CONTENT NOTE
Gurmeet Kaur’s ‘A Glossary of Grief’ makes mention of the Afghan Civil War; genocide, apartheid, occupation, and colonisation of Palestinian people at the hands of the state of Israel; censorship; bombing, the killing of babies, children, and people; arrests and imprisonment, the dehumanisation of Palestinian people; the regime of Israel, and western imperialism. The piece features depictions of grief and trauma.
On day two of the attacks on Gaza, I am at Melbourne Fringe to see Stéphanie Ghajar’s Zaffé. A wedding party set in Beirut, Zaffé was an immersive theatrical experience navigating the permeable borders between celebration and loss. There are jokes and gossip, long-distance video calls, singing, and dancing.
When the dabke starts, I think of my parents’ wedding in the middle of the Afghan Civil War in 1991. There’s a VCR tape of them dancing on the roof of their Kabul apartment, fresh faced and expectant. You wouldn’t think anything sinister was taking place beyond the apartment walls. Their city would change dramatically in the months to come.
There’s a moment towards the end of Zaffé when the power goes out. The party continues in darkness but the mood changes: we remember Beirut 2020. In this way, grief and joy coexist in this world as life persists. Though the play found a route through loss, I am finding it difficult to write about grief. As the performance finished, we were led by actors down the fire-escape. A sombre reality check of the events in Gaza hit the audience.
Language. At a Palestine rally, there are thousands of us, voices chanting with conviction, electric with anger. My throat burns. There is a metallic taste in my mouth I can’t locate the source of. Maybe it’s grief, leaking. I see children handed megaphones; children proud to be leading anti-occupation, pro-Palestine slogans. Something swells in me. I want to cry that the children are here and not playing on a Sunday afternoon; I want to cry that the children are here, marching for the children of Gaza. The pressure on my chest is heavy with history.
Cognitive Dissonance. In my early 20s, I saw Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah perform in Camden, London. In ‘We teach life, sir’,[i] she talks about a journalist who, speaking to her after the ‘bombs were dropping over Gaza’, asks her not to mention words like apartheid and occupation, and instead requests a ‘human story’, not a ‘political story’, so that they are better able to help her.
Depoliticisation and dehumanisation go hand in hand. On mainstream western media, every Palestinian spokesperson is asked to condemn Hamas, the question stripping them of their humanity before they have even begun to speak. The double bind registers as suffocating–how to condemn a political entity fighting for liberation against the violence of the Israeli settler colony? And if no condemnation is uttered, then you too are censored or labelled angry, brute, terrorist.
On social media, I see the Israeli Defense Force carpet bomb ‘safe havens’ in direct contravention of international law: hospitals, refugee camps, schools. Videos of children wishing they had been martyred with their families so they don’t feel the pain of survival. Electricity, gas, water, internet, and food, all cut off from occupied territories. Thousands buried under rubble. West Bank civilians and activists arrested and imprisoned. How can the west doubt so much violence? How can we watch a genocide live on Instagram and still give Israel a blank cheque for apocalyptic brutality?
Hell. An acronym emerges in Gaza: WCNSF. Wounded Child No Surviving Family.
Everything feels sharper now, like sucking a lemon. No one at work wants to talk about this so they avoid conversing at all. There is a charge to these behaviours––how someone averts their gaze or smiles to the answer of ‘I’m okay’, not wanting more. This is the colonial logic of silencing. I hear stories of censorship and apathy in workplaces; a friend is told to take a ‘neutral’ stance in a situation where the only two sides are coloniser and colonised. It’s clear what is being neutralised.
A photo appears of Israeli Defense Forces raising an Israeli flag at Al-Shifa Hospital after killing premature babies in incubators, then leaving their bodies to rot for weeks. Where do we begin to map this mourning?
Collective Memory. This did not start on 7 October 2023. There is the Balfour Declaration 1917. Jallianwala Bagh 1919. Mau Mau Uprising 1952. Lebanon War 1982. Brereton Report 2020. Iraq 2003. January 26 1788. My Lai 1968. Soweto 1976. Partition 1947. Syria 2011. Nakba 1948. The land is thick with memory.
Afterwards. There’s this theory of grief by Tonkin called Growing Around Grief.[ii] It visually depicts how grief doesn’t shrink but how we enlarge around grief over time while it itself remains the same size.
If this is true, how will we be able to confront our complicity when all this is over? That we found a way to hold all the massacres and barbarity by increasing our capacity? That we worked around the grief to continue our lives? That those we know who believed state propaganda, and enabled the dismemberment of humanity, compelled us to accept dissonance?
I refuse to hold this much grief and grow around it. To normalise this. Though the loss will be interminable, let it wrap around the whole of us, shroud us in its haunting so that we forever remain tender enough to bear witness.
Disassociation. I’ve been sleeping a lot. Naps puncture each day, slicing time into fragments. I write this essay in fragments too––it feels impossible to think through a linear thread. Friends tell me they can’t sleep or they cry every morning for each new depravity that the Israeli Defense Forces bring, funded and armed by the US, the UK, Europe, Australia, and all of Israel’s allies. The R9X Hellfire missile has six rotating blades that slice through its targets. This missile was fired into Al-Shifa Hospital.[iii] There is no safe haven. There are too many of these stories.
Resistance. At the rally, there are overlapping chants from every side, as if to pause is to betray the cause. Silence is collusion so we keep chanting until our bodies are full with sound. There’s a moment when a drum appears. Someone begins to play the zurna. A circle forms and we are chanting for a free Palestine, for intifada, building a kind of kinship. It doesn’t make any sense that we can dance and demand a free Palestine at the same time.
But as the children of Gaza face abhorrent conditions, they too smile through it. In Ziadah’s poem, Palestinians ‘teach the rest of the world life’ even under 75 years of occupation and apartheid. And this witnessing moves me through the grief as civil society challenges the deranged regime of Israel and western imperial world order that imposes apartheid in occupied territories of Palestine.
[i] Rafeef Ziadah, ‘We teach life, sir’, performance on 12 November 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM.
[ii] What’s Your Grief, ‘Growing Around Grief’, 7 June 2021, What’s Your Grief website, https://whatsyourgrief.com/growing-around-grief/.
[iii] TRT World, post on X (formerly Twitter) with video, 10 November 2023, https://twitter.com/trtworld/status/1722959564671156331.