Verbalizing Palestine: Don’t Let Your Heart Die
Amidst the rising news and countless images of slaughtered Palestinian civilians circulating the media, this quote from James Baldwin came on my timeline. I was startled, having to settle myself for a moment realizing how harrowing our reality turns out to be. The death of the heart, as concerned by Baldwin decades ago, is circulating the air like a deadly virus.
I’m always afraid of indifference: the human state where one being unwilling to care about affairs that don’t directly affect them. This indifference, however, is scarier more than anything when it’s collectively spread. I’m as terrified thinking how indifference is largerly embedded within people, blinding them from acknowledging the wails of human sufferings happening nextdoor in Occupied Palestine.
It doesn’t affect them. It’s only something they hear on the news. They go on with lives. Thinking about it, I’m more devastated by the disengagement. This happened during the depravity of the Holocaust. The concentration camps were just steps away from a neighborhood. These civilians knew about the burning and the deadly massacres happening nextdoor. They weren’t even so surprised seeing the atrocity unfolded when the Allies took siege of Auschwitz.
Because they always knew what happened. They disengaged themselves with the knowledge that people were in fact burned alive. It just didn’t affect them, or the dehumanization of Jews were so normalized it didn’t matter at all to them. It was horrifying, and now we’re seeing how history is repeating itself through the horror of disengagement and indifference.
The consistent work of the powerful (the West, The US, Israel) to dehumanize Palestinians through media representations leave a strong impact on how the world sees them. It’s always been hard to contest the hegemonic representations made by the West in dehumanizing Palestinians. These representations are systemic and carefully controlled to maintain their powerful dominance.
It doesn’t matter to what extent they dehumanize the oppressed, but when they keep getting away with it, I’m terrified people will gradually tolerate the dehumanization with disengagement. To verbalize the genocide happening in Palestine is to contest the widespread indifferences supported by the PR effort in the media to maintain the image of the West.
In mass media – before the near-shifting narrative in Instagram or Twitter – Palestinians were(are) represented in a twisted manner. They generally portray them as terrorists, radical, and rock-throwing males; these have led widespread public perceptions who see that Palestinians only exist to fight the Israeli regime rather than seeing them as human beings.
The one-dimensional images of them sanitizes the actual scale of their sufferings. Now they are depicted in death tolls, as victims, and perpetrators of violence.
Edward Said, a Palestinian-American academic and a cultural critic, states that the pervasiveness of representation is exerted by those who represent, especially those who are more powerful. He further contends that representation is a vehicle for power rather than an instrument for truth – what is happening in Palestine got under my skin every time I think about it.
The Israel depravity is unfolding before me every time I open Twitter:
- IOFs raiding the of Mohammad Hatem Basheer, a recently releases Palestinian prisoner. They destroy chairs set up for his welcome reception following his release.
- Photos of IOFs occupying houses of Palestinians: them in the kitchen, them wearing clothes of Palestinian women with smiles on their face.
- Doctor gives Palestinians tylenol and ibuprofen for an arm that has been cut off.
- The pictures of journalists constantly killed by Israel while documenting the genocide in Gaza.
- Israel burns supposedly “safe” refugee camps. People are burned alive.
- The videos of the bombarded universities in Gaza.
- IOF burns libraries, posting it online because they know they wait no consequences.
What James Baldwin said rings true in my mind: there’s nothing more terrifying than the death of the heart. It feels wrong to breathe the fresh air. It feels wrong to wake up everyday without the fear of death, but the rage should be put on these blood-thirst postcolonial aggressors who claim to be peacemakers. The rage should also be put on those who deliberately disengage themselves from reality, and those who choose to coexist with moral apathy.
I will be more scared about what’s about to happen when indifference prevails. I’m afraid of people treasuring consumerism that indulges them whereas empathy declines – because it doesn’t affect them.
When I saw the end of The Zone of Interest (2023), a devastating Holocaust cinema, I was utterly startled and in disbelief. The screen turned into a complete darkness and incomprehensibility after the final shot, the weight of our reality smothered me. Mica Levi’s harrowing score then followed like an endless searching in continuity, that right now we’re sneaking back into the past, that people here are there to just observe in their absence meanwhile the wails and screams of human sufferings are put into oblivion.
In the film, we see a Hedwig’s family, but two different narratives are actually converging in the most harrowing situation imaginable. We are drawn into the Hedwig’s garden and the inner lives of a Nazi family who does daily domestic chores, of a wife who reminisces over a holiday while hundreds of people are burned from the other side of the Auschwitz wall, of kids who giggle and play with the remains of an exterminated group, of a family who parties and worries about their dreams while gunshots and the smell of burned bodies assail the air.
It is important that they are portrayed as humans not for us to empathize with them, but it’s about how far would they do this to themselves as we grasp that these depravity is still enabled and ignored at the same time several decades later as genocide in Palestine is happening next door.
The film rings something bizarre but true. People go on with their lives while others are constantly massacred as if they’re less of humans than the others. It’s happening now too.
I’d be devastated to see the world goes on while an entire group of people are exterminated on the other side of the world. I can’t imagine living in a reality where people tolerate moral apathy, allowing atrocity to happen until it’s too late when, years later we helplessly look back in horror with an earnest question: how can they allow all this to happen?
It’s never too late. Don’t stop verbalizing Palestine. Free Palestine!
Tulisan ini dibuat untuk Pekan #NyariTantangan dengan tema harian “Utopia-Dystopia”. Yuk #NyariTantangan bersama Nyarita!
