“Although I can sense the nervousness of everybody in the car, we are exhausted and hungry”
As this killing occurred in a church there is automatically an element of religion associated to it. It automatically gives the setting of the incident. You can imagine the stone building, big wooden door, banners exclaiming the word of God. Certain feelings are associated with a church; peace, acceptance, security, joy, repentance, forgiveness, rejoicing, purity and welcoming.
“There is a white marble statue of Christ above the door with hands outstretched.”
It is ironic and, therefore, sickening when all these associations and links to the church are severed in the ruthless act of killing. It reinforces the injustice of the situation, people ran to the church for guidance and protection, a place of holy worship, a sanctuary where no one can invade, and in this case shows an incredible violation of human rights.
“There are other bodies between the pews and another pile of bones at the foot of the statue of the Virgin Mary.”
“In a cloister, next to the Holy water fountain, a man lies”
Religion is something you are usually born into. As a child you follow the religious patterns of your parents, going to church every Sunday, especially Keane’s generation where it was quite strict and considered vitally important. Most schools were religious which involved prayers and hymns in assemblies and gatherings. As you go through life religion is used for times of need and comfort, a chance to go back to your childhood in some cases and seek the security and protection you had as a child, where you cannot find the answers for yourself and need the guidance from a higher more experienced being. This is exactly what happens to Keane, he is witnessing something he cannot control himself, this shows us, the shock and the ruthlessness and tragedy of the situation is too much for him. He wants to rectify all the wrongness to God, show to him that people still do love and have compassion for one another, but he has no answers so he turns back to what he knows, his team leader and God:
“I stay close to our team leader…..because at this moment, I need his age and strength and wisdom.” “I begin to pray myself. ‘Our Father who art in heaven…..’ These are prayers I have not said since childhood but I need them now.”
As he continues to look around he passes into a classroom. This is something a more developed country can relate to. We spend half our lives in a classroom as we grow up, it is something that we could easily visualise and associate with. He says:
“The chalk marks from the last lesson in mathematics are still on the board”
And then goes on to clarify the difference,
“But all the desks have been upturned by the killers.”
It is important that Keane sets a scene we can relate to so it is possible for us to have more empathy for the victims, a better understanding of the tragedy. Children wre actually taught in these classrooms not so long before, they were alive, starting out with all their lives ahead of them and it was taken away from them by the “killers” in a matter of seconds. He cannot help himself looking around at the bodies sprawled at his feet, at the faces of the victims, describing them has being “twisted and turned into grotesque shapes.” “Here the dead have no dignity” and at this point he says,
“I cannot think of any prayers now.”
As if it is so incredibly bad that he cannot even seek comfort from God. This shows us the severity of the impact it is having on Keane.
Churches are very atmospheric. A church is always very still and quiet, a sign of respect for God and others occupying the church. Outside in the churchyard there are graves and stones of the dead, there are also bodies of the victims scattered all over the floor.
“The dead are everywhere.”
Everything is silent out of shock and respect for those who died; all that can be heard is maybe the writing of notes, the click of the camera taking pictures, the sound of insects, the quiet scarce mumbling of words between colleagues, but most of the time like a knife cutting the silence in the air. The place has also grown dark as the evening has progressed, which suggests the passing of time and gives a very sinister feel. One of the drivers has to put the headlights of the car on so that the crew can see where they are placing their feet.
“The sound of insects grows louder now, filling in the churchyard.”
This reminds the readers of the lack of noise, if all those people had not been killed then there would not be silence, the amount of people killed would fill a stadium with noise. It exaggerates the amount of loss.
Death is portrayed throughout this article, whether it is the lives of the victims, or the general surroundings. Keane’s choice of lexis when he describes the bodies and churchyard, gives a good sense of the time past since the shooting. All the bodies are decaying, some faster and more disturbingly than others, and the weeds are growing high in the churchyard. We can deduce from this that the bodies have just been ignored, either the local community cannot face the magnitude of the devastation, or people just don’t care. It makes the situation just that little bit more bitter and painful.
“The body is in such an advance state of decay and I cannot tell whether it is a girl or a boy.”
“There is blood, rust-coloured now with the passing weeks.”
“The rains have left pools of stagnant, stinking water all around them.”
Although it is important for Keane to help the readers to relate and empathise with the situation it is also important for him to convey the differences that most of us will never possibly come into contact with; his bluntness and honesty creates something beyond such imaginable concept, that it is purely alarming. Keane needs to verbalise the extent of pain and suffering to the reader.
“A smell unlike anything I have ever experienced”
The human element of tragedy is greatly used in this passage. It would be impossible for someone to describe the scene without portraying the sadness, loss and grief of the circumstances. As he goes through the church and the classrooms, analysing and absorbing the effects of the killings, he describes exactly what he is saying:
“A woman on her side, an expression of surprise on her face, her mouth open and a deep gash in her head. She is wearing a red cardigan and a blue dress but the clothes have begun to rot away, revealing the decaying body underneath.”
This is one of Keane’s first and most explored descriptions as he enters the church. The reality of the situation is conveyed here, he is clearly trying to stress, throughout the whole article, that these people really did have lives like us; they were civilized people that have been brutally killed and left dead.
“A women is lying in the corner surrounded by four children”
He uses emotive language constantly to convey the human element of tragedy. His adjectives are always very expressive always showing the extremity of the situation:
“unbearable” “grotesque” “stagnant” “decapitated”
His choices of verbs are also very influential as to how we see the circumstance:
“hacked” “shielding” “fled” “decaying” “splayed”
All these verbs show the actions used by the killers and the state they left the victims in. She also uses two types of nouns abstract and concrete. For example of concrete, “corpse”, these help give the physical visualisation. For abstract, “horror, fear, pain, abandonment”, these help give the human element, an incite into how the victims felt, making it easier for the reader to have complete empathy for the situation.
Throughout his description Keane narrates it as he appears to see it. He fills in the blanks to make it not just appear as an analysis, but as a real-life event.
“They must have fled in a group, crowded in the next doorway, an easy target for the machetes and the grenades.”
“a man lies with his arms over his head. He must have died sheltering himself from the machete blows.”
As a journalist Keane has a great sense of events his mind works in a certain way where he tries to link things together to form a reason for people why things are the way they are by looking at the evidence. He is speculating here what he things must have happened and its impact again is mostly visualisation for the reader.
As he is looking around he also watches the reactions of those of his colleagues,
“”I look around at my colleagues and there are tears in the eyes of our sound recordist, Tony Glenn.”
It is important to know that all the crew are carrying out a routine. They must visit many scenes to investigate and report on, and for each time they have a certain amount of things they have to carryout: description, notes, photos, filming, reporting, and evaluation; they have a pattern that needs to be done, as it is the function of their job. When he speaks with Tony, Tony says,
“This is fucking unbelievable”
This use of taboo lexis expresses the intensity and seriousness on what their take is of their surroundings. He repeats this phrase again to emphasise his point:
“It is fucking unbelievable. Can you imagine what these poor bastards went through?”
It may be considered swearing, but “poor bastard” is the only real expressive way of saying it. As it is such a severe incident, it is considered acceptable to say this, as normal everyday words cannot express the devastation and do not have the same meaning and impact.
Carol Ann Duffy’s war photographer has the same theme. It is about a male photographer that goes to the scenes of the civil wars in “Belfast, Beirut, Phnom Penh” and takes photos for newspapers as his job. This is a poem, so it has a great deal of structure in the way it is written. It is based upon the routine of developing photos; he is in the “darkroom” watching them develop, carryout the function of his job.
The poem is written in the third party in the present tense. The reason why it is written in this way is to provide the piece with a certain amount of anonymity. This man could be any photographer, working for any newspaper, anywhere in the world, developing the photos right at this minute. He has a definite personal view which is very cynical and affected by the circumstances he has had to witness. He appears very resentful of life and dislikes the pain he is exposed to and the attitude of war from those around him.
Like Keane, there is also an association to religion in this poem.
“though this were a church and a priest were preparing to intone a Mass.”
At this point the photographer is in his dark room which lit in red, needed to develop the “spools” of film, but red is a very expressive colour, in a church a red light indicates the presence of holy sacrament, red symbolises blood, and red also symbolises negativity, a cross when something is wrong. Religion is used in the poem for the same reasons it is in Keane’s piece, when you are faced with such intense unimaginable scenarios, you look for some superior being to help you cope and guide you. The religious implication has a more specific reference to the bible,
“All flesh is grass.”
This is referring to a direct quote from Psalm 90 in the bible. This is a very view on life, but one that is true. There are two ways of interpreting this Psalm, the first, is in relevance to the whole history of earth and mankind it is not significant than a few people dies, people’s lives are brief, they die and it doesn’t make that much difference in the scheme of things, time should be not spent worrying about the things that worry you in daily life, as in the whole cosmic, it is irrelevant.
“Thou dost sweep men away; they are like a dream.”
The second would be the message of living life for the day, and accepting the fact that days do turn into night and the cycle never changes.
“Make us glad as many days as thou hast afflicted us,”
This shows us that the man in this poem is of Christian religion, but is having a hard time accepting this statement. He is trying to remind himself of the words from God to console him, and help him overcome his frustration for the general public’s attitude.
Due to this personal insight into the character, Duffy presents a much more personal view of the speaker and character. Here we get a real insight into the mind of the photographer, and the story is portrayed only from the man’s perspective. Instead of using the horrific description of the victim’s dead states, and portraying the frustration of the reality that this happens in some countries, Duffy uses the description of the photographers mind, and the frustration of the general public’s lack of care for the victims.
There is a great use of emotive language to portray the tragedy of the situation and how he feels on certain matters.
“suffering set out in ordered rows.”
“tremble” “pain” “nightmare” “twist” “stained” “agonies” “prick”
All the lexis is drastic, and very impacting.
