Common Ground: The Trouble With Caring

December 2007 | Art & Soul

The Trouble With Caring

In the case of Sudan’s genocide in Darfur, first you must feel, and the rest will follow.

By Jamie Friddle

A friend of mine confessed recently that at one time she had felt unable to truly empathize or sympathize with the genocide in Darfur. Even in the face of an arresting and upsetting awareness campaign that ran in the BART/MUNI stations in San Francisco where she lives, she remained unmoved, feeling a momentary pang of despair before returning to her daily commute.

The campaign, co-sponsored by Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 180 faith-based, advocacy and humanitarian organizations helping the displaced and embattled peoples of Darfur, was spearheaded by the San Francisco Bay Area Darfur Coalition. Its message was sophisticated: Make sure your investments do not help feed the genocide of Darfurians in Sudan, an Arab-African nation of almost 40 million people.

Since 2003, when the Darfurian rebellion began against Sudan’s increasingly unresponsive Muslim-led government, the United Nations estimates 200,000 to 400,000 innocent civilians have systematically been murdered by government and militia forces, and more than 2.5 million have been displaced by the violence.

There is no doubt a moral imperative presented to the world to help Darfur. But for myself, for my friend, and probably for many others, something was missing. The incomprehensible scale of genocide, the distance between lands and the difference in cultures makes it difficult to relate to Darfur’s dispossessed.

Darfur is a humanitarian nightmare. Because of ongoing threats and hijackings of aid missions, rebel factions must now resort to raiding peacekeeping forces to get what they need to survive. The Sudanese government continues to deny the death toll, and currently harbors a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, the militia still rapes, beats and kills, razes villages and leaves children to starve.

So what, if not the indisputable facts, is required for us to care?

For my friend, the answer to that question came in the form of a book. After she read What is the What?, Dave Eggers’ fictionalized account of the ongoing personal trials of survival of a Sudanese refugee in America, she felt an overwhelming urge to help the people of Darfur. By intimately focusing on the story of a single casualty of Sudanese strife — Valentino Achak Deng, Eggers’ tragic (and ultimately triumphant) protagonist — she came to understand and personalize Sudanese suffering. Immediately, the almost insurmountable problems of Sudan were comprehensible through one character, and her personal relationship with Darfur began.

Ted Braun, writer and director of the recently released Darfur Now, can relate. An assistant professor of screenwriting at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Braun was only mildly aware of the crisis in Darfur in 2006 when his agent, Dean Schramm, moved by Darfur’s plight during a meeting of the American Jewish Committee, called Braun out of the blue. Would Braun make a documentary about Darfur?, he asked. Could it be true that a Hollywood agent could help make a difference in Sudan by… agenting?

Only 18 months after that conversation, Braun has released his first feature-length theatrical debut, a pressing portrait of six individuals working to make a difference in Darfur’s peace while responding to the crisis personally and humbly. The result is an ensemble of hope for Darfur rather than despair. And if Braun can be faulted for one thing, it is that his film inspires so much hope that audiences may not feel a need to pitch in.

“My goals once I made the decision to embark on this subject… were not activist,” says Braun. “They were humanist. I was interested in trying to enable audiences watching this film to understand and feel with the characters that were on the screen. And I used every tool I could to bring to life what those characters were going through.”

Braun is a filmmaker, not a social psychologist, so we won’t expect him to know about recent studies that reveal how people are more likely to show empathy and altruistic behavior when they see an image of one suffering person rather than many, or when they know a single relatable fact about a victim rather than an entire story. And oddly, according to these newfound empathy studies, the more pain/sadness/despair one must endure to help — one study had subjects submerge their hands in ice-cold water before donating to a cause — the more one gives. My friend made an investment of time and emotion to read Eggers’ book; Braun spent four months filming in Darfur. It could be you, surfing the Web, or surveying destroyed Darfurian villages in Google Earth (earth.google.com).

In many ways, all the characters in Braun’s film have suffered and relate that suffering to the victims in Darfur. As Cheadle says in the film: “Maybe their plight is in some way tied to my plight.” Adam Sterling, profiled in the film for finding the country’s first divestment campaign against Sudan in California (the very same campaign which eventually led to the ads my friend witnessed in San Francisco), feels his work honors his Jewish grandmother, who fled Nazi Germany. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, another of Braun’s subjects who now is lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, had to levy sentences on his own superiors after Argentina’s military junta ended in 1980.

“It’s a recognition of shared humanity,” Braun says, on the cause of caring. “That’s the light bulb that goes off. That’s the very thing we tried to explore in this film. That we, as human beings, share an enormous amount of value, and that in recognizing what we have in common with one another, we can find ways to help each other and work together.”

Darfur Now is playing in limited release in United States theatres. For more information about Save Darfur Coalition, visit savedarfur.org. The Sudan Divestment Task Force (sudan divestment.org) now has legislation pending or passed in 23 states, passed in the U.S. House, and headed to the U.S. Senate.

Jamie Friddle is a writer and editor in Seattle. He hopes writing helps others.

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