The Politics of Empathy: The Words We Use for The Dead

There is something of a natural rightness in the phrase “left to mourn are his wife and child”. My friend died unnaturally; his wife and four-year-old child died with him in a vehicular accident on Tuesday.

Hernie had a kind face and a quick smile. He made me laugh at the bar my mother owns. Yvonne, his wife, I’d seen around. We smiled when we saw each other, and I marvelled at her flawless skin. His old bus was always chug-chug chugging along with his best friend Jamal in the front seat, talking about whatever men talk about at the end of a workday.

The bus crashed into a mango tree along the Majomel road in Laborie.

It was sad.
It is sad.

My mother gasped when she heard the news and sat down, whispering, “Oh my God.” I also sat down, thousands of miles away, saying one word — a word very far from my mother and far from God.

Four-year-old Rain, I have only seen in pictures since the tragedy. She looks so beautiful, so loved, you cannot help but cry at the unfairness of it. The WhatsApp statuses and Facebook posts knew what to do: white flying-dove emojis, flyers suggesting, or demanding that they sleep in peace, rest in peace, rest in power.

These deaths are tragic, and, at the very core of our humanity, we know that at this immediate hour, all there is to do is feel.
Feel the unfairness.
Feel the sorrow.
Feel even the dark part of you that whispers in the corner of your soul, thank God it is not me, my daughter, my son.

So you call and ask, “You hear what happen?”
“Bondyé, how that happen?”
“When you coming home?”

Mourn, friend.
Mourn friend.
Call the family.

The discussions on the topics will come soon enough. The road. The railings. The chug-chug chugging. That is for later, for an investigation and, however we may feel about it, for the police.

A few hours after the accident, Timothy Poleon, on his popular radio show Newsspin, announced the incident:

“As we come on the air, we have some breaking news to share with you. Unfortunately, in a part of Saint Lucia, Marjomel, Laborie to be exact, it appears that the mood is definitely red. We are being told that, apparently, between last evening and maybe into the wee hours of today, a minibus plunged down a precipice, which resulted in several people being killed.”

The response was immediate.

“The mood is red” was used by the Saint Lucia Labour Party as a political slogan in the last general election, a direct response to the United Workers Party slogan, “The code is yellow.” Each party forwarding its colours. The chants were shouted from moving trucks packed with people, from windows, and from political and digital platforms. On December 1st, the SLP won 16–1.

The talk show host's use of the slogan to inform the country of the tragedy jolted listeners and angered some Saint Lucians. The Facebook comments, WhatsApp messages and tweets started:

“Tim need to be in a zoo.”

“This is low, distasteful and in poor taste. Thankfully, this man does not represent real journalism.”

“Fuck Timothy Poleon... when my granny got the news, she wouldn’t stop screaming. Her children have to take shifts to stay with her & y’all opening y’all dirty mouths to make jokes?”

Within hours, partisan battle lines formed between those who thought the comment insensitive and in need of apology, and those who insisted it was fair. The debate devolved into partisan rhetoric, and for some, Hernie, Yvonne, and Rain no longer mattered.
It was about winning.

I think about all this the next day while seated in a class listening to Dr Roberto De Vogli speak to professors and students about his new book, In Selective Empathy: The West Through the Gaze of Gaza. The book is described as blending political critique with psychological insight, revealing a civilisation that reserves compassion for some while ignoring others. Gaza, he argues, has become the West’s moral litmus test.

The premise suggests that the West does not see Palestinians as deserving of empathy and that part of this failure is political and part cultural, rooted in long-standing dehumanisation. The conversation touched on mainstream media and narrative framing.

Perhaps it was what had happened the day before. Perhaps it was my being from an ex-British colony, a descendant of slaves, a black woman immigrant who, up until recently, struggled to attain a student visa. I felt frustrated with my own powerlessness and with what felt like an inconsequential discussion among learned academics.

So I raised my hand.

“This may be personal,” I said, “but what will this do? For the world? For what we’re seeing and feeling? When there is so much pain and suffering and death, people need more action than words. Where is this going? Must we continue to focus on the oppressors and their reasons? In writing and saying this, do you ever feel despair that it will mean nothing in the end?”

He thanked me for the question.

I do not remember his answer now.

Girls were killed in a school in Iran the next day by a strike executed by the United States and Israel.

I have stayed in my room for three days in the dark, feeling nothing, doing nothing, because I feel that nothing can be done.

I must call Miss Lucita about her son with the kind face, her daughter-in-law who once had flawless skin, her beautiful granddaughter, to say — simply to say — in the big, dark, empty cave of her grief: “I am so sorry.”

It will echo into the nothingness and join the others that lie there, mixed up in letters, a warped chorus, a decaying mess that cannot tell one from another. No matter how earnestly said, they will lie limp at her feet.
I ask myself the same questions I asked Dr. Roberto.
And still —
I will call Ms. Lucita tomorrow.