Imagining Sorrow 3 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

In West Africa, Haiti seems as far away as the moon. Present, distant, it rises every evening to hang in a balance with the glowing Harmattan sun. A few hours later it shows a bright white face against the night. Then the clouds take it back again.

A shyster prophet called one of Accra’s most popular radio shows a couple of days after the Haiti disaster, proclaiming that Ghana was next-in-line for an End Times earthquake.

Across the capital city and in coastal towns, people took to the streets with their children and possessions. Finally, at daybreak, a government official commandeered the airwaves, debunked the prediction and, in good form, blamed the fiasco on the opposition party.

I and the twenty-three children who live in this house on Accra’s outskirts—a home for children rescued from labor trafficking in the Lake Volta fishing industry—slept through the entire event.

This is strange, considering that with Ghana’s recent run at the Africa Cup of Nations, all of Accra roils with football fans’ cries: instinctive, eerie clouds to which all ears are tuned.

I imagine that night, Accra’s streets gave up similarly eerie singing, wailing, and casting out of demons—the kinds of prayers with which Haitian survivors cried out as aftershocks rocked their island.

It is at once comforting and disillusioning for me to think of the U.N. compound going up in Port-au-Prince, like a barricaded oracle around which the hungry riot and non-governmental organizations fawn.

Facebook updates from friends and colleagues in the international development sector make for a sober ticker: Haiti work is grueling, the loss is inhumane, and they are lonely.

But even far away, my eyes avert. I don’t want to see what they see.

An anonymous reader of David Griffith’s recent Good Letters post about Haiti and anomie asked: where is the religious imagination in all of this?

I’ve been asking that question, too, in a kind of achy, compounded prayer, one that holds the rubble of Port-au-Prince as much as it holds my first day on Lake Volta, when our boat floated up alongside canoes so half-sunk that small children sat in the floorboards, glassy-eyed, dredging up bilge water with faded plastic cups.

I didn’t want to see those children. Rocking on the water alongside them, their faces elicited from me only my own crude impulse to save, or a sharp, odd shame that God had not yet given me my own child. I saw enough to nearly despair, and then I looked away.

At the time, I was ashamed that I could not bear more. But now I think I took in enough knowledge for my heart to acknowledge their pain and keep beating, not stop, grapple with the self that is always triggered first in any manifestation—selfish or selfless—of empathy or sorrow.

I think part of the work of the religious imagination is not only sowing into us a capacity to feel deeply, in our very bodies, but also teaching us to desire healing for ourselves and others—and teaching us to honor that desire by acting in love before we make an idol of what we behold.

With Haiti so far away, and my heart already so full, it is excruciating for me to turn my mind toward the reality of that sorrow. May God give me the eyes to see so that I may act in full, confident love.