Dispatches from a Young Journalist in Gaza
“Hi everyone, ana Bisan, min Gaza, and I am still alive.”
The young woman speaking has curly brown hair restrained by a bandana, an oval face with warm eyes, and braces on her teeth. She is a 24-year-old Palestinian journalist and refugee who has been documenting the genocide in Gaza since it began. I don’t know Bisan. I’ve never met her. But I check her status every day on Instagram, and I am not alone. Bisan Ouda has over 250,000 followers, many of whom send her messages of support and prayer.
I send her one message, the only one I can, and it is this:
“I love you, Bisan.”
What does it mean to write this on a blank space on Instagram alongside thousands of other comments and heart emojis that she will likely never see? Because she is fighting for her life? Because the country that I, a white 61-year-old woman, pay taxes to and call my home is bombing the shit out of a strip of land equal in square mileage to Philadelphia? A place with 2.2 million people with no food, running water, sanitation, shelter, or medical care?
“Hi everyone, I am Bisan from Gaza, and I am still alive.”
A promising young woman is still alive despite American-made explosives that rip limbs from children and topple tons of concrete onto sleeping newborns.
She is still alive despite sickness, dirty water, freezing nights under a plastic tarp, days of hunger, wailing babies in filthy bandages, rivers of blood at her feet, and air fetid with the stink of waste and rotting bodies.
Each time she says, “I am still alive,” I have the tiniest bit of hope that our elected leaders will lead. Will comprehend what survival requires. The narrative that I pray will not be the final days of her life, social media’s Palestinian analog of Ann Frank’s diary, recounting everything from the lack of khoubus (bread) and blankets to the babies reduced to doll-sized blood-soaked masses of ash.
Except that that I am witnessing Bisan’s incremental deterioration not after the fact but in real time, daily. From a sparkling fighter who speaks in both English and Arabic, and sometimes a mix, to one resigned to death.
“I am still alive,” she says, but her tone is emotionless. Uncertain.
And yet, somehow, still, a counter point to relentless and dominant narrative punctuated by two questions:
Do you condemn Hamas?
Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?
These are the questions being asked and answered, and asked again and answered, the performative recitations of an undeserved loyalty oath by a nuclear-bomb endowed colonial settler state. And a rejection of a militant arm of Palestinian governance that resists the unbroken decades-old erasure of Palestine, the country, and its indigenous people, who have exhausted all possible means of restorative justice.
These repeated questions are like the bombs that drop and keep dropping, as if repeated often enough, can elicit that undeserved promise rather that to prompt other, better questions. Like:
Does a nuclear-weapon endowed colonial state have the right to bomb the shit out of the population who has lived there for centuries before that “state” was imposed on them by western nations?
When will Israel have killed enough infants and children to ensure that there are no Palestinian children to grow up and resist their own erasure? Logically speaking, won’t they have to kill all of them?
Which leads to this:
Is a super-power’s murder of a vulnerable indigenous population in any way justifiable?
And if it is not, why does it continue?
This cacophony of these sorts of questions constitutes the current state of dominant discourse, the intellectualizing of genocide as “foreign policy.” White western pundits sit at glossy desks opining on peace, which really means, “make it all go away so that we don’t have to face our complicity in smashing five-pound newborns into gasping blobs of flesh and concrete dust” during our biggest shopping season of the year.
Bisan’s voice is clear and strong, though of late, she has been crying. She is, she tells us, sick. But “still alive.”
Until December 2nd, when she wrote this:
“I no longer have any hope of survival like I had at the beginning of this genocide, and I am certain that I will die in the next few weeks or maybe days.”
A vital young woman predicting her death. In real time, while we — and she — watch the encroaching incendiaries.
Then do what: Shop and eat and go to the gym and make weekend plans?
Because another important question is this:
How do I — we — live in a world that pretends this isn’t a government sanctioned massacre?
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I know a lot about trauma. Survivors constantly negotiate their lived reality, which consists of memories and triggers — obstacles in the daily effort to persist. Many of us take on the extra heavy lifting of repeatedly educating those around us on what it means to be a survivor in a world that tells us to “get over it,” “it’s the past,” “move on, already.” As if the neurobiology of trauma can be unzipped and slipped off like a coat, when it is the survivor’s primary mode of meaning making. Navigating the reality of the interior with the non-reality of the exterior is constant work. It is the work of survival. And it is fucking exhausting.
It is also a vulnerability to the acute betrayal the comes when a survivor confesses trauma, only to find herself shunned, silenced, ignored. If trauma hasn’t killed your soul (and maybe body), perpetually trying to justify yourself to an indifferent world just might.
I try to imagine forecasting my own brutal death while bearing witness to a daily slaughter that foretells exactly how brutal it will be.
“I am Bisan, and I am still alive.”
Over the last 60-plus days, Bisan Ouda has daily said these words. Sometimes with levity; also with despair, irony, anger, sorrow, surrender. She has said them while shivering, wiping away tears, tickling a toddler’s foot, beckoning a dusty kitten, pointing to smoke spirals, showing us her tent, and receiving one tiny radish — her dinner — from a woman who miraculously pulled up a bunch with which to feed her children.
She is twenty-four. So very young. When I was her age, I was racking up student loans trying to avoid facing my past. Wasting my life like it was clean water from a tap, neither of which she has.
Pre-October 7th clips show Bisan telling stories of Gaza. Of the farmers who grow fruits and figs and olives. Of the plentiful sycamore trees, the sandy beaches, the blue waters from which fishermen harvest the sea. Bisan herself in a floppy straw hat, sandal-footed, a basket of fruit over her arm. Her face fuller, beautiful, and bright with intelligence. As ripe as an unpicked apple.
This face reveals the full meaning and the cost of the refrain, “I am Bisan from Gaza, and I am still alive.”
See me, world. See us, world.
I love, I create, I eat, I breathe.
I am an irreplaceable human being.
I have something unique to give this world, and you are lucky that I am in it.
I do not merely exist. I am a life.
I am alive.
And this:
I am trying to stay alive while also educating you about genocide.
I am risking my life to educate you about genocide.
I am risking my life to plead for the bloodied newborns.
I am translating the screams of orphaned children even as I cannot scream.
I long for my mother and father, even as I show you the faces of mothers and fathers shattered by death.
And perhaps it means this, too:
So long as I am alive, I will raise my voice, even if solely to remind myself that in the face of your inertia, your brutal indifference, and your comfortable silence, I choose to draw breath.
I am Melanie, and I am still alive.
#Ceasefire #EndtheOccupation #FreePalestine
