Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life

INTRODUCTION

It is noon. I pause, resisting the haziness of vision that transforms the stone buildings into white arms trembling in the breeze, then continue moving along the wide avenue, trying to seek shelter from the burning midday sun. A few seconds later, I open my eyes as wide as they can go. I stare at the end of the street where black silhouettes are coming closer, moving oddly, shapes with uncertain features that blur and vanish into the mirage as if flying. I try and bring them into focus, struggling to grasp what is happening at the end of this unfamiliar road.

At the time, I wasn’t very familiar with this place. The map of the area was an enigma, and my sense of what was happening there was confused. I found myself, as intended, at a government office in Thumama. There, survivors of the Gazan genocide were gathered; people with amputated limbs in complex and critical states of  health. Together with the family members caring for them, they numbered more than 2,500. This fantastical scene was taking place in a quiet city called Doha, but in those moments, the destruction in Syria was re-enacted for me. The silhouettes of the victims, the very same moans – it was disaster, all over again.

There wasn’t a living soul around. The cruel, oozing midday sun was burning my forehead, and strange qualms began to wrestle me in the desert noon. I looked away at first, trying to escape the thoughts taking hold, but then took a few steps closer, trying to distinguish those black shadows, and realized they were wheelchairs being pushed by others. I turned around, only to see a woman in black pushing a chair that carried a young woman in the prime of  life. It occurred to me that the whole world had come to this: missing body parts, people with amputated limbs, half-bodies living on the margins of  life like remnants of a bygone age. I felt like we were on board a ship hovering in mid-air, suspended within a destiny of impotence and loss, among delusions and ghosts I couldn’t quite make out. The sun was pitiless, and I had to head to the administrative offices to meet some officials. A train of thought transformed what I was seeing into an image from a novel, an attempt to maintain my equilibrium in the face of this reality. And to drive from my mind the interwoven scenes of ruin, the confusion between which was Syria and which Palestine.

A strange grief nearly swallowed up the spectacle, as if the place was rendered unreal by the excess of its tragedy. Who can bear such agony? 

It was no coincidence that I saw the devastation conveyed by these wheelchairs, so like flocks of  black birds and carrying the resounding suffering of the Palestinian people – a people plucked out by the root and left to dangle in limitless space. Those phantoms embodied a recurring symbol of  humanity’s defeat, as if  Palestinians had become Syrians and Syrians Palestinians, across a shared space of  brutality that I have witnessed, written about and buried in my heart. 

I found myself facing those wheelchairs and the people who had survived the torments of genocide, impelled to try and understand their pain. I felt called upon as a writer trading in words and narrative as a means of empathy, of effecting change and, most crucially, of understanding the dangerous world around us, thinking of a better, more humane future. I was still panting in the wake of these racing thoughts, still drawn towards these people by the ideas so deeply rooted within me. These people meant a great deal to me. One way or another, Syria was before me at that moment and, as always, I held fast to the imperative of not leaving the victims alone, the imperative of movement and action and feeling; these are the conditions of our existence, and by necessity our humanity. 

I was stuck, suddenly, by a searing question – what happened to the people of  Gaza who survived the genocide? Is it even right that we consider them survivors? Where does human pain go when justice is absent? How did they lose parts of their bodies and embark on new forms of existence? How can we deal with their sufferings? How can it be that the lives of ordinary people, having dwelled for years in an open prison, have vanished forever since that infamous day, 7 October? There is something else in the speed of this disappearance – destruction and a redoubled, unfathomable barbarity have settled over these people. Why do we drone on and on about their issues in political and ideological slogans, far removed from their subjective, individual pain?

These questions were troubling, but I did my best to collect myself that desert afternoon as I walked towards them. I said a greeting, and received some weak smiles and diffident glances in reply. Instantly, I realized that I was going to stay here. I was going to live among them, try to grasp the details of their lives and sit by their side with their grief – the grief that has made me come to recognize them as heroes and honourable people who resist so as to stay alive. (…)