Death on the Treadmill TV

Rereading Teju Cole's 'Death in the Browser Tab'

-Ashley Allard

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It is a couple days after the anniversary of October 6 that I go to the gym. I go alone today. I go to the treadmills. It is three o’clock in the afternoon and the gym is mostly empty.

On the treadmill screen, a body of a Palestinian woman is being carried by three men, her pink dress trails along the floor, a child clutches at the hem. Headlines blare across the screen in violent yellow and red and then there are missiles flying and crashing and buildings crumbling to ruin. I haven’t seen a fully-intact Gazan building since viral coverage began. It is difficult to imagine that there were any to begin with.

I click on start and go onto full screen, blocking the pictures of lined-up body bags and children with missing limbs. Instead the screen shows my heartrate, calories and speed. I pretend that what I am doing is better than watching a live-streamed genocide while I do my cardio.

Published in 2015, Cole writes about the filmed deaths of Walter Scott and Tamir Rice, among other victims of American police brutality, in his New York Times essay ‘Death in the Browser Tab’. The public spectacle of death is something that has shadowed humanity since the Vietnam War, the first televised conflict in our history. In fact, Cole’s essay captions the Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of the Vietnamese general, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, fatally shooting the Viet Cong commander, Nguyen Van Lem in the head.

“But when you see death mediated in this way, pinned down with such dramatic flair, the star is likely to be death itself and not the human who dies. The fact that a photograph exists of a man being shot in the head in Vietnam is easier to remember than Lem’s biography or even his name.” – Teju Cole

George Floyd’s murder was filmed and quickly went viral, news articles attaching the clip (sometimes blurred, sometimes not) in the body of the text. “I recognised the political importance of the videos I had seen, but it had also felt like an intrusion when I watched them: intruding on the grief of those for whom the deaths were much more significant, and intruding, too, on my own personal but unarticulated sense of right and wrong”, Cole writes. Everyone has born witness to these deaths, willingly and unwillingly.

And you can make the case that it is important to do so: Especially if these deaths are the direct cause of whiteness, it is important that white people are educated on the subject matter, recognising the brutality and violence that comes with upholding and supporting systemic forms of colonialism and supremacy. No longer is it possible to ‘turn a blind eye’, to claim ignorance. But, simultaneously, it is the end of someone’s life, someone’s murder, that has been uploaded, commented on and reposted. Even liked. There is a sort of violence in that, too.

Death has become casual viewing. Clips of war crimes are cut into Instagram reels and proof of genocide is projected onto everyone’s flat-screen TV; its inundating frequency and unedited nature makes it almost laughable that some people still believe there are sides to be chosen, that broadcasted evidence can be debated or even denied. It is ironically similar to another historical event…

When I finish my run, I click stop and the screen takes a couple of seconds before switching back to the news. Again, I see hospital ruins and overpopulated refugee camps. I see families falling to their knees at the edges of bloodied white sheets. It is something I have seen, in the past year, over and over.

I know that thousands of children have been killed. I know none of their names. I see the lists, containing the names of victims of the genocide, but I doubt anyone has read them; unless, of course, you are looking for someone particular.

The videographic afterimage of a real event is always peculiar. When the event is a homicide, it can cross over into the uncanny: the sudden, unjust and irrevocable end of the long story of what one person was, whom he loved, all she hoped, all he achieved, all she didn’t, becomes available for viewing and reviewing. – Teju Cole

I go to Checkers after the gym, picking up bread and strawberry yoghurt. I line up in the Ten Items or Less queue, impatiently waiting to return to my life outside the mall. At counter three, I see a girl dance around the hem of her mother’s dress. She wears the same pale pink leotard and mesh skirt I would wear to my ballet classes when I was her age. She has hot pink leg warmers that climb up her shins, her hair is tied back into a tight bun. Sometimes, she strays from her mother and does a little pirouette, showing her younger sister what she has learned. Her sister tries to copy her. Then I see their brother, so small he can’t walk without holding onto the metal divider, try the same. He looks up to his sisters; he will be taught that this is shameful and embarrassing. I see them, their whole lives ahead, and think of the lists and the numbers tallied up. I wonder how many Palestinian children have been robbed of this mundanity; of standing in the grocery line, doing spins for the cashiers and climbing over the mall benches, waiting for mom to swipe her card. I have a rough number in my head, but it never stays the same.

In the Uber on the way home, we stop at a red light. I stare up at the robot; help is written in fading green letters on the pole.

I start to watch footage of Scott’s last moments. It’s the third time, and it makes me uneasy and unhappy. The video begins with the man holding the camera racing toward the fence. A few seconds later, Walter Scott breaks away from Michael Slager. Slager plants his feet and raises his gun. There is still time. He shoots once, then thrice in quick succession. Scott continues to run. There is still time. That is when I stop the video and exit the browser. – Teju Cole