Today I saw Riz Ahmed’s “The Long Goodbye” for the first time.
Watching it, something I’ve been holding back for days, seeing the outrageous cruelty in Karachi and Jerusalem, burst forth. Something visceral about the destruction of homes. Some unwritten sacred thing that I hold dear undergoing the ugliest and most vile violation.
I feel it physically in my body; cold and sick and feverish all at the same time. I feel as though I don’t have the barrier of my own skin against the horror of the world. Something about “bare life” is echoing in my mind on repeat, an understanding of a visceral vulnerability that I have never been able to articulate.
For weeks at work we’ve been talking about experiential filmmaking. A film that elicits a physiological emotive response, beyond the realm of cerebral understanding and misunderstanding. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I want to make art that unsettles. I want to make art that sits in your bones. I felt this film in my gut, in the back of my throat, at the edge of my skin.
This is what art that confronts does; it yanks you out of your skin.
And so here I am, thinking about Palestine again.
With Palestine I have never been able to wrap my head around the sheer undeniable injustice of it. The brazen, blatant, beghairati of the zionist project. How can a family of otherwise ordinary people steal a home. How can one enter a space populated with pictures, clothes that carry the scent of skin, food still warm on the table - and just occupy it? Who could live in a home with ghosts like these. I want to ask - do they not haunt you? Do you hear the singing when you try to sleep? Listen closely, it is a song of return - it is only ever the song of return.
I used to think about the zionist narrative of abandonment. As hollow as it is, that amounted to a justification through which one could delude oneself if so inclined. But what new hell is this? To look human beings in the face, to pull them out of their homes with your own hands, to see their resisting, protesting, unrelenting humanity up close - how does one face that and continue? I imagine the answer lies in a loss, the inability to recognize what one does not have.
There are so many painful parts to this story.
Palestinians who have to foot the bill of the demolitions of their own homes. Palestinians and humans of conscience who put their own bodies in between bulldozers and buildings to no avail. Palestinians, standing on Palestinian land, labelled “present absentees.” How can a human being be both present and absent? This is the magic trick bestowed upon Palestinians by Israel. People who are and not simultaneously. People who do not exist but exist enough to be a problem, enough to need to be eradicated. How does a person, standing there in flesh and bone, in the entirety of their corporeal humanness, prove the fact of their material existence? Indignity upon absurd indignity. The facts of the occupation constitute such gross, absurd injustices that nothing written or said can contain them.
I do not want to speak or write, I want to grab you and shake you because look, look - there is nothing here that requires explaining. Do you not have eyes that see? Do you not feel, in your very bones, right from wrong?
This is why words fail me now.
I was twelve (?) thirteen (?) when I started to learn the history of Palestine. It was inconceivable to me that such blatant injustice could go on. Inconceivable to a child that any human being with a beating heart would not just see the naked truth of what was happening. But as the years go by, the abuses continue. They grow, mutate, into new unrecognizable horrors. The magnitude of it shrinks one into silence, into hopelessness.
And yet. That is not an option. Even now, when we all know what is happening, corporate overlords that govern the entire domain of online life delete Palestinian after Palestinian–delete Palestine–off the Internet. One must speak. This is a project of disappearance. Since the very beginning, it has always been a project of disappearance.
“They do not exist.”
“A land without a people for a people without a land.”
“The old will die and the young will forget.”
That last one comes from the first Israeli prime minister, consolidator of zionist terrorist forces, architect of ethnic cleansing, Ben-Gurion, in 1948.
And yet, over 70 years later, they exist. They remember.
The same rubble that is the destroyed Palestinian home is both memory and resistance when flung in the face of the colonizer, the occupier. What is the name for the one who commits genocide? We have named the acts: massacre, ethnic cleansing, genocide - what is the name of the one who commits them? I want to name them for what they are. To name a thing for what it is, so that it cannot be obfuscated, so that it may be confronted, seems to me incredibly important in a narrative full of cowardly lies. The act does not occur without the actors - why don’t we have a name for the perpetrators of the worst horrors that humanity has ever seen? I could not find a word in English but, apparently, the French have one. To name those responsible for massacres in Rwanda: génocidaire. Telling in some ways, the English refuse to name what they do, the French, in their tradition of delusion, believe they are not involved.
There are other zionist delusions as well. They forget about us. The other wretched of the earth, the other colonized peoples of the world. They forget that we remember too. As long as the memory of colonization persists, zionism will not win. As long as the colonized resist, zionism can not win. The settler colonial state of Israel operates under the impression that the enemy is Palestine, they fail to understand the enemy is every last person with a zinda zameer still breathing on the face of this earth.
I have a lot of anger today. I have a lot of pain. How dare you look into a Palestinian mother’s face, after you’ve dragged her out of her home, and raise a single, miserable finger against her. How dare you step one filthy boot inside al-Aqsa. The wretched of the earth do not disappear this easy. There will always be a reckoning. Whether God’s or Benjamin’s, whether karma or the peoples’ righteous revolutionary anger, there will always be judgement day – it will be a mirror, and you will tremble when you see your face in it.
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