Gaza

Field Notes by Sarah Bessey

Hi friends,

I suppose I could keep calm and carry on. I’ve done it before, with mixed results. But none of us are fine. And I do always (try to) tell the truth (as I best understand it).

So here we are.

Earlier, I was re-reading Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha and in his poem, Hard Exercise¹ long before this current atrocity, he wrote,

In Gaza,
breathing is a task,
smiling is performing
plastic surgery
on one's own face,
and rising in the morning,
trying to survive
another day, is coming back
from the dead.

There are a dozen stats and numbers and facts flooding the news and social media feeds in this ongoing horror unfolding in Palestine after the horrors in Israel, but I keep circling the fact that in these days, more than 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza.

Thirteen thousand.

Thirteen thousand mothers without their babies - if their mothers are even still alive, which feels unlikely. Thirteen thousand women like me who have empty arms. Thirteen thousand empty school uniforms. Thirteen thousand children like my own who aren’t here to make mischief or laugh or sneak treats from the pantry or play hide and seek because they are someone else’s “collateral damage.”

I have grown to hate the inhumane phrase “collateral damage” just as much as I despise the old faithful of politicians: “thoughts and prayers.”

As Cole Arthur Riley shared yesterday on Black Liturgies, “You will never convince me burning children alive in tents is necessary to protect another country.” She follows with invitation to embodied action, but wraps up by reminding us that the reason why our souls are disturbed is because they are still intact.

And so like a lot of us, I keep doing that work that is mine to do even while it feels useless. I light a candle. Again. Daily. I pray. Daily. Send more emails to politicians just to receive more auto replies and then loathe all of them a bit more. Donate to orgs on the ground. Pray for and aggravate those who are able to do the work closer to the halls of power. I cry, rage, direct my anger everywhere and nowhere. Log off social media. Log back in. Log back off for another day or two. I post things on Instagram and then I hate that because posting about a massacre, a genocide, a collective punishment involving elders and children and whole communities and universities and libraries and homes feels absolutely obscene. Writing about it here is useless, I know that. Here we are anyway. I keep emptying the dishwasher and staying up late with teenagers who need to talk and making appointments and reaching out to friends and and and and.

No one is going to get it right all of the time, least of all me. I feel my inadequacies profoundly. But I’m trying to stay steady, to believe, to keep going with whatever is at my own hand to keep doing. I never want to shame anyone for how they are processing the unprocessable.

I don’t know if bearing witness, if keeping my soul tender, if loving each other even from far away is enough. It isn’t, but I want to believe it is something anyway.

I’m trying and trying and trying to keep my heart tender, my soul from becoming numb, my mind connected rather than disengaged. I don’t want those kids to be abandoned or forgotten. Daily.

I want so much more than a ceasefire and an end to a genocide. I want common good to matter, and foolish me, I still pray for peace. I want every kid to be safe. I want every single hostage returned and for babies to be with their mothers, for homes halfway around the world to be warm and for poets to be able to write about birds and kisses and trees instead of bombs and silence and grief.

God, we want we want we want.

In another one of his poems which has haunted me these many months, that same Mosab Abu Toha wrote, “We love what we have, no matter how little, because if we don’t, everything will be gone.”

Thirteen thousand kids.

Almost forty thousand people.

Where is God, where is God?

I think I believe in human depravity at last.

Around Christmastime, I heard a sermon by Rev. Dr. Munther Issac who said, “God is under the rubble.” I think that’s true. Or I hope it’s true. I want that to be true. I do believe God is under the rubble and in the thankless work of making peace and with scared children and exhausted doctors and terrified hostages, with aid workers and bureaucrats, refugees and protestors, and in the lonely powerless pacing corners of our minds.

I’m not sure why I’m sending this to you other than I promised to write you every week from the middle of my life, from what I believe is true in that moment. And it’s hard not to feel the despair of it all. It feels ridiculous and futile.

I suppose this is just a way to say when everything is gone, maybe we keep loving the little that remains and to keep the part of us that cares and rages as sacred. I don’t even know what that means now. Maybe, as Cole Arthur Riley wrote, it means we’re just trying to keep our soul intact. Even sacred lament and consuming grief and these powerless feelings are a way we bear witness, it’s one way we cling to our humanity.

Thirteen thousand children. I just don’t know how to bear witness to that.

For those who are looking for a place to donate, I’ve been giving to Save the Children Canada: Gaza Emergency Appeal. They also have offices in the UK and in the USA. It’s not everything but it’s something.

Ceasefire now,

S.