A triumph over those he is supposed to hate? I doubt it. The triumph is over the passivity, the bitterness, the sense of absurdity which emanate from a certain depth of despair.

It is hard for the First World to imagine such despair. Not so much because of its relative wealth (wealth produces its own despairs), but because the First World is being continually distracted and its attention diverted. The despair to which I refer comes to those suffering conditions which oblige them to be single-minded. Decades lived in a refugee camp, for example.

This despair consists of what? The sense that your life and the lives of those close to you count for nothing. And this is felt on several different levels so that it becomes total. That is to say, as in totalitarianism, without appeal.

To search each morning

to find the scraps

with which to survive another day.

The knowledge on waking

that in this legal wilderness

no rights exist.

The experience over the years

of nothing getting

better only worse.

The humiliation of being able

to change almost nothing,

and of seizing upon the almost

which then leads to another impasse.

The listening to a thousand promises

which pass inexorably

beside you and yours.

The example of those who resist

being bombarded to dust.

The weight of your own killed

a weight which closes

innocence for ever

because they are so many.

These are seven levels of despair — one for each day of the week — which lead, for some of the more courageous, to the revelation that to offer one's own life in contesting the forces which have pushed the world to where it is, is the only way of invoking an all, which is larger than that of the despair.

Any strategy planned by political leaders to whom such despair is unimaginable will fail, and will recruit more and more enemies.