I Saw the News That Day

I Read the News That Day

“I read the news today, oh boy.”

That line has followed me around for years, because sometimes the news is not news at all. Sometimes it is a picture burned into a child’s mind before the child has any language for politics, protest, war, religion, oppression or despair.

When I was young, I remember seeing images on television of people pouring petrol over themselves and setting themselves on fire.

Black and white.

No colour.

No special effects.

No warning.

Just a human being sitting there while the adults of the world explained nothing properly.

The image I remember may have been one image, or several images folded together by memory. The most famous was Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in Saigon in 1963 to protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. His act was photographed by Malcolm Browne, and that photograph went around the world.

There was also Jan Palach, a young Czech student who set himself on fire in Prague in 1969, protesting against the Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring had been crushed.

There were others too. People so desperate to be seen, so certain ordinary language had failed, that they turned their own body into the message.

That is the part I still cannot get past.

A child does not see “political protest.”

A child sees a person on fire.

A child sees stillness where there should be screaming.

A child sees adults watching, cameras watching, the world watching, and somehow the world still continuing afterwards.

That is psychologically enormous.

Children do not have the adult machinery to file these things away as “history.” They do not understand Buddhism, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, communism, imperialism, occupation, religious persecution or state violence. They understand bodies. They understand danger. They understand fire. They understand that if someone does that to themselves, something in the world must be terribly, terribly wrong.

Even in black and white, perhaps especially in black and white, it becomes unbearable.

Black and white makes it feel like a document from another planet. Not quite real, yet more real than ordinary life. It strips the image down to shape, flame, smoke, silence, witness. A child’s brain does not say: this is a famous news photograph. It says: remember this, because this is what the world can do.

And so you carry it.

You carry it through school, through adulthood, through every news bulletin, through every protest, through every war, through every politician using calm words to describe human catastrophe.

You carry it because nobody told you where to put it.

And perhaps that is what trauma is sometimes.

Not the event itself.

The image with nowhere to go.

The news that went in too young.

The adult world entering the living room through a black and white television and sitting down beside you without permission.

I read the news today, oh boy.

And part of me is still that child on the carpet, looking at the screen, trying to understand why anyone would have to become fire before the world agreed to look.