From the end of this fantastic essay on the work of the witness by Sarah Aziza:
"As long as Palestinians are alive
to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness
will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion
has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are
appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing
the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet
Natalie Diaz has observed,
empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to
someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It
has nothing to do with them.” Or, put more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.”
Rather,
we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought
to think of ourselves in relation to the legacy of the shaheed. Our work
as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must
make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut.
This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to
invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth,
privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if
sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where
real witness must begin: in mystery.
Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of
faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a
sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable
other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly,
tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists
on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The
world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the
one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of
normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.
Or, much better expressed in the words of my cousin, the pharmacist,
ما زلت مصرا نحن لم نعتد القصف ونخاف من كل حدث ولم نعتد مشاهد المعاناة ، ان القلب دائما ما ينفطر، ولم نعتد المجازر الذي يرتكبها الاحتلال فلكل شهيد حياة.
I continue to insist, we have not gotten used to bombing and we are afraid of everything happening to us. We have not gotten used to the sight of suffering. No, it always breaks our hearts. We have not gotten used to the massacres perpetrated by the occupation. No. For every martyr, there was a life."
