BJ Silcox

It's just to witness it.

They tell me what wrong is, they tell me what right is, and they ask me to watch it happen.

There's no sense of me working out where the moral complexities are.

There's no sense of me thinking about

whether or not I could make different decisions, whether or not I think society should or could work differently.

In a sense, it has the moral complexity of a cowboy film.

There are the people in the white hats and the people in the black hats, and we know where our allegiances are meant to lie.

And I think when we're trying to understand violence in our society, particularly now when we have a far greater understanding of just how systemic violence is,

that it isn't aberrant, that it isn't monsters acting upon a child, when it's in fact an entire culture of silence that allows violence to happen.

We have an opportunity and a responsibility to look at the system that produced the violence and not to attribute it to a single aberrant human mind.

I interviewed the wonderful Australian author Chrissy Neen about this, and she said the best books, the ones that endure, the ones that have

Lives outside of their own time are the ones that create a space for a conversation between a reader and the writer, that ask you to come in, to make your own judgments, to have a conversation with the book.

And when you're, in a sense, locked behind glass, watching an atrocity unfold, and you don't have a space to talk with that book, to converse with it,

you in a sense feel both locked out and locked in.

And that's the feeling I had difficulty with.

Absolutely.

And one of my great discomforts

as a reader, as a critic, as a writer, is grappling with that question.

I think what I wanted to come out of this conversation was purely a space in which we say art has consequences.

It has consequences when we valorise performing hurt.