response to Mr. Venkatesh / Ms. Landres' question

This set of questions has been haunting me since we began to pose them. I feel utterly split between different sides of myself, each seeking solid ground to stand upon in a world where solidity is quicksand at best. Was she right? Yes, of course, says the first side; yes because how can I pass judgement on the unspeakable? the inexplicable? that labyrinth of horror I know nothing of. to pass a negative judgement against Sethe would make me complicit in the further erasure of Sethe, of the "60 million and more" Morrison dedicates the novel to. Shouldn't we be silent on this? Isn't silence the only response if we truly want to listen? 

But a different side voices itself: no, silence is not the only response - silence in addition to something else, an examination or perhaps even a judgement, might be necessary - isn't Morrison asking this of us? 

perhaps we cannot simply say Sethe was right, not without a violation of some kind. bare with me here. wherein lies the violation? Ms. Landres, writing in her post, claims that Sethe is convinced she can "do no wrong." Responding to Paul.D's indictment of her righteousness, she says it "ain't my job to know what's worse. It's my job to know what is and to keep them [the children] away from what I know is terrible." When Sethe acted to save her children, she *had*  to believe she unequivocally knew what was and what wasn’t terrible, that is, she *couldn't* have weighed options, otherwise, how could she have acted at all? the unspeakable cruelty of the situation, architected by whiteness, and enforced by Schoolteacher, had imprisoned Sethe in a labyrinth of suffering, where *every* action horrifically created the most extreme forms of suffering. how *could* she have lived with herself, faced herself, been a whole self at all if she had weighed her options? wouldn’t she see herself as a murderer without any possibility of being a savior if she faced the moral complexity of her actions? 

It is almost as if Sethe cannot make a moral choice because no moral option is available to her. Every option contains something of the extreme side of the immoral in it, a world she was constructed into. 

However, there is a side of myself I cannot deny, the side that is terrified by the idea that "one can do no wrong." Isn't this always dangerous? I'm struck by your articulation, Mr. Venkatesh, that if Sethe is beyond judgement, would we be willing to grant the same exemption to other parents in different but analogous situations? 

I’m thinking about this question as it relates to a different, but perhaps somewhat analogous situation. Let me explain. 

Over the last few days I've been watching Palestine burn. As a jew myself, I have felt deeply disturbed and horrified at what the State of Israel has become, a political entity that has created a sickening version “liberation” for the jewish people, but at the expense of denying the humanity of Palestinian people. Several days ago I watched on Instagram videos of the forcible eviction of the Al-asqa mosque by the Israeli military on the eve of one of the most holy days for muslims, a day which also happens to be a holiday for the Jews: Jerusalem Day, commemorating the requisition of east Jerusalem. As the mosque burned just behind the wailing wall, thousands of jews collectively chanted a curse against the Palestinian people through loudspeakers that spread the sounded curse for miles into Palestine: it called for the destruction of the Palestinian state and the Palestinian people. They chanted this with pleasure. 

There are two central injunctions that modern judaism (as I see it) want jews to heed: 1) Exodus 23:9: which essentially states that one should never forget that we were in the land of Egypt, where we learned the heart of slave, and that we should never oppress another in the way we had been oppressed. 2) that the history of exile, pogroms, and the holocaust convinces jews that we must never avert our gaze from the forces that desire our total destruction. But how does one balance a commitment to accepting, supporting, and allowing others to exist, self-define, and enjoy liberty, while knowing that those very same others could assume a destructive superiority? Or, rather, how can we seek to protect ourselves from the risks of the second injunction in a way that doesn’t violate the first? 

The scene of the curse, I think, embodies the erasure of the first injunction while claiming to be an execution of the second. In other words, to chant a curse of the destruction of the Palestinian people is to sing a song of protection and defense. But this expression of self-defense has become a mask for pleasurable cruelty, for the execution of superiority, racism, and abject othering; and such a mask, I fear, has emerged from the thinking that “one can do no wrong,” and that such a claim, which was perhaps necessary when the labyrinth of suffering was present during the Holocaust, has persisted to a time of relative security. Further, the continuation of the “one can do no wrong” has turned into the exact opposite of the first injunction. It has been held onto as necessary in a safe world that is believed to be a labyrinth of suffering. 

As soon as we live in a world where we must act as if one “can do no wrong,” don’t we always open up the possibility of irresponsibly generating the very kind of suffering we had attempted to escape?