I was daring thinking about a densely packed city under heavy attack from air strikes and cannons. I have tried to do this exercise for the last couple of days, sometimes at night time, in the almost absolute silence of our sleeping city. Will the market be there? Would I sleep comfortably ever again? How big is my grief? Would I ever recover from the death of my family members, my neighbours, my friends? Who keeps me informed of the events?
But, more importantly, and consequentially, I have been trying to imagine how everyday life gets distressed, changed, and adapts to the new dramatic regime. How would I go to the loo? Is there any water? How would I post my blog without electricity? Could I send my children playing outside during the few hours ceasefire? How could I take my son to school? Is there any school?
I just cant get it, without the risk of falling into rhetoric, or worse, into a patronising attitude. I cannot but think in fact I belong to that privileged minority in the western world. I can only be a spectator or worse watch the event on telly. But on the other hand I do believe that it is not just spectacle: the reality of the war out there needs some deep thoughts, reflections, and critiques. I do agree with the latest writing of Susan Sontag’s on the subject of the grief, the pain, the representation of the wars of the others. She writes:
‘To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalises the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment. It assumes that everyone is a spectators…[and then, discussing Jeff Wall's famous transparency 'Dead Troops Talk', 1996]… “We” – this “We” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what went through – don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly cannot imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is – and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer stubbornly feels. And they are right’[i]
Yes, I think Sontag is absolutely right. We don’t understand the direct experience of suffering, but we are eager to represent it. And images are the trickiest medium of all, inexorably real but incredibly able to be bend to this or that party. One example: pictures of dead children at war. They have been used many times either to arrest or to provoke a military action. Again, Sontag:
‘Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally, in the form that is registered by the camera, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account, which, depending on its complexity of thought, references, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership, a photograph has only one language and it is destined potentially for all…The photographic image [on the other hand] cannot be a simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.’ (ibidem).
Following these and other issues about representation, truth, and realism, that I preferred to turn my gaze to the pacifist movement (or I shall say demonstrations) rather than the conflict itself. It feels like there are two binary, parallel, different worlds. A Here and There. A space of suffering and one of representation of this suffering. On the other hand though, the possibility offered by the Internet are now wider, I mean, the chance to communicate, listening, interacting with the Others much more developed and sophisticated than ever before. For these reasons, I started reading, researching and annotating blogs from the warzone, mostly from Gaza, sometimes from people directly connected to the denied citizens (exiles, relatives, aid workers). I believe that in this way the spaces of representation and the representation of spaces collide to some extent. The pain of the others might be reflected and reproduced, bounced back and fro to Others, participated to some extent at last. What I am interested into is the direct experience of ordinary people under attack (rhetorically referred to as ‘civilians’ in the death toll), the emphasis being on the actual description of their daily life, rather than the much talked about political issues. I slowly started to feel a sense of grief, a general anxiety of mourning, and an inexorable sliding into the character of the sympathetic pacifist, rather different thing from a Palestinian Father under siege: this would have been at very least pretentious (a sort of Butlerian discursive magic spell).
In particular, I found incredibly inspiring and touching a blog from a Palestinian journalist, with a foot in the States and the mind in Gaza, as many exiles on the border, in-between identities and statuses. The reason I chose it from the many is that it comes from a mother and talks about the everyday life of exiles as well as continuously reminding us of the terrible situation in Gaza. The title is exemplar and I invite anyone to have a read:
Also of particular interest and full of ‘hands-on’ information from the Occupied Territories, a blog from Sharyn Lock, a human rights worker based in Gaza.
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- S. Sontag, ‘Looking at War’, The New Yorker, 9/12/02 [↩]
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