This footage is not history, this is me, this is embodied, it’s not leaving
*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism
(*artwork by Incé Husain)
There are no words. There cannot be. I am distinctly non-verbal. I am only a stream of images that fuse time and space into a singular vessel of genocide. I’m enclosed in this fusion. I see and hear nothing else.
I watch the documentaries made of Bisan and Ahmad’s footage, the clock beginning again from October 7th, rapid, two years smashed into streams of 30 second reels. Ahmad Alive. Bisan.
The place where words come to me is a void. It bleeds itself blind. It cannot speak, pause, object, comment. It is not fast enough for the footage.
It can recognize.
Dimly, I recognize: yes, I’ve seen this bleeding explosion-blackened child. I’ve seen these cream-coloured buildings crumble to blasts of carpet bombs beneath a blue sky. I’ve seen this teddy bear in the ashy rubble. I’ve seen this journalist film this hospital with the floor that is sinks of blood. I’ve seen this bombing from this angle with these pitches of screams and upturned documenting phones. I remember these journalists smiling, playing with children, greeting friends, infusing joy in a land forcibly sprawling with tents and displacement. I remember Bisan saying “now, I have no fear”. I saw it all live on Instagram. I remember, I was there, minutes before it was breaking news, before it was packaged into documentary.
Bisan talks about the student encampments with eyes full of light and says “I have never felt hope like now”. I remember this, I listened live, I quoted her exact words in an article called “And if we don’t get it - SHUT IT DOWN”, before Rafah was stormed, before the banner “Eyes on Rafah” streamed over my stone campus. Footage of student protesters floods. Lawns, chants, police. I scream silently into my fist. I was there, this was me, I was screaming, I was writing, I was trying. I sob, silently, so hard my eyes can’t stay open and I resurrect all the images I missed with the sounds of chants and bombs. I can taste the air, feel the grass, feel the banner in my fingers, feel the tatreez thread, see the clusters of people that felt like a turbulent sanctuary, who I embraced without knowing their names, who I clung to, who became the tether of my sanity, who were humorous, lively, furious, exhausted, building new life in a transient, threatened lawn; they roar back to life with a rawness where I can feel their warmth, voices, movements, clogging real space around me with a heaviness, as if I’d missed the tangibleness of us while I was a piece of them, as if my sight was half-blind, seeing what I thought we would do rather than what we were; I thrummed in this haze trying to hold it and document it while I also became it in my own way. I was clinging and afraid of clinging; I was sincere and dissociated; I was exactly as I always was, trying to be bold and kind and battling random bursts of shyness, focusing on what I ought to do rather than what I felt; my instincts were sharp and clear, I have never known myself better.
This footage is not history, this is me, this is embodied, it’s not leaving. I demand of the future: do not put this footage behind a glass casing and call it the past. It never will be. Do not drag me back there as if it happened and it’s done and it’s severed from me and everyone I know.
To see myself in a 30 second clip on a screen imposes a distance and a severance that is untrue. It is like an out of body experience, like I’m dying and floating away out of my life. I want to scream as if it will fuse me back to my body again, fuse me back to the lawn. Drag me back, don’t drag me back; I want to remember the pieces that are muddy, the pieces they will call history, to find the continuity that turned one encampment day steadily into the next. Even when I reread my piece documenting the encampment’s first seven days, there is an aversion, as if I don’t believe it happened, as if I made some mistake, as if there is an insistent chance that this is some second parallel realm that was just a test for me, that cannot interact with or be the real world. When the edges of my vision start to blacken, this is what I think “no, it can’t be real, it would make no sense.” Even the photos I took are bleached of colour; I have to blink, focus. I think of all the logistics that made the mechanisms of the encampments, the trivial things that would not be remarkable if put together any other way, that gave the encampments a mundaneness - group chats, food, books, metal rods in fabric tents, soccer balls, paints and cardstock. These were the gears, basic. The identity was who we were, not all of what we did to make it function.
Yes, this was Rafah. This was ceasefire. This was Israel’s breakage of ceasefire. This was Bisan, who I quoted over and over. These were my two years in London. I write, repeatedly, “London is a wound, London is a wound, I don’t want to return”.
London is a wound. It is and it cannot be. It is because I was fused with all this imagery, always, while dreaming and waking and trying to eat, and I was not permitted, ever, to claim this state in professional life, to give voice to rupture without hiding, without packaging myself into palatable boxes. It cannot be a wound, ever, because London is safe: I will not die overnight. I cannot compare it to a wound when I have seen crueller wounds.
What do I do with this urgency? If my body bursts, will I finally feel sufficient?
***
London is metaphorical. I sniff my shampoo and conditioner: please, let coconut smell like coconut again and not the encampments. I walk across the grass: please, let the lawn be a lawn again and not a rupture. The streets, the buses, the circuitry of campus buildings - they suffocate, they scream “shut me down”.
I learned of the Srebrenica genocide. I heard Omar Suleiman say “they were killed only because they were Muslim.” I see a cemetery full of white graves, new stones erected to this day as more bodies are freshly buried, discovered from the genocide of thirty years ago. Some mothers didn’t even find bones. Thousands of mosques destroyed. Children lured from the forests into executions.
I think about how I knew none of this, how I take for granted the things I did know, the knowledge I didn’t work for that was woven into my upbringing. How being Muslim was always simple, how I never associated it with being a target. How it was always about festivity, love, discipline, pure heartedness, mysticism, and the conviction that things will fall into place as they’re meant to, about things so elemental that there was nothing to explain. Even now, if people were to ask me, what does it mean to be a Muslim? I would draw a blank. I would retort: What does it mean to be anyone? I know this is not a good answer. I know there exists a technical answer, a family answer, a political answer, a scholarly answer. These are layers I can lather onto myself, accept and discuss and enrich and wield. But the embodiment of Muslim, for me, is too simple to even name. It is not different from anything else; it is just a people. It reminds me of what Omar Suleiman said about Srebrenica: “this three year old girl didn’t know why she was killed”.
***
What do these reactions mean for me, as a journalist? Do they strengthen? Do they shamefully paralyze?
It is a choice. I must wield them all. I must not let them make me stagnant. I must choose my rituals wisely - when to cry, when to write, when to do both at once, when to lie down and rest. I must time myself, must plan, find the right method for the moment.
The implications are many. It means I don’t document anything I don’t feel. It means I am sincere about how I relate to my documentation. It means that I fall into two orbits: I am the news because I see the news in the faces around me even if I don’t check a single headline; I am less so the news because I don’t hold all this in my body, I witness it from my own web.
I can only offer sincerity: what I can and can’t do, what I can and can’t embody, what I am close to and what I have distance from, what I can understand intuitively and what I am severed from, the gaps in my literature, what is inescapably clear to me, the promise that I will always strive but I cannot fully escape the life that led me here and its ties, that I will sharpen and wield what I am. I will hold all I can, and what I lose, inshallah, will be held by someone else. ♦