Hala Alyan in The Guardian: ‘I am not there and I am not here’: a Palestinian American poet on bearing witness to atrocity

‘The thing about diaspora is that the option of looking away is a trick mirror – doing it is never a relief.’ Illustration: Samin Ahmadzadeh/Elena Mudd/The Guardian/Hala Alyan/Getty Images

 For months, I’ve watched devastation from five thousand miles away. But what is the task of the diasporic witness?

Hala Alyan

Sun 28 Jan 2024 09.00 EST

A few weeks ago, I got an upper molar filling at one of those hip dental practices targeted towards millennials, all green tiles and personalized screens. In the dental chair, I watched an Anthony Bourdain episode on Beirut, then lunged for my phone as soon as I was alone.

For months, I’ve watched hundreds of clips of dead children. Men with their limbs blown off. Babies whose faces are covered in burns. Mothers cradling white-shrouded children. These children, these babies and men, are somewhere I’ve never been, somewhere my father was born, somewhere my grandparents, my uncles, my great-grandparents, lived for years. For months, I’ve watched American officials scrunch their foreheads in consternation at press conferences. My dissociation has become more norm than exception: I walk down Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn as though I’m gliding, as though someone is transporting my body through sheer will. I enter rooms and freeze, stop speaking mid-sentence, forgetting where I’d begun. My grief is dormant during the day, masked by alternating helplessness and frenetic bursts of energy.

The exiled has the option to look away, but that option is only an illusion: to look away is to further disconnect yourself

In the millennial dentist office, my fingers moved like their own orchestra: the swipe, the tapped bright pink heart icon, the hungry scroll through stories. This was during the ceasefire and the stories were about what was being discovered: clips of destruction, people finding their dead. This story was about the Gaza zoo. It showed a baboon starved to death. It showed a wolf whimpering and darting around in circles in fear. The animals, the zookeeper told us, were nearly all dead. The ones that remained were terrified from the bombings. They wouldn’t let us get to the animals for weeks, he said. One of the zoo staff had been shot trying. There was a close-up on a trio of Palestinian foxes, flies swatting around them. The bodies were gathered together. Their eyes were ajar. Dead.

~

The foxes shake my grief awake. I’d forgotten about zoos. I’d forgotten about animals. I let out a sob so loud someone knocks on the door to see if something is wrong. Everything OK? the technician says when I emerge. It is no longer clear where is safe to grieve Palestinian life, even Palestinian foxes, so I shake my head. Just a long day, I say in my perfect American accent.

~

“Where would history be without the witness?”...READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/28/gaza-palestine-grief-essay-poetry

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES or quotes or watch videos IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]