A set of questions to decipher how you feel
about empathy. Empathy. Em. Pa. Th. E. Reminds you of pathetic. A set of
questions asking you what empathy is. Can you empathize? Shudder. Put pen down
to paper. Try to empathize.
When
and why does your empathy fail?
Remember the time when you were taken to the children’s
orphanage? The message above the front door clearly said ‘Time not Money’.
Time. Maybe that’s what is needed for empathy.
You remember tried so hard. You sat with the
children, tried to leave out the everyday snippets of English that slip into
your conversations and talk only in Urdu. You wore your oldest clothes and you
deliberately left your cellphone in the car. Because you knew families and even
living mothers had abandoned most of them deliberately, you tried to avoid
every topic that could somehow be related to talk of family. You thought you
were being empathetic. It was hard. By the time you left, you slipped a
considerable amount of donation at the head office—you felt undeservingly
privileged and terribly, terribly sorry for the children.
The trick is the difference between empathy
and sympathy. It is so easy to slip between the two. Empathy is understanding.
Empathy is sidelining your emotions to allow for someone else’s feelings to
consume you. Empathy is selfless. Empathy is beyond pity. You realize what you
felt there was sympathy. Sympathy is giving into pity—that helpless feeling of
not being able to do anything Give into sympathy and empathy fails.
Empathy can be challenging and to some extent
unachievable. How is that you can empathize with those orphans or lets say a
starving child in Africa, when you have no understanding of his situation save
that of what the New Yorker tells you? That is not empathy—that is more
believing what you are told. That is mass media ladling out excessive shots of
empathy, feeding them to the masses until they sicken of the taste.
Sometimes you shut yourself to empathy
completely. The day you heard that a 150 children had been shot in Peshawar, in
their school, cowering under their desks as bearded, masked men set fire
randomly at will, your thoughts immediately went to the mothers. Those mothers
who unknowingly sent their children off to school that morning, expecting to
see them that very afternoon. You thought of them; crumbling to their feet at
the news, helpless and wounded beyond repair. You remember your eyes welled up
and your shoulders shook. Just for five minutes. Then, your mind went blank and
you pushed away thoughts of pain to the back of your head. Some things are so
terrible, so brutal; you can’t bring yourself to terms with the thought of
them. The limitations of human capacity to feel, the limited threshold of pain.
That is when empathy fails.
In
what ways do you find empathy difficult? (in daily life or as a writer)
You stopped writing a while ago
because you felt as if you were failing your subjects. Can a Pakistani writer only
good at writing in English, write the narratives of her people, her people who
speak Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki—everything but a smattering of
English? Can you write their narratives so fully embodied in their everyday
language in a foreign language? So much gets lost in translation, so much gets
lost, that the flavor of authenticity lost in the garnishing of pretentiousness
just doesn’t work. Not in fiction. Not in poetry. Can you even understand fully
where they are from? They toil in the fields, they take public transport, they
eat a single meal a day that costs as much as your daily cup of English
breakfast tea. How can you tell the truthful narratives of those you hardly
know anything about? Will you do them justice? You once wrote a story on your
waxing woman once in second person. You remember being so proud of it, showing
it off in a writing workshop, thinking you had finally captured the true
essence of empathy--whatever that is:
“She
wobbles dizzily to her mahogany dresser, her footsteps making a sticky crunch
as remnants of wax stick to the marble floor.”
So proud until one person hesitatingly asked,
“Can a woman with no education whatsoever tell what mahogany is?”
In that moment, as a writer, you knew empathy
is a process that would require constant revision, rewriting and never being
completely sure whether you had every facet covered.
A set of questions answered and you wonder
whether you are some good at empathy or not. Wonder whether the very fact that
you had to struggle to answer a set of questions asking you how you feel about
empathy is in fact the failure of empathy itself.
