Growing Up in the Shadows of Activism and Genocide: A Personal Journey
If you want to know what it’s like being a child of activists during a genocide I can tell you.
It’s watching news clips and knowing that’s going on is bad but not fully understanding what’s happening or why. You know it gravely concerns your parents and so over time it gravely concerns you too but you don’t really know why.
My parents attended and organized protests for Bosnia in the 90s. They had the big signs at the front of the protests made. I remember the big banner made by a friend of our family. There were cartoon images of decapitated heads on them. There was a UN worker asking a Serbian genocider if he can feed the people he’s going to massacre first.
Being raised by activists is participating in clothing drives. Do you know where clothing from a clothing drive goes? I’ll tell you — it goes to a big warehouse. I got to see and play on the mountains of clothing being collected for the people of Bosnia. It’s not fully understanding how our used clothes can help but nonetheless leaving little notes in the kids clothing telling them that we care about them. That was my contribution.
It’s meeting newly minted Bosnian refugee children for play dates and trying to play with these kids who felt so different from us. Quiet. Attached to their parents. Sullen. Sunken. Sad. It never occurred to me until this moment that they weren’t playful because they must have been traumatized.
So that’s what it’s like to be a child of activists.
Of people who care about something. Of people who didn’t take us to vacations to Hawaii at the time (for a variety of reasons but also because they just couldn’t afford to).
Bosnia is a part of the fabric of who I am now. I can tell because of the goosebumps. I can never not have goosebumps when I talk about Bosnia.
Some years ago I had the chance to go to Bosnia with friends. They loved it. And I admit I too was for a moment enchanted by its beautiful wild pomegranate tree hills.
But for me, the trip was filled with shudders. I crossed the historic bridge that was blown up in Mostar. My parents had images of it. Beautiful. We visited a place called the glass bank, a large glass building which was not finished as a bank when the war started. It turned out to be the best snipper tower in Mostar. We walked streets lined with houses riddled with bullet holes. I shuddered.
I shuddered at every corner of Mostar — how this could happen. Friends and neighbors turned against each other. Its beauty was heavy. It had a heavy air. It was hard to not feel it.
In the capital, Sarajevo, I saw some of the most stunning Islamic architecture I have seen in my life — East meets west meets north meets south! Incredible! But they were also the sites I had seen as a kid. My mom had a framed art print of a mosque in Bosnia. I went to that mosque. I sent her a photo of me in the main square, which I had also seen growing up. “Look ma, I’m in Bosnia,” I wrote in my Instagram caption. I was wearing a brown sweater I bought at H&M in France, where I had been two countries before. It felt like I should post instagram pictures with cheeky captains during my late 20s euro trip but somehow I could not shake the feeling that I stood somewhere people died.
And all over Sarajevo were tombstones. Names and dates didn’t make sense. These were children in these graves. The bullet holes were everywhere.
The owner of the Airbnb housed us in a hostel-like room. The room had a series of twin size beds in it and had an eerie feeling even though if I recall it had a balcony overlooking a garden. She was quiet and did not seem like she wanted to talk to us until we made an effort to talk to her. She said their own neighbors and friends were the ones hunting them down. Her husband was a doctor and died near the front lines of one of the tunnels. She survived and now was housing 20-something backpackers to make a living.
The keystone of my trip to Bosnia was the genocide museum. I imagine it’s something like the Holocaust museum. It shows picture and video evidence of what happened and stories of the horrible genocide. I have some of the video clips stored in my photographic memory.
In the genocide museum all my memories came together. The clothing on the backs of people being herded to mass execution sites could have been from us. The news clips. The banner. The UN worker. The decapitated heads on the ground. I was where all the things I saw on TV as a kid appeared together and clicked.
The key stone of the key stone was an image of a mass grave that was about to be excavated. On it, a lone babydoll appeared the day before.
Its throat was slit.
I shuddered. I shuddered all the way back to Croatia on the bumpy wooden train. I shuddered in Dubrovnik on the beach, returning to my form as a regular tourist. The grandson of the Airbnb owner was playing “what does the fox say” on repeat as the sun set over the Mediterranean. Things seemed normal but I did not feel normal.
It was just a trip to a country. But I have almost completely forgot what Bosnia looks like except the bullet holes.
I know a small, small, tiny, tiny fraction of what the experience there was like. I can’t imagine. I am not a victim of that genocide, just a mere distant witness. But I will never forget Bosnia. I hope those kids got my notes and learned what “we care about you” means in English and know somewhere out there, someone cared.
I think that’s maybe the point of activism. Or one of them at least. To make sure those people experiencing tragedy that goes beyond our understanding of human language know we care. When people say what does protesting do, well, if they feel cared for over there, that matters.
I Think about Bosnia and I Think of Palestine.
I have been to the West Bank. I have got lost in the cobble stoned streets of old Jerusalem. I have been through Damascus gate, just in the news today the settlers are storming Al Aqsa. I prayed there for my husband who I met last year. I know Al Aqsa. I know Hebron and it’s sweet boys and old men too. I always assume they’re frozen in time. I’ve never imagined the boys as any older. Even though I should. Because the truth is, I don’t know if they got any older.
I often wonder about a boy in a blue shirt that asked me to take his photo. He was playing with a lighter, he was 8. Really, I’m not sure how old he was. He had that sadness that should be reserved for adults too. He asked me to take his photo I thought as a child does, but now I wonder if he wanted his existence documented. Maybe he wanted to make sure someone out there knew he existed. It felt disrespectful to call the boys in Hebron cute. They had seen too much — more than me. I asked the boy to stop playing with the lighter because he could hurt himself. He shrugged.
Hebron was one of the easiest places I’ve been to photograph locals. They invited it. As if to say, please let the world know we are here.
A Palestinian man implored me to write about them. He didn’t know I was a relatively powerless journalist and had quit recently. I would’ve liked to have written about him. I am now I guess.
I did publish the photo story of that trip in a small Muslim magazine. I was given a full editorial and allowed to have a recorded version of my story. I was too shy to record it myself. Somewhere out there, other people did end up bearing witness to my time in Palestine and the people I met there.
I think of the people of Gaza now. What I felt in Bosnia was merely from being in the same space as a genocide 20 years later. The goosebumps are not just bumps. They’re indicative of the horror felt just from the aftermath of something I only heard about. We are horrified for the dead victims of the genocide, but how will the living live?
I’m reminded of Iraq. The people of Iraq were bombed similarly but with uranium. I was basically the Iraqi refugee beat as a journalist in Egypt. I had heard all about their suffering on the radio with my dad on the way to school. What Israelis did in Rafah, Americans did in Felujah. We can only imagine the bloodcurdling screams.
In Abu Gharib they tortured innocent men the age of my father, for fun. For sport. We did not see decapitated babies live-streamed. The massacres of Iraq felt so very far away. And here they were being interviewed by an Egyptian-American journalist, a recent college grad, trying so very hard to understand their Iraqi Arabic — their eloquent speeches about their country diluted in my articles as I translated from Iraqi Arabic to Egyptian Arabic to English. They came to my home to pick up blankets and feta cheese. They came with their chins up to take money for costly medical treatments for their children caused by uranium, as they sought to etch out a future in place that was not their home. How much could a bag of feta cheese help?
My heart still hurts.
I’m reminded of the native Americans. We are taught in our history books that this land was stolen and we are so very sorry but the past is in the past. But do we ever imagine their bloodcurdling screams while they tried to protect their children? Can we imagine how terrifying the colonization of this land was for them? Do we even try?
I’m reminded of places I haven’t been or did not see on TV as a kid. Of past and current. Of genocide and torture and western-backed coups and proxy wars. Of the Congo. Of Sudan. Of Ukraine. Of Venezuela. Of Vietnam. Of Japan. Of the world.
I donated to a gofundme of a man in Gaza. I’ve donated to a few, all Palestinians looking to raise the amount of needed to cross Rafah to Egypt. It’s $5k per adult, and Palestinian families are large. I don’t know why our government which claims to not want civilian loss isn’t addressing this, unless this truly is meant to be like shooting fish in a barrel (it is).
One of the people I donated to, Fares, messaged me on Facebook to thank me. He prayed for my health and happiness. I cried. I struggled to respond to him. How and why could he pray for my health and happiness while he is suffering so much and it is at the hands of the country I pay taxes to?
The sheer magnitude of terror that has been unleashed on the planet by people who have nothing to do with us, the people of the global majority, and care for nothing but their own interests at the expense of their own and our humanity — it is unbelievable.
And yet here we are. Another genocide. The bullets and the babies and the massacres and the decapitated people and the banners and boys asking for you to take their photos. Again. While we sit on our couch a world away. My Egyptian-American world collided with my husband’s Venezuelan-Mexican world and we compare notes as to what the US did in our countries and to our people. It looks a little different, but mostly it looks the same.
I’m not sure what to say anymore.
I feel ashamed. Ashamed to have participated in a system that did this to people who are so very like me. Or even not. I grew up in the US for better opportunities. That’s why all immigrant parents move anywhere. But was it for me to sell skincare and build tech products and worry about getting laid off and not be able to buy a home? Did my parents come here for me build companies that are most likely participating in systems of destruction and servitude around the world? Undoubtedly the POC I know are some of the most talented people at their jobs. Did we leave our own destroyed countries to build companies that in some way or another benefit from our subjugation?
I don’t want to contribute to a world that recreates these systems anymore. We could’ve dedicated our lives to each other’s freedom but we were too busy chasing American Dreams.
For years we have done excellent work. We heard about it in the form of perfs and praise from teachers and coworkers and VPs of design calling that one liner you came up with “brilliant.”
I don’t really know the path forward. Perhaps that is this painful feeling I’ve had these last few months. It feels literally impossible to go back to the way things have been. I literally cannot stand up in meetings and tell you about the metrics or what legal eagles say or design choices for xyz, while a genocide is happening. It feels too dystopian to participate in ‘normal’ life, normally...
I simply cannot do it anymore and I know I’m not alone in this feeling.
I want to end this with a quote by Nadir Nadil posted on threads, dedicated to everyone, not just creatives.
“The last ten years was about making good content, now we're in an era of making important content.”
