People in pain — how long will you and I be silent?

15 May 2025

Because our flat screens don’t spill blood, don’t emit the stench of death, muffle the piercing cries of real loss, leave the scene of the crime, we are led to think that pain is painless. In this way those of us who are safe for the moment insulate and inoculate ourselves from feeling pain.

Pain is universal and it is as old as human experience. Feeling pain is fundamental to human existence and is a necessary early warning mechanism to avoid greater harm. Pain is physical and it’s emotional and sometimes it’s both. Pain is unpleasant and mostly accidental. But as with everything else pain is unevenly distributed across class, race and gender.

Who feels pain is a measure of modern inequality.

You could say that, on one very fundamental level, human history is a history of the quest to avoid pain, to put ourselves beyond pain: to find shelter, food, relief for illness.

But today, I wonder whether we are victims of our own success, particularly whether the privileged part of humanity has gone too far in our quest to avoid pain and as a consequence it’s making us lesser beings and eroding some of our most fundamental characteristics of human nature, particularly compassion for others going through pain and, flowing from this, actions of solidarity – motivated by compassion – to help alleviate others’ pain.

These thoughts were sparked by reading Griefseed, a new book of poetry by South African poet Malika Lueen Ndlovu. In 2003, Ndlovu’s daughter, Iman, was stillborn. The immediate pain of her loss is captured in an earlier book of poetry, Invisible Earthquake, A woman’s journal through still birth (2009).

Griefseed (2025) is a meditation on that pain after it has acquired meaning from time. It is unapologetically about living with grief, a form of acute and chronic pain, and embracing it, rather than continuing to suppress it. As Letting, the first poem in the book, says:

Let the wound weep
mess with your sleep
make you forget
to call or eat

Ndlovu’s poetry, and the prose reflections in which the poems are embedded, reveal that giving in to grief, the pain and paralysis it involves, allowing it, is ultimately liberating.

“Once we begin to get a grasp of its pervasiveness, this paradox of how pain makes you uniquely appreciative of life, we can come to know the light and liberation that grief brings.”

Ndlovu argues that grief helps recalibrate the spirit, tuning our behavior to what matters and is most essential in human life.

I have lived inside Ndlovu’s pain. Thirty years ago we lost our first two children, Joe and Caitlin, at birth in two successive years. A few years later, knowing that pain, the horror of infant death, made it possible for me to feel the pain of mums and dads losing their infants because of preventable HIV infection. Fighting former president Thabo Mbeki over his refusal to allow a national health program to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission using antiretroviral drugs became personal.

We organized grief to break its cause. And we won. Today fewer than 2,000 children per year are born with HIV in South Africa.

Read more: Cape Town study brings hope to newborns left behind in HIV treatment advances

Fake pain

A cultural norm of late capitalism, one espoused by my late father who I suspect spent his life running from the pain he experienced as an orphaned child, is that the poor as well as the precarious middle classes are meant to suck it up: take the slings and arrows of life, but not register or complain about the pain they cause.

“That’s life.”

It’s not.

The problem is that if we mask the pain, we often end up hiding the injury… and the injurer. Although experienced at an individual level, pain is often not personal. It is political. It has systemic origins. We don’t analyze the pain, or rather we leave it to someone else to analyze. We move on.

This ends up making us distant from ourselves and from others.

Today our bipolar world is more divided than ever into those who bear pain and those who can escape it.

Perversely many people willingly expose themselves to pain, watching endless films and TV series that depict violence (which obviously involves pain). However, because our flat screens don’t spill blood, don’t emit the stench of death, muffle the piercing cries of real loss, leave the scene of the crime, we are led to think that pain is painless.

Griefseed, a new book of poetry by South African poet Malika Lueen Ndlovu.

In this way those of us who are safe for the moment (usually a marker of where we sit in the pecking order of class, race and gender inequality) insulate and inoculate ourselves from feeling pain. Over time we transpose the fake world onto the real world and start to fail to distinguish between the two.

We fail to distinguish between real pain and fake pain.

Ironically, we are so close to painless pain that our emotions don’t know what to do with it.

We are made numb and, as British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak keeps trying to tell us, “The opposite of goodness is, in fact, numbness”.

Read more: Literature as empathy: A call for stories that bridge divides, ignite understanding

Can you imagine the real pain of your fellow human beings living in Gaza at the moment? Or in Ukraine or South Sudan? Everything painless is gone.

Gaza is a Petri dish of pain. A captive audience for the infliction of agony. A place of no safety. A place of no privacy. A place where you can’t relax for long enough to go to the toilet, make love, fall in love, have a good night’s sleep.

Gaza is a place where you die for the crime of living while being Palestinian. A place where the old apartheid doctrine of “common purpose” plays out at a population level. Pain is being made banal.

South African poet Stephen Faulkner puts it like this:

Did they hide explosives?
No
Were they terrorists?
No
Did they carry arms?
No
In their hands were bus tickets, shopping lists, maybe a love letter, a novel to read in the queue
A birth certificate, water bottles, two eggs

Faulkner says Gaza is a place where “the heavens heave with hardware”. A place of constant unrelenting fear and disruption. A place where you can’t dream. A place of exhaustion without respite. A place of blood and bodily dismemberment.

A place you can’t escape from.

In other words, a nightmare place. And yet we allow it, watch it every day on our TV screens, keep quiet about it in polite company, avoid taking sides and calling out evil. Move on.

The inequality of pain

Closer to home, can you imagine the pain of the hunger experienced daily by millions of South African children? Or the pain of parents watching their children live with – and sometimes die from – malnutrition?

Obviously not, otherwise why would we allow it to continue to exist when it is so manifestly unjust?

What can we do to counter our numbness to pain?

Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon and others understood that to revolt it was necessary to first liberate black people from mental apartheid, the internalization of slavery and colonialism. Today, to revolt we need to work on regaining “human consciousness” if we are to liberate ourselves from what Achille Mbembe calls the age of “brutalism”.

Strange to say, but maybe we need to reorganize the world around pain, seeing pain, acknowledging pain, preventing pain, tending to pain. We need to stop exposing ourselves to fake pain as a form of relaxation, and instead seek wonder, joy and beauty. We need to look others’ pain in the eye. It would be painful. But that way we would be forced to address the underlying causes of the collapse of our compassion, not continue to mask its symptoms. DM

Thanks to Stephen Faulkner for allowing me to quote from his unpublished poem, Letter to John Berger on his Birthday.

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Fake pain

The inequality of pain