Portraits of Grief: Helping the traumatised through story telling

Men die but dreams survive. Each of us will die with a dream, a longing for tomorrow. The same happened to the young who died in Charsadda. Every death leaves some dreams behind. But the sudden, unexpected departure of any youth leaves a lot of unfulfilled desires. In places like Charsadda it is not only the dream of a person, but that of a family, a village, a small town, a group of humans that die an untimely death. It is more the death, than the way it happened, that matters. The manner of death is a transitory story. It is important, no doubt! But life has to go beyond it, no matter what. Media is the conveyer of information about such heartbreaking happenings. It is but also the image factory that represents a people, happening, the aftermath, and the followups. The first function, naturally, is to inform a larger public about what happened. But then begins the phase of understanding the cultural context of the tragedy. Spot coverage and answering the immediate questions is important and there is no journalism without the spot coverage. But there are limits to continue with the same basics. Professionally and ethically there is need to build the capacity to switch from the news narrative to the human context. Following up on the same news spiral brings audience and media fatigue, which kills the story too early. It never helps understand the human problem a tragedy creates and leaves behind. It just keeps it a gory memory. The inability to follow tragedies from a human perspective is one great weakness Pakistani media has to learn to overcome.
How to do justice to this human function of the media? This is possible through opening the canvas of media representation beyond the spot coverage. People live and die in communities. They have lives that stretch far beyond the happening that brings their lives to an end. They live in the real human habitat, the human environment. Once the immediate fact finding and representation is over, the media has to follow up into the real life circles of the victims. Journalism has a responsibility to represent the community the victims belonged to. And this effort should not be focussed on finding clues about the happening. Not at all! The very reason for this is that communities under trauma need to be represented in the media. This is an ethical burden media should be readily able to shoulder, whenever the need arises. This need visits us too very often nowadays in KP and FATA, but the media, unfortunately, fails to respond each time. When tragedies strike a human denomination, journalistic responsibility goes beyond the narration of happenings. It stretches into the realms of integrating the community, keeping the collective psyche together, healing the wounds of the bereaved, and giving the sense of togetherness at moments of collective alienation.
How is it possible? Story telling, simple story telling! Don't let numbers make humans disappear. Always keep the human alive. In the present case, the number 21 or 22 has simply impersonalised the young souls. Weren't they young individuals with living lives, families, loved ones, loves, and places to go and likes to like? They surely were. But why to quantify them beyond recognition? I think none ever gave any serious thought to the fact that we have eliminated the very human aspect of the tragedy through a routine ritual, the counting game.
Don't universalise! Making larger than life characters out of human beings is no tribute. It doesn't help. Keep them human that ordinary mortals, their community and many other similar human beings, could identify themselves with. The misplaced idea of heroism being something abnormal, larger than life, is primitive. Death already reveals a lot about a human being. There is nothing more than the loss of a human life for a people who love the person. They need support, identity, and fellow feelings to overcome the grief. They need to see how their loved one is being portrayed. And what could be the best portrayal than the way the person lived? Just do that, if you want to help and put your bit into helping a people out of trauma. The person has family: a mother. Did they speak with their mother? What were the dreams they used to discuss? And please, don't bank upon misery. Don't use the wailing of a mother to develop a story. Get information from sources that are in a position to talk normally. Everything could wait, literally everything! A friend might be a good source to talk. A village elder might tell you about the young man who used to have a chat with him whenever he was home on the weekends. Don't go for extremes. Try to keep it normal. Keep in mind that the aim of such portraits is to help a people, not to make them a spectre of helplessness.
It is always about life, about the next day after the tragedy, about the stream of life. The human function after the tragedies is giving the survivors and relatives of the victims a closure that help them live through hard times. Another aspect is to make a larger audience understand how tragedy affects lives in general. This helps in developing a lager community, a partnership in grief. The sharing of grief is always soothing and it helps a lot. A people who know that others are also feeling their pain could overcome the trauma easily. They can easily defeat alienation, individual and collective. It is also vital to understand the difference between misery and grief. Journalists too very often think that a wailing female (mother, sister, victim) projects a tragedy best. This is untrue, and extremely unethical too! Being miserable doesn't create a bond. It simply attracts the audience for a moment and then shy them away. Nobody wants to see miseries all the time. People have their own baggages to carry too. It causes depressions, traumatises the audience. This doesn't mean that the audience is not interested. They are, more than anything else. But one has to give them something to relate to. One has to give a context to which they could relate. They are ready to understand life beyond the immediate happening. To know the life cycle of the victims, the normal selves before the last breath. Why do they take such interest in it, or why should they? Because they could identify with the stream of life. If none could identify with a happening, the marathon transmissions, and all the air and space dedicated to the coverage of a tragedy is in vain. Catching traumatised people and asking nasty questions to make them cry is not journalism at all. It is the rating race. Grief doesn't necessarily mean the weaker side of a human being. It is the total reaction of a person or a community to the loss of a person (or persons) who are important in the life cycle of the people. Portraits of grief are showing this place of a person in the community. And the portraits are nothing but a holistic image of the life of a community with the understanding that a community is the basic unit of human interaction. A journalist representing this unit properly is doing his/her job properly. If not, there is a lot to rethink!