Out of the Blue, Simon Armitage’s devastating poem commemorating 9/11, re-humanises a distant “falling body”, captured by accident in the background of someone’s video footage. It charts the descent of one of the people who wanted to live so much that they took the risk of jumping from an abominably great height in the hope that a miracle would save them.
The voice in the poem directly addresses you, the reader, as if there might be something you could do to help. By the last stanza it’s clear that there’s nothing you, they, or anyone can change. If it was possible to watch the footage without crying, the poem adds the missing bits, punching the tragedy out at you. The idea that you would need to look at a video in order to understand the poem is weird. If anything, it’s the other way around. The poem is hardcore, it doesn’t seem to need “bringing to life” any more than Little Red Riding Hood needs to be supplemented by documentary evidence of a wolf being hacked open.
If you are a child you are likely to be very good at identifying, getting involved in stories, picturing things in your head. This is just as likely to be true of historical events as fictitious ones. The notion that children are uninterested in the world, and need things spicing up for them, seems to go against the evidence. In a large number of cases the opposite is likely to be true; the world is rather overwhelming and full of sadness and horror, and children tend to be pretty well aware of that. The problem is how to talk about it without freaking them out even further – or lying to them in order to pull the wool over their eyes.
When reading about the sacking of Suriyah Bi, my first thought was that I wished she had worked at my primary school. We were endlessly having disturbing episodes from history rammed down our throats, being taken to the Tower of London where creepy old men would tell us how many hacks it had taken to remove Anne Boleyn’s head, while standing in front of the patch of grass where it had actually happened. If some kind person had stepped in to save us, I for one, might have been spared years of nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and a fear of the dark that lasted into adulthood.
The idea that Suriyah was obstructing the truth due to religious or political prejudice is completely misguided – as the employment tribunal found. Why would people have such a passion for showing unsettling images to children that they would eject any obstacle in their path? Especially when buffering children against the ubiquity of distressing imagery is surely a very important part of any contemporary education. Remember, kids, you don’t have to look at everything on the internet.
In a sense, the whole of one’s early education, beginning at birth, involves help and instruction on what to let in and what to keep out. Don’t consume the stuff that will harm you, try to ingest the good stuff. This maybe starts with separating the edible from the inedible, before passing through distinctions between friends and enemies, objects that frustrate and objects that satisfy, good ideas and bad ideas, and so on.
There’s just so much stuff around the place that you have to develop some pretty elaborate internal means for dealing with it. You learn not to be a passive object in relation to the world, but also, hopefully, to continue to let the world in; it does something with you and you do something with it. (It’s interesting that the class in question was a special needs class, perhaps suggesting that what they were prepared or able to take in would be regarded as being somehow different from that of a mainstream class. But how would that justify using greater force to “get through” to the children?)
The strange thing about this story is that it seems to involve such a long and twisted series of ingestions and rejections. The plane goes into the building, the people fling themselves out. The films capture the people, but in a way that’s hard to fully understand. The poem pulls you in to consider the experiences of the people. The teacher thinks the poem isn’t going to pull the children in enough. However, the teaching assistant feels the children might be overwhelmed by the graphic nature of the footage. And, also, why teach them to override the rules in order to access the heavy stuff? The school decides that the teaching assistant is invading their establishment with her truth-distorting Muslim sensibility and immediately ousts her – bringing up the Trojan horse affair, just to add another layer of paranoia about invasion.
Those poor children. What useful lessons could their developing minds possibly extract from all that?
• Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and author
