about I news I stories I plays I occasional pieces I links I contact I home

Copyright © Ranbir Sidhu. All rights Reserved.

300 Miles Above Us

Ranbir Sidhu

Some months ago bands of Hutu refugees from Rwanda, attempting to avoid forced repatriations, became lost in the jungles and plains of eastern Zaire. Aid organizations counted several hundred thousand wandering nearly starved across the denuded landscape, traveling in the direction of the camp at Bukavu. At the same time, United States officials argued no such Hutu refugees were lost in eastern Zaire, all either remained in camps or had returned to Rwanda, and they claimed to have satellite photographs to prove their point. On these photographs the several hundred thousand bodies remained invisible, shrouded to the eye of modern technology.

What does the world look like from the eye of a satellite? What does it see? What is obscured or is made invisible by it? How is the universe organized by an eye that watches an object three hundred miles below it? When several hundred thousand people are invisible to our most sophisticated technology yet seen by men and women on the ground, who should we believe and what does it mean for how we ourselves see or do not see?

These are questions I have no answers for and ask only because they concern me and I believe they are questions of importance to writers who want to thoughtfully engage the modern world. The eye is no longer necessarily the eye of the protagonist. There are many eyes through which we watch and organize the world and many more continually watching and organizing us. Cameras capture us at ATM terminals, as we window-shop in malls, as we wait with frustration in a lawyer's office, as we speed across bridges, as we cheer the home team victory in baseball stadiums. There are the points-of-view of X-rays, mammograms, cat scans, night-vision goggles, cameras attached to smart bombs, infrared cameras guarding the border with Mexico, the points-of-view of technology that records, protects, attacks, humanizes and dehumanizes. These are the eyes that organize our world. What do they see? How do they see us?

If you traveled recently you would have quickly found yourself on the home videos of a thousand different families pointing their mini-cams at every attraction, statue, famous building or painting. You would not have been there by choice, either theirs or yours. You will never meet the people who will watch you, perhaps over and over, when they return home to relive moments of joy or ugliness, beauty or exasperation. You will remain forever the stranger peopling the backgound to the minor drama of their vacation. Like the satellite blind to several hundred thousand Hutu refugees, will these families ever see you? And will you ever see them on the videos you carry home peopled with a cast of strangers you never met, nor will ever meet, but who will always shadow your journey through memories that have become videotapes?

How do writers see in a world where everything is seen, including us, with unremmitting Argus eyes, twenty-four hours a day, simultaneously from the close-up proximity of a fiber-optic scope traveling into the pathways of an ailing digestive system to that faraway satellite eye where an individual becomes only the smudged edge of a crowd?