Keeping on Vigilant
Between these sunny summer days, the occasional outings with friends and family, and daily jaunts to the gym, I unlock my phone to witness images of horror, anguish, and grief from lands far, far away. I scroll endlessly through reels and images that range between activism, memes, Palestine, literary interests, food, and I cling desperately onto my recently discovered radicalism to world politics, injustices, and histories. Sadly, such radicalism has often desaturated my immediate present experience in a way that almost polices the way I navigate and enjoy life. In the same way that I’ve always envisioned leading a life fulfilled with serious existential purpose, keeping that sense of awareness and perception for serious outside issues has since obstructed me from truly extricating every single drop of joy that could be found from life.
It is a truly lingering tension, not only having been laden with a social responsibility to eliminate that feeling but at times also carrying with me an inadequacy, failure, or frustration to change the outcome of the world. Every day that I willingly choose to do the opposite, the discontent grows even deeper. And though many of us, myself included, definitely do not cross paths with marches or protests, it is still urgently imperative to remain tenacious against the repose of indifference no matter where we may always find ourselves. This entry for instance, though it may have no creative purpose to myself other than to evidence that I have things to say and words to write still; what sort of writer would I be if I were not to write at all?
And as I ride passenger in my Uber on the way to today’s guided boat tour of my city’s architecture, I encounter a grim image of a Palestinian child claimed by death, an adult most likely their father evincing their headless remains pleading for the rest of the world to care; yet another among the countless children taken by the arms of Israel. When I arrive and take a seat amongst the others along in this tour, I can’t help but to notice the tourist in sitting front of me update themselves on the same current events as I have, albeit from what seemed to be a Jewish news source. He was the father, along with the wife, of two girls taking this boat ride in stride on this undeniably sunny afternoon. I felt uneasy as I tried to do the same, trying my best to hold onto the interest of all the -isms of the city’s architecture. For a moment, it brought me back to when I possessed a genuine interest for architecture, particularly in Brutalism.
I’m usually not one to be sensitive over gruesome imagery but the thought of that helpless father crying and holding out his now lifeless child while we as a society deafly watch on delivered that same semblance of failure as I’ve over-and-over felt. But it simultaneously has shored up the consideration I once had before, scrutiny of myself and outside myself. As contemporary Palestinian writer Elena Dudum writes about the inventorying for the existence of Palestine, she states, “writing about Palestine no longer feels like a choice. It feels like a compulsion… but it’s also an act of faith—faith that one day all of this work will be useful, will finally be put on display as part of a new archive that corrects a systematically denied history.” Elena is one of the many Palestinians on social media that has motivated me to write, photograph, and take action for Palestine, not to mention Leali Shalabi, Motaz Azaiza, Jenan Matari, Bisan Owda, and Mosab Abu Toha.
Much like every morning waking up, becoming illuminated in this manner is sobering, reckoning with every update on the death counts and taxing oneself with the pain of human loss solely through the media of our devices. It’s quite an uncanny feeling. Coupled with approach of the general election and possible reelection of both Biden or Trump, this year has thus far been compounded by several laps of trepidation, listlessness, and overall exhaustion. The anticipation of even deciding to choose between two poisons adds to a moral quandary laundry list to deal with.
So to close out this entry, I want to connect one of my previous posts stating that I had found myself more “Palestinian-minded” by way of prayer, ritual, practices, and observances. Now a recent Instagram post by Jenan Matari has basically affirmed that “phenomena”, stating that I would eventually identify as, and with, Palestine, which ironically harkens back to Jewish poet Emma Lazarus who wrote, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Similarly, Ghassan Kanafani refrains again that same principle, “the Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever they are, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era. We are more truly more interconnected than anyone could ever realize, and when we claim other’s griefs, hardships, and suffering as our own, the prospect of peace and liberation becomes ever clearer in the minds of all.