In Lomé, just outside our front door, I witnessed something I will never entirely forget. A Voodoo session. A “cleansing ritual.” A small boy, perhaps five years old. His body trembled with fear. His eyes searched for something to hold on to and found nothing. By chance, I filmed a brief moment as it happened. I never released the footage. There are images that do not belong in the public sphere.
There are moments when language fails—not because it knows too little, but because it has seen too much. And there are names that function like black holes, drawing in every particle of sensation, greed, and moral agitation a society can produce. “Epstein” has become such a name. A magnifying glass. A marketplace. A carnival of outrage.
But why is the woman not heard?
Why is the quiet voice ignored—the one that does not scandalize, does not wave documents, does not point fingers, but simply says: I was there. I saw. I survived. Instead, the onlookers are fed. They are handed morsels—new details, fresh rumors, endless speculation. It is as if the public needs the trembling of others in order to feel alive itself.
Nearly fifty years ago, the trembling wore a different disguise. It was called art.
Taxi Driver—celebrated, awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, nominated multiple times at the Academy Awards—still stands as a monument of American cinema. And yet there is that girl, fourteen years old: Jodie Foster. A child performing acts that do not belong in the space of childhood. It was called courage. It was called brilliant acting. It was praised as an unflinching portrayal of reality.
But what does “reality” mean when it is staged through the body of a child? Who asks about the psychic texture of what is inscribed there? Once, it was considered especially realistic—almost daring—when a child enacted gestures meant to expose the corruption of the world. Audiences applauded the boldness. Hardly anyone asked how such images settle inside a child’s inner life.
Art became a shield.
A friend once wrote to me about a night when her father sat at the edge of her bed. Nothing more—just that image. Years later we sat across from each other, trying to look into one another’s eyes. In hers there was something unspeakable—like a movement trapped inside, a scream that had never been allowed to sound. And suddenly I knew what had happened… to her… to me.
It is not the act alone that destroys. It is the silence that follows. The looking away. The reinterpretation.
Why do men become violent? Why do women? Why do some lash out, why do some flee? Why do some retreat into other identities as if into a shelter? One only has to examine the fragments—the remnants of rituals that lie like shards in memory. One must look at what they themselves have endured. Then it becomes clear that what appears as aggression is often an act of survival.
And the onlookers?
This new community of the digital grandstand stands at the edge of every abyss—not to help, but to see more clearly. It consumes horror like dessert. Perhaps that is the true misery: that even suffering is monetized, that even silence is exploited. And somewhere, a woman sits who does not scream. She only wants to be heard.
What I saw—what I partially filmed back then while walking through our neighborhood and stumbling upon that Voodoo session—remains with me. There are images that do not belong in the public sphere.