Aylan Kurdi Through the Lens of Nilufer Demir
We are a product of our actions. When we buy a coffee for the person behind us in the drive-thru we become an extra in the background of their scene, a caring coffee character that gets them through the day. We can think of those around us living their own storylines, with us as supporting actors who help them fight evil or get the girl. But what happens when we are exposed to the horrors of another person’s storyline? To the devastating and unjust ending of a character's life? Do we blame the storyteller? or ourselves for being too invested in what our own ending will be like?
Aylan Kurdi did not get to tell his own story. He did not get to meet all his supporting characters or a happy ending where he rode off into the sunset with the love of his life, we do not look at his life as a fairy tale. Instead, we see it as a defining moment in change, a measurement of how we have wronged others who deserved a chance to tell their own stories. However, we would not know about Aylan Kurdi if it weren’t for photojournalist Nilufer Demir. In early September of 2015, a photo taken by Demir of a small child’s body washed ashore was scattered across headlines, it was with this photo that the world was exposed to the life of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi (Durham, 2018). Kurdi and his family had been attempting to escape Turkey when their boat began to sink, the only member of his family who survived was his father Abdullah (Raghavan & Tharoor, 2015). Demir became the narrator of Aylan Kurdi’s life with one photo. The photo became a symbol of the refugee crisis and posed as a visual to inspire our world leaders to make the necessary change (Raghavan & Tharoor, 2015). But many questioned if Demir had the right to tell Kurdi’s story? If posting that photo was met with intentions of care for Kurdi’s story?
I think that Demir acted as a storyteller to more than just Aylan Kurdi. Sharing that photo allowed for those with similar lifelines to be heard, for the leaders of our world to bookmark their own stories and begin to glance at the pages of those unlike them. If I was allowed to share a story in the way that Demir has I would have acted the same way. The publication of Demir’s picture helped to provoke outrage and attention to other refugees with the same story as Kurdi, to give a voice to the voiceless (Durham, 2018). However, I do believe that some people were hurt in the process. Aylan Kurdi’s father survived the accident, living to mourn the loss of his family in the public eye (Raghavan & Tharoor, 2015). He was not allowed to grieve in peace and to know that he would have seen this image of his son is heartbreaking. Even though Demir intended to right the Kurdi family by sharing their story, she wronged them by showing a lack of care for their privacy.
We cannot write without first knowing how to read, we cannot make change without identifying the problem and we cannot inspire without being inspired. Without Demir’s picture we might not have learned about the life of Aylan Kurdi, we might not have been exposed to outcomes of refugee life and we might not have been ignited to create change. Aylan Kurdi and others just like him deserve to tell their own stories and hopefully, he has inspired change that will give those stories a fairy tale ending.
Durham, M. G. (2018). Resignifying Alan Kurdi: News photographs, memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35(3), 240–258, DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2017.1408958
Raghavan, S., & Tharoor, I. (2015, September 3). The saga of the Syrian family whose 3-year-old turned up dead on a Turkish beach. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-saga-of-the-syrian-family-whose-3-year-old-turned-up-dead-on-a-turkish-beach/2015/09/03/4a82ed56-5251-11e5-b225-90edbd49f362_story.html