A video of a group of children in a displacement camp in Gaza carefully lifting a doll on a stretcher, to re-enact a funeral, came to my notice recently. My first reaction to the video, made by a Palestinian content creator and published by Al Jazeera, was the usual response of horror. War had reduced itself to play. Then my eye caught something: It was a smiling doll (quite a natural thing for a doll meant to connect with children through shared happiness), and the children, too, were smiling (quite natural as well, for children do smile, even in battered Palestine). The smiles meant that the war in Gaza had been normalised to the point where it had been reduced to playful smiles. This was dehumanisation at its irreducible worst. This is what the video says: War transforms children, the most vulnerable among its sacrificial offerings to history, into complicit victims. Smilingly, they become a part of war. War becomes a child: Children become war. That is the sadness which the video captures. When the children grow up, they will recognise themselves in the video. However, by then, they would be socialised into the ways of war, whether it is waged on them or they wage it on others, or both. Children, dolls, war and smiles will continue. Cheers!
The video makes two crucial points. The first is mimesis. The Greek word for "imitation," mimesis can also mean "representation"; typically, in one definition, it signifies the "reproduction of an external reality, such as nature, through artistic expression". Erich Auerbach's masterpiece, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written during World War II, remains to this day a benchmark of how to relate life and art. To Plato, art in an imitation of life; to Aristotle, mimesis works through three basic media - rhythm, language and harmony -with dance using only rhythm, music combining rhythm and harmony, and tragedy using all three media. True to Plato, the Gazan children imitated the violence of life through what became the redemptive art captured in the video. True to Aristotle, they transformed the Palestinian moment into a universal and eternal lament over the tragedy of existence.
The second point that the video makes is about existence at play. Here, I am reminded of Homo Ludens, a thought-formative book by Johan Huizinga first published in 1938. It expands the mimetic element in play into a theory of life itself. Here is the crux of Huizinga's argument: "A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realise that we are not so reasonable after all as the Eighteenth Century, with its worship of reason and its naive optimism, thought us; hence modern fashion inclines to designate our species as Homo Faber: Man the Maker. But though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens it is, as a name specific of the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many animals too are makers. There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making - namely, playing. It seems to me that next to Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature."
Huizinga justifies that argument by noting that, "even in its simplest forms on the animal level, play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex. It goes beyond the confines of purely physical or purely biological activity. It is a significant function - that is to say, there is some sense to it. In play there is something 'at play' which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something. If we call the active principle that makes up the essence of play, 'instinct', we explain nothing; if we call it 'mind' or 'will' we say too much. However we may regard it, the very fact that play has a meaning implies a nonmaterialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself."
In Huizinga's terms, the Gazan children were participating in a significant act. They were saying that, while children elsewhere might play will dolls which signified life, their particular doll had turned even death into play. For that is what war is: death, injury, physical destruction and emotional displacement. All that can be turned into play. Amidst the ruins of Gaza, amidst the crushed hopes for a sane world where Hamas does not butcher innocent Jews and Israel does not take revenge on innocent Palestinian children, the doll's funeral proclaimed the end of innocence.
Mimesis had come to the end of the road travelled forever by homo ludens.
The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com
