Suspect

Introduction

“Suspect” is both verb and noun. To suspect is to create a suspect. Out of speculation, odd fragments, gossip, and half-truths one constructs a tight narrative of motive, means, and guilt, giving fantasy a specific form and face. It happens quickly. Suspicion, as Mark Kingwell argues here, tells an entire story in an instant, a story that is scripted in imagination before anything can be known of the reality.

Suspicion is a glance that generates an implacable tale of guilt. The Latin specio—which like the English “look” means both to see and to appear—is the root of “suspect” and also of “speciousness,” the dangerous quality of appearing good while being bad. Thus the onlooker can make up his story on the basis of bad evidence; hooded, unaccountable, he sees without being seen. And as Joey Dubuc, Cheryl Sourkes, and Heather Cameron report, the expansion of this type of looking and recording via technological surveillance systems ensures that more and more of the world is visible, but always as mere fragments and blind outputs. We can map the planet and its residents pixel by pixel, but we cannot escape the speciousness of suspicion.

Instead, seeing more only means having more suspects. Their number grows hourly, compounded by the technologies of surveillance, finance, and marketing, technologies that impose patterns of narrative on the pictures they generate. States respond to these narratives with new spending, laws, and extralegal practices (secret incarceration, various levels of torture, and the like).

Suddenly, we are all of us entwined in this complex of suspicion, and firm ground from which to address the suspect is not necessarily provided. One can seek democratic development in the Middle East without embracing Bush’s Iraq war, just as one can support Bush’s America and still feel sickened by the dawn raid (24 March 2005) on the New York City home of sixteen-year-old Tashnuba Hayder: she was arrested and deported to Pakistan—a land foreign to her since kindergarten—for visiting suspicious websites. But the imperative to reflect on these stories exists, whether or not they net us a political position. Simon A. Cole tells the story of Brandon Mayfield, wrongly identified as a terrorist on the basis of “infallible” fingerprint evidence. Timothy Stock and Warren Heise retell as a graphic novel the fate of the artist Steven Kurtz, arrested under the USA Patriot Act.

Likewise, the shock of these violations of civil liberties should not blind us to the real need for security. In separate essays, Kent Enns and George Bragues explore the tensions inherent in the liberal position and suggest ways of thinking that include defending against real threats and enemies while safeguarding the rights of the suspect individual or nation. In fictional works, Jaspreet Singh and Diana Fitzgerald Bryden illuminate our ambivalence towards both suspected terrorists who have been exonerated and known terrorists who claim to have reformed. These pieces demand a way forward. How does one forgive for being made to fear? What is the appropriate response to the suspect? Can anyone feel secure after terror?

If not, the prognosis is grim. Indeed, the specter of the over-empowered state is depressingly familiar, as S. D. Chrostowska and George Z. Gasyna remind us in their exploration of films from the 1960s and 1970s, films that look at police-state surveillance techniques from a real but darkly comical Communist Poland and a fictional, terrifying totalitarian Italy. Suspicion in the hands of the state is often volatile, self-perpetuating, omnivorous. In Camilla Gibb’s “Things Collapse,” suspicion and contagion pair up in hellish fashion and a contemporary society purges itself unmercifully in response.

At the same time, we should not be led to say that terror has made empathy for the suspect impossible. Stephen Andrews, by redrawing the by-now classic photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, but erasing the prisoners, confronts us with our involuntary investment in these images. Working toward similar ends, photojournalist Rita Leistner had herself smuggled into Iraq to photograph the occupation. There are also strategies beyond bearing witness to the violence: psychoanalyst Jeanne Randolph, reading Conrad’s “Secret Sharer,” asks what it might mean to look into another’s eyes and, interrupting suspicion, invoke a more deeply considered view. Patricia Rozema’s film, made for this book, gives one such moment its close-up.

Developing a response to suspicion is the challenge of our age, and the stakes are high. We must find another way of looking at a violent world, a perspective founded not in fear but in respect and compassion. Technology and historical forces have made our world overwhelmingly complex; our task is to seek both the right way to live within it, and the right way to confront its dangers.