Eulogies usually begin with an account of someone’s birth, his or her upbringing and early life, small accomplishments, amusing anecdotes of experience gleaned and lessons learned. I don’t know any of this about you. I’ve dug around a little, but could find no mention of where you were from, who your parents were, whether you had siblings. I wonder intensely. No one, it seems, bothered to record such things. Maybe they’re in a file somewhere.
It’s as though you came into the world fully grown, fully aware, and fully powerless. As though you came to exist the moment we saw you, and ceased to exist when we turned away.
And now, I’m told, you cease to exist at all.
My first memory of you was as a picture on a flyer. You began to exist for me, too, then, as a representation. A model, a signifier of things you were not. I am guilty as the rest, and was from the start.
You were already behind bars – Was there a time when you weren’t behind bars? In a file somewhere, perhaps. – and you were looking directly at the camera. Your fists were clenched around the metal rods, and each of your eyes seemed to be aligned with mine. And I remember thinking, there’s only one word that could describe your gaze: “Accusation.” It popped into my head – “Accusation” – exactly like that. As a noun. I read your story.
A man named Tipu Aziz named you “Felix.” From the Latin for happy, fortunate.
You were to have the top of your head removed shortly, gadgets were to be attached to your exposed brain, and various blips were to be monitored while you struggled. We would learn something, proponents said, about something or other. A more detailed study should be forthcoming.
Names are powerful things, though. People began to notice, and wonder. “Who is this Felix?” While you had been just another object of study, Aziz accidentally made you a subject. A named individual. You started to exist even when we weren’t watching.
And then we fucked it up. We made you, again, an object. We made you a rallying cry, a symbol of your own oppression. Or of the cruelty of others. Or of concepts, or words, or feelings. We put you on flyers and Web sites, and you faded away again.
And now you’ve vanished entirely.
I can’t even begin to imagine your life, or your death. Not in the vague sense in which we can never know each other’s lives, but in a direct, real sense completely alien to that – You are beyond me. What it would be like to exist as you existed. What it would be like to die as you died. I try to imagine and fail.
Oftentimes, we end these selfish requiems by proclaiming our belief that the deceased have gone “somewhere better.” We call you and yours “the departed.” I doubt this very much, in all of our cases. In your case, I doubt you even made it into the ground.
Still, you’re beyond pain. And you’ve left something of a legacy. Representation, again. Symbol. But maybe there’s a way to keep you alive, as an individual, and keep your image in mind, with all that it signifies.
Maybe you were born, you lived a life of sorts, and you died at our hands.
Maybe 1,000 more will take your place.
Maybe each and every one of them will ultimately join their brethren in that longer line we’ve drawn. That march of the young billions to meaningless graves, fodder for poems and songs and fevered conversation and blog posts.
Maybe this has got to stop.
Rest in peace, Felix.
