Terrorised

posted by Jess Sains

‘Terrorism’ has come to Exeter this week. On Thursday May 22, 2008 (perhaps to be known in the future as 22/5) a small bomb exploded in the Giraffe restaurant in the new Princesshay shopping centre in Exeter city centre.
Since then there have been a lot of labels placed. The ‘suspect’ (label one) is a ‘gentle giant’ (label two), who has been ‘radicalised’ (label three) to the Islamic faith and there is the biggest label of all (label four) that he ‘has a history of mental illness’.

So, already we have been told a good deal of loose information about a man whom I have only seen in a fuzzy photo with blood all over his face. Information. Or labels? Labels have so much connotation in them, they can effect how people are viewed by ourselves and others for their whole live. Yet, we – and particularly our media – slap them on people on a daily basis. David Cameron is a ‘Old Etonian toff”, others are ‘yummy mummies’, ‘hippies’, ‘addicts’, ‘scroungers’ or ‘terrorists’. All these labels bare with them connotations; the yummies will be dressed up to the nines, driving a 4X4 and castigating any woman who works whilst her children are young; the scroungers will be on the dole, perhaps – another label here – a bit chavvy or having too many children for good tax-payers comfort. Most dripping with unspoken intuitions of all of these labels are the two ‘terrorist’ and ‘mental illness’.

‘Terrorist’ means, in this day and age, that you will kill anyone for a cause. A few years ago the unspoken connotations might have included things like ‘Irish Republican Army’ or even possibly something to do with anti-vivisection, now what hangs in the air is ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, ‘Bin Laden’, ‘September the 11th’. Sitting in the darkness at the very back of all these words are falling towers, smoky tube tunnels, blood soaked faces, death.

We live in an age where all media events are played out on our screens. I, like millions of others, was sat watching the television when the second plane hit the World Trade Centre, was enthralled to the news by the time the Tavistock Square bus was blown up. All this instantaneous action and reaction makes labels all the more pervasive. They are thrown out there, stuck on a person before we even know what’s happened. I remember when the first plane had hit in 2001 sitting there watching and the reporter telling us all that the attacks were suspected to be by ‘anarchists’. I knew that wasn’t so straight away. ‘Anarchist’ is a label I wear; my ‘anarchism’ is something to be proud of, an ideal, yet I know that for others my label is something quite different. I am likely to be ‘trouble’, ‘rebellious’, I have ‘issues with authority figures’ – I might even throw bombs… we all wear so many labels – ‘loud’, ‘fat’, ‘thin’, ‘rude’, ‘boring’ – that some almost seem to lose their meaning. But that’s just it, they are both meaningless and yet the connotations hang in the air around us, they are stamped on us, they make us “other” and “other” is scary.

That’s what labels are, ultimately; making someone unlike oneself. That makes oneself there person who is ‘OK’ and the other the one who is outside the circle, who is different. It is only when we peel off the labels that we can truly see the person:

I am an anarchist. I am a daughter. I am fat. I am loud. I am a sister. I am a politics geek. I am a partner. I was home educated.

I am Jess.

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