I heard with dismay at the weekend, Saturday 12th November 2016, and on the following Monday on the television news bulletins and in the newspapers, about the 6th killing of a young Black man this year in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the eleventh homicide in 2016. The killings are not rare. I have had a base in Halifax for some 13 years and a trickle of such deaths have punctuated our day- to- day lives like the ticking of a clock.
It gradually becomes part of the background noise: death, grief, loss of loved ones, funerals, media coverage seeking answers and getting none, expected commentary from law enforcement that they are doing their best, calls for additional resources to be pumped into identified community facilities, words from elected officials and from the churches in the Province. What is absent however are effective strategies that are implemented based upon evidence- based ideas and initiatives that work, on how to tackle successfully this outrage.
I was painfully reminded of the writing of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel outlining their personal experiences of the holocaust in memorable award winning books. They spoke about their survival and self identified ‘duty’ to give meaning to that survival ‘in which nothing made any sense’. Both writers were of the view that only those who had endured the horrifying impact of being in the concentration camps ‘knew what it was, Others will never know.’ They did, however, say that a level of qualified understanding could arise with trying to acquire knowledge about the experiences, how they arose in the first place, what were the factors which helped to create them, and most importantly, how can we prevent them happening again. We need to further involve those engaged in the killings to explore how they can be reduced and preferably stopped.
Elie Wiesel in his first novel, Dawn, tells the story of a young man charged by his superiors to murder another man held prisoner in a secret location. The young man spends an evening preparing to carry out the murder and reflects upon his life. The tale is about despair, the impact of external negative forces on our developing identity, and the acts of violence against innocent victims because of what we believe. The book is also about hope. Things can change for the better.
During the young man’s reflection, he thought he saw all those people who had contributed to his formation, ‘to the formation of my permanent identity… Some of them were familiar, but I could not pin a label upon them; they were names without faces or faces without names. And yet I knew that at some point my life had crossed theirs.’
We, as members of the Nova Scotian community pride ourselves as being linked to each other by the fact of our residence here whether recent or multiple generational. We have a responsibility to look out for one another. The young man in the story learned painfully that he was part of a community, a wider network of people, known and unknown, who cared about him, wanted the best for him and were part of him. He realised that what he did and said directly affected all those people:
‘…an act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.’
Primo Levi in his book, Truce, talking about the silence of the German population about what was happening in the concentration camps, stated that during the period ‘… in spite of the varied possibilities for information, most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know.’
We all are Leaders, young and older, and can identify in our diverse communities, credible people with contacts, ideas and practical experience who can contribute their expertise to reminding our youth and elders that we are all linked and that the killing has to stop. We can do it if we want to. We are all involved in it. Whether recognised or not, our lives do cross each other’s.