Island
Living 27: Holocaust Envy
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
A former acquaintance
of mine, Geoffrey Forrest, who lives in Köln,
Germany, once suckered me into a long argument about
the Holocaust -- not about the event itself, but
mostly about how many Jews seemed to have a proprietary
relationship to the word, an unwillingness to share
it with groups who’d undergone different but
terrible catastrophes and wanted to apply that term
to those other present and past historical events.
Geoffrey, like
so many glib and articulate semi-literates today,
didn’t have the faintest idea what the word
actually meant until I sent him to the dictionary
to look it up. He thought it meant something along
the lines of “a bad thing that happened to
a lot of people.” As Webster’s New
Collegiate Dictionary reminds us, however, it
comes from Greek roots combining whole and
burnt:
1: a sacrifice
consumed by fire 2: a thorough destruction, especially
by fire.
The central
image, clearly, is devastation by fire. It doesn’t
imply death by fire, though in fact many
Jews were burnt alive -- in the ovens, in barns,
in houses and synagogues, in open fields, in the
tunnels of the Warsaw Ghetto -- by the Nazis. But
the abiding icon of the concentration camps is the
crematorium, and the chimney thereof, and the burning
of Jewish bodies (which, according to Jewish theology,
is a desecration), and the rendering of Jews into
fat used for soap by the good Germans. So the term
holocaust has clear pertinence to that great
tragedy.
Before he informed
himself of its actual meaning, though, and even
thereafter, Geoffrey (who’s neither Black nor
gay) insisted that people of the melanin persuasion,
and people of the gay persuasion -- indeed, anyone
who wanted to -- should feel perfectly free to use
that word to describe any tragedy whatsoever. The
Jews didn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t
own it in an exclusionary way.
It had never
occurred to me before he and I had this discussion,
but obviously something I’d have to call Holocaust
envy had emerged. I have no problem applying the
term holocaust to the fire-bombing of Dresden
in World War II. Nor to the arson perpetrated by
a madman in a store on 125th Street a few years
back, in which several people died; that was a holocaust,
on a small scale. And watching Slobodan Milosevic’s
murderous wolf-packs wilding in Kosovo, home after
home put to the torch, often with living people
trapped inside, the word again seems appropriate.
But Geoffrey -- like the Rev. Al Sharpton, Stevie
Wonder, and not a few more -- wanted it out there
as an all-purpose locution signifiying big trouble
and big grief.
For the sake
of argument, I was willing to consider his position.
However, I proposed, this can’t be dealt with
simply on a one-shot or case-by-case basis. What
we need here is a policy. And the key issue
to be resolved seems to be whether the names and
metaphors we use for major historical events are
reserved for them and them alone, or are to be treated
as interchangeable, or are simply to be replaced
by generic descriptors.
As I understand
it, Black people aren’t unhappy per se that
the fate of Europe’s Jews is referred to as
“the Holocaust”; they’re upset because
Jews (and others) won’t refer to the African
American experience of forced emigration from their
native land and slavery as another “Holocaust.”
The fact that the image of destruction in an all-consuming
fire doesn’t fit that dreadful historical situation,
even metaphorically, apparently has no bearing on
this inexplicable craving for Holocaust status.
(Curiously, no Black advocate of calling that a
Holocaust has proposed the logical corollary --
that the Jews’ enslavement by the Egyptians
would then also qualify for Holocaust status.)
Similarly, gay
people want the term “holocaust” applied
not only to the parallel Nazi slaughter of homosexuals
and lesbians but also to the AIDS crisis, even though
once again no consuming fire is involved and we
have two perfectly good, resonant words for that
terrible disease and its social consequences: plague
and pox.
So how are we
to handle this controversy over nomenclature? Here
are what seem to me to be the policy options.
-
Possibility #1:
Tragedy-description sharing.
In this scenario, Jews relinquish any exclusionary
claim on “holocaust” and even “genocide”
(though they hardly behave possessively in
regard to the latter). Blacks can then state
without contradiction that they were subjected
to a holocaust and genocide. So can Native
Americans. But so can forcibly imported Chinese
coolies, Japanese-Americans interned during
World War II, and the Irish who suffered through
the Potato Famine. By the same token, the
Jews could then claim that in Hitler’s
Germany they were “lynched” on a
scale that dwarfs any lynching in Black history,
and were subjected to a “racism”
that makes the treatment of African-Americans
seem a piece of cake by comparison.
Problem to resolve:
-
Possibility #2:
Tragedy-description exchange.
In this scenario, any group desiring to acquire
the nomenclature for suffering of any other
group would have to surrender its present
terminology. So, for example, Blacks who demand
the right to use “holocaust” and
“genocide” would have to relinquish
any claim on “slavery” and “the
Middle Passage.”
Problem(s) to resolve:
-
Does this exchange
have to be mutually consensual? If not,
how does the group whose nomenclature
is preempted find its replacement? Does
the surrendered nomenclature of the initiating
group transfer automatically to the group
whose terminology they prefer for themselves
-- so that the Jews would have to start
using “slavery” and “the
Middle Passage” in reference to World
War II? Or does the cast-off nomenclature
go into a common pot? If so, how is it
apportioned? If the Jews could no longer
refer to their experience as “the
Holocaust,” because someone else
had the right to that term, might they
instead find themselves obliged to call
it “the Crucifixion” or “the
death march on Bataan”?
-
Also: how often
would any group be allowed to exchange
nomenclatures? Suppose, ten years from
now, Blacks decide that they prefer “Irish
Potato Famine” or “ethnic cleansing
in the Balkans” to “Holocaust.”
Can they go nomenclature-shopping?
-
Should all nomenclature
of tragedy perhaps go into a common pot
and be rotated arbitrarily (on
a yearly or biennial basis, say), among
all victims of terrible misfortune and
their descendants? If so, how -- by random
lottery? What about matters of proportion
and scale, in that case? That is, how
do we avoid the crisis that would surely
result if a young girl who had to shoot
her pony when it broke its leg were required
to refer to that event (even if only for
twelve months) as “the Inquisition,”
while the Jews were mandated to describe
the effects on them of Nazism as “the
day my daddy ran over my puppy with the
station wagon”?
-
Possibility #3:
Neutralizing and de-poeticizing the nomenclature
of tragedy (the Forrest technique).
With this system, which Geoffrey proposed,
the language of tragedy is rendered unspecific,
stripped of imagery, devoid of metaphor. Thus:
-
“The Holocaust”
= “the worst thing that ever happened
to the Jews.”
-
“The Middle
Passage” = “that awful ocean
voyage people from Africa had to take
when lots of them got seasick.”
-
“The Crucifixion”
= “the worst thing that ever happened
to the Son of God.”
-
“The desaparacidos
of Guatemala” = “the Guatemalans
with whom the military played hide-and-seek
until their friends couldn’t find
them anywhere and got very sad.”
-
“The Triangle
Shirtwaist Fire” = “the time
a lot of seamstresses couldn’t get
to the stairs fast enough when it got
hot.”
-
“The Gulag
Archipelago” = “cold places
where Stalin built homes for people when
they weren’t his friends anymore.”
-
“The day my
daddy ran over my puppy with the station
wagon” = “the day my puppy got
lots flatter than he was supposed to be.”
I’m not
sure that any of those will solve the dilemma; seems
to me they all cause more problems than they eliminate.
And, given the fact that the only real conflict
over this subject appears to be the yearning on
the part of Blacks, gays, and other groups to partake
of the resonance of the term “Holocaust,”
perhaps the best solution would be for Blacks, gays,
and other groups with that inclination to take a
look at the dictionary definition of holocaust,
recognize its inappropriateness to their historical
experience, and find their own resonant single-word
summation of their victimhood, if they feel they
need one. That is why God, in Her infinite wisdom,
gave us the thesaurus.
Blacks in the
U.S. were interrogated under duress frequently,
and forced to convert to Christianity -- surely
more so than were either burned alive or cremated
post-mortem. Yet the term “Inquisition”
doesn’t really apply to their history. Similarly,
Jews were enslaved by the millions in German factories
and Nazi forced-labor camps, and thousands of them
met death by hanging; but neither “slavery”
nor “lynching” effectively sum up that
ghastliness.
As a (genetically)
half-Jew myself, and one who grew up very Black-identified,
I don’t feel that the concept of the Holocaust
in any way diminishes the horrors of slavery, racism
based on skin color, the looting of Africa, and
the Middle Passage. They are surely distinct enough,
different enough crimes against humanity that no
single word with any meaningful specificity could
apply to both historical situations.
So, in the last
analysis, I’m for letting the word “Holocaust”
stand as a summation of Nazism’s effect on
its victims. If others want a similarly evocative
term of their own, it’s up to them to find
it. Or to let the proven facts of the matter speak
for themselves, eloquently, as they usually do.
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©
Copyright 1999 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World
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