It’s hard to know what to say when it feels like the world is going to hell and we are living in the Hunger Games for real as celebrities in the Capitol gear up for the Oscars to distract us from the war and starvation happening in District 12. All that glitz and shine competing with blood on the street and emaciated children dying on dirty hospital floors. Look this way, see how pretty we are, wouldn’t you rather look at us? (I am disgusted by celebrity culture in a way I never have been before.)
The most horrific thing I have seen in my lifetime is happening and I can’t look away, so I haven’t been writing. I want to write, but nothing I could say feels important enough. So this is just an update, really.
I will get back to writing about culture and history and art soon but I can’t do so without first acknowledging the genocide in Gaza. The scale of the atrocities being committed there are unfathomable, but they are also undeniable. I have been watching Bisan, Motaz, Plestia, Hind, and others, like you. My Instagram feed is almost completely filled with the suffering of Palestinians as they beg the world to intervene for justice.
There are the glimmers of hope from South Africa’s legal case, or the air drop from Jordan. The look on Bisan’s face as she talks about making pizza in the tents. Aaron Bushnell—a name I can remember without looking it up. The US man who donated $17.74 to Gaza from dozens of hours of work in prison. The hundreds of thousands of people protesting and demonstrating in cities all over the world in solidarity, in humanity, in outrage. When I explained to my son why I wasn’t going to buy him McDonalds and he agreed immediately even though he really, really wanted a Big Mac.
Then the horrors of the images we are seeing, the stories we hear, Biden eating ice cream as he talks about a ceasefire, pandering to a media that continues to ‘both-sides’ it.
Our own politicians in New Zealand are doing their best to undo good work done by previous government without doing any of their own good work to make up for it. Not to mention their gross avoidance of the genocide. These people are walking down the same streets I walk down. They are in my hometown. I have gone to protests and stood on the manicured lawns of parliament and yelled at the stony building. It’s hard to comprehend how they are seeing the same things I am, and they are turning away.
I don’t know how to write around these things. How to live, even. It feels like the whole world ought to stop until this horror is stopped, but that’s not how it works, so I go about my safe, ordinary life. I don’t have much of a platform and it feels useless for me to say anything, but I can’t say nothing. I am finding that I crave people talking about this.
So for Oscars night I’ll be wearing the shame of my government refusing to take a stand against genocide. I’ll be wearing the fierce outrage of a mother watching other mothers dying as they try to protect their babies, as they scream and wail over their bodies. I’ll be wearing—most likely—my pyjamas, in my safe and warm house, as I email our politicians. I’ll be wearing frustration and pain but I refuse to wear hopelessness.
While I continue to email and protest and boycott and post and share the voices of Palestinians, while I do the only things I can, I will also give myself permission to write again. To live my ordinary life. And I hope that soon Bisan and all the people of Gaza—especially the children, God, my heart, the children—can live their lives too. Though it won’t be ordinary again for a very, very long time.