Apa yang orang lain lihat tentang diri mereka dan bagaimana mereka membayangkan diri mereka dilihat oleh orang lain mempunyai kaitan dengan identiti diri kolektif, dan hubungan antara diri dengan Yang Lain boleh wujud dalam bentuk dualisme, atau pandangan yang berempati boleh mencabar kecenderungan tersebut. Kita meneliti puisi I. Dharker, ‘The Right Word’.179 Dari dalam bingkai seorang penyerang yang bermusuhan, muncullah seorang mangsa yang rentan. Kita dihadapkan dengan kesedaran yang linear dalam puisinya tentang seorang budak lelaki yang gambarannya dalam suara puitis belum sepenuhnya difahami, “I see his face. No words can help me now/Just outside the door,/lost in shadows,/is a child who looks like mine.” Yang menyusul ialah satu kesedaran, satu penerimaan. Walaupun imej kanak-kanak itu beralih daripada seorang pengganas, seorang pejuang kebebasan, seorang militan bermusuh kepada seorang pejuang gerila, kanak-kanak yang ‘lost in shadows’ itu dimanusiakan melalui kod pengiktirafan, iaitu persamaan fizikal. Pemisahan daripada imej yang dikenakan ke atas budak lelaki itu kepada imej diri sendiri yang ditemui pada budak lelaki itulah yang membolehkan si penutur mempertimbangkan semula prasangka lamanya tentang budak itu dan dunia tempat dia datang. Penyair mengajar bahawa jika kita tidak terlalu cepat menghakimi, mungkin orang tidak perlu hidup sesuai dengan label yang kita berikan kepada mereka, “I open the door./Come in, I say./Come in and eat with us./The child steps in/and carefully, at my door,/takes off his shoes.” Dehumanisasi ialah pengaburan perbezaan, menjadikan Yang Lain sebagai tanpa wajah, dan berbeza daripada kita. Seperti yang telah dibincangkan, kebangkitan peperangan dron di langit kita hari ini, peperangan udara dikawal dari jauh, telah melahirkan satu mod pembunuhan yang tidak berperikemanusiaan, iaitu dehumanisasi, jarak dan keterasingan. Chamayou dalam Drone Theory menjelaskan: “Thousands of miles can now be interposed between the trigger on which one’s finger rests and the cannon from which the cannonball will fly.”180 Mekanisme dehumanisasi dan cara ia mengkhianati kebenaran hati nurani manusia dalam penentangan dirinya yang dipaksakan untuk ‘berpaling’ daripada apa yang terdapat pada ‘dirinya’ sebelum dirinya sendiri. Yang terakhir ini tergambar di sebuah kem tahanan Jepun semasa Perang Dunia Kedua:
What others see of themselves and how they imagine themselves being seen have a bearing on collective self-identity and relationships between self and Other can exist in a binary, or empathic outlooks can challenge those tendencies. We look upon I. Dharker’s poem, ‘The Right Word’.179 Out of a frame of a hostile aggressor emerges a vulnerable victim. We are confronted with a linear realisation in her poem concerning a boy whose description in the oetic voice has not been fully discerned, “I see his face. No words can help me now/Just outside the door,/lost in shadows,/is a child who looks like mine.” What follows is a realisation, an acceptance. Though the image of the child traverses from a terrorist, a freedom-fighter, a hostile militant to a guerrilla warrior, the child who was ‘lost in shadows’ is humanised through a code of recognition, a physical similarity. It is this separation from an image imputed onto the boy to an image of oneself found in the boy that enabled the speaker to reconsider her previous prejudices about the boy and the world from which he arises. The poet teaches that if we were less quick to judge perhaps people would not have to live up to the labels that we give them, “I open the door./Come in, I say./Come in and eat with us./The child steps in/and carefully, at my door,/takes off his shoes.” Dehumanisation is a blurring of distinctions, a rendering of Others as faceless, and unlike ourselves. As discussed, the rise of drone warfare in our skies today, of remote-controlled air war, has generated a new mode of depersonalised killings, of dehumanisation, distance and detachment. Chamayou in Drone Theory explained: “Thousands of miles can now be interposed between the trigger on which one’s finger rests and the cannon from which the cannonball will fly.”180 The mechanism of dehumanisation and the way it betrays the trueness of human conscience in its forcible self-antagonising to ‘look away’ from what lies of ‘itself’ before itself. The latter is reflected here in a Japanese prison camp during World War II: