When the news breaks, what does it break?

We are surer about the news than we are about the story – news must come from outside, the story might have found its way into the world from the inside. The provenance of the story or the poem or song has always been a bit ambiguous – the reason one often asks a writer where it ‘came from’. We’ve never had to wonder about the birth certificate of ‘news’. This binary, between the worldly origin of news and the slightly mystical – if not mystified – birth of something that’s ‘made up’, we were aware of intuitively, until news began to ‘break’. On Doordarshan, the only television channel in India until the early 1990s, there was never any ‘breaking news’. Socialist India did not have permission to break anything – the sound of a glass breaking in the kitchen would hang like a damp rag for days in most houses; the news was read with politeness and care, its tone and pitch not very different from a priest’s enunciation of the mantras. The television set was a quieter planet – nothing could break inside it, not even news.

The ’breaking’ of ‘breaking news’ comes from the history of the physical layout of newspapers – the insertion of an urgent story that’s just come in, that forces a ‘breaking’ of the planned layout of the page. It would find its equivalent in radio and, soon enough, in television, where regular programming would be interrupted by the sharing of an urgent bulletin, a ‘breaking into’. The phrasal verb reveals a kind of gasping energy, like a gust that might break through a window. Right from the beginning, the word has been associated with varying degrees of violence. Looking at this etymological life, of words gradually coming to sit beside ‘break’, one grows aware of a history of fear of the outside, an attack from it on what we call ‘inside’.

The elements, trees, animals, people, buildings, objects inside them – individually or in various combinations can cause breakage. We can also break them all, all besides the elements, of course. This breaking is not soundless. In these sounds is a history of resistance offered by us and them; a history of the outside, its speed and intensity, a calibration of its violence. I suppose it is an impress and anticipation of all of these that are summed up in a phrase such as ‘breaking news’.

Stories and poems break too. Their origin is suspect, as is their intention. We presume that they come from ‘somewhere deep inside’, a phrase that is as apocryphal as it is mystifying. Outside the causality that marks the news cycle, a relay race of alertness, attention, and action, the information in a poem confuses. We can’t recognise it often, and, when we can, we don’t know what to do with it. Take the poem ‘Breaking [News]’, written by Noor Hindi, a Palestinian-American poet. It begins with news about news: ‘We’ll wake up, Sunday morning, and read the paper. Read each other./Become consumers/of each other’s stories...’

Consumption is a unidirectional journey, from the outside to the inside, the route of news and food. These lines are followed immediately by ‘a desperate reaching/for another body’s warmth – its words buoying us through a world’. The difference in directions, between news to the consumer and the reaching for the warmth of a human body, emphasises something else – that news might not only be in ‘words’ and accompanying images but also in the wordless. Why is it that we do not recognise this, the ‘desperate reaching’ and ‘another body’s warmth’, as news?

The other words that follow become news – how can ‘graveyards on our backs’, coming from a Palestinian poet, not? We slide into the making of news: ‘In interviews, I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible/to consumers’. I pause to notice the word ‘frame’. Just a few lines before this was ‘reaching out’, a breaking out of the frame. Could it be true that what is called ‘breaking news’ must also be tamed within a frame, that it’s actually an illusion, the belief that only what breaks the geometry of the expected is categorised as ‘news’?

I pause at another word: ‘digestible’. The digestive system, a secret of our inside, when tamed by metaphor, becomes a controllable thing, ‘digestible’, in a way we can’t be certain about the food that enters our gullet. ‘I become a machine. A transfer of information./...What’s lost is incalculable’. I suppose it’s the ‘incalculable’ that cannot become ‘news’, the reason our internal bulletins cannot be broadcast? The poem ends with swimming pools that ‘will be gutted of water’; ‘it’ll be impossible to swim’. That’s the thing about insides – whether gut or ‘gutted’, they don’t break into news.

The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials.