Tomorrow will be rife with language! Today, I lament the intellectual word. I can find rationality only by feeling. I am exhausted by advocacy, yours and mine. I am no proclaimed activist. All I ever desire is to write something good, “clean as a bone.”1 Sometimes I claim a journalistic edge but I have no credential; I repeat the phrase, I studied journalism for two years, over and over, which is true. But I have no journalism degree. I have only an inclination.
This morning I watched two small children be pulled from a collapsed house in Gaza. They appeared to be around the ages of two or three. I was in the comfort of my own home, on my couch, slothfully reposed. And they were screaming in terror. No, that isn’t apt language. They were wailing in abject horror, their plump, baby faces contorted. They were so small their bones remained soft and malleable, like cloth dolls. But they were not dolls; they were living babies. They were all alone, heaved up by strangers from the bellows of a house collapsed. No, this language does not aptly describe a scene. The house had no form, no body or skeleton. The house had no up or down, it was dust and jumbled geometry, matter disoriented. There was no foundation, no roof, no wall, no floor. We call it rubble but that, too, is a language insufficient.
The children likely sensed only darkness, lacking any ability to orient themselves to such confusing, mysterious reality. I wonder if they, like most children, are afraid of the dark. Though most children don’t exist right side up one second, only to be plunged into nothingness the next. Most of us, especially in the West, will never truly understand the experience of bombardment by missile, will never have material reality split like an atom by bomb. We will only read about it, in language formal and sterile.
These children existed on earth until now by intuition alone, all needs and wants—a need for mother’s milk, a hunger for nutrients, a nervous system blossoming and requiring constant calibration, from a warm familial embrace. Do children carry an intrinsic awareness of impending death? Can they fear death before comprehending, experiencing life? The children are orphans now. They have no immediate family remaining. The children were pulled up from earth, their screeching was guttural. There was a collection of foreign limbs raising them up from a ground flipped on its axis. The children were ripped from choking air turned black of suffocation. How long did they cry out before civil services arrived? They were pulled from the rubble by their youthful fleshy forearms, straight out of a collapsed vastness. I wonder if they instinctually searched for something familiar, a remnant of any lingering, parental pheromone. The only available embraces were entirely estranged.
What will become of the children? How does a child experience such trauma and go about living? No, the word trauma carries no shape with it, no contours of reality: this is a shredding of existence before it could even begin. There will no longer be familiar sound, no nostalgic scent, no safe and deep exhalation. No future peaceful sleep or gentle waking. These children will never feel secure again. Never feel the embrace of a parent. What will these children grow into? Who will rear them? Who will embrace them?
By various estimates, these children are two of around 50,000 orphans created by Israel’s relentless and indiscriminate bombardment in Gaza. Some estimates surmise the number to be even greater. Still, the number does not carry its weight. How can we possibly comprehend? The city I was born into carries a population of around 50,000. An entire city made orphan. Mountains and valleys of orphaned children. The children have names, though there are too many to name.
Most days I love literature, writing, and discourse. Today I lament every ounce of language, every dull, insignificant written word. I came upon a quote by Goethe and it repelled me. “If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.” A friend scolded me: “You can’t just name a tragedy and have the moral high ground.” Her words encircled a dead child on screen to dissipate into a mist of rage.
If I share this video of children being pulled from the rubble, a kid I went to high school with, a conservative boy draped in a perpetual fleece vest, might look upon the image in apathy. The image may not move him. I cannot think of novel language to move him. Why do I care about moving him? As Susan Sontag said, “Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.”2
I watched children die various forms of death on screen for more than two years, and yet language will not touch the images, and the images cannot touch their horror. The best I can do, it seems, is make sure it doesn’t happen in the dark, to tell people what I see: children burned alive, a baby’s skull crushed like papier-mache. I am struck by the dead children who look alive, who appear to be merely sleeping. It is their stillness that betrays them. Such stillness is foreign to the restless earth. The sleeping children are not restless; they are in fact dead.
Tomorrow I will read a book; in Gaza and elsewhere, people will continue to suffer through war. As Zadie Smith’s narrator says, in the short story, “Now More than Ever,” published in The New Yorker:
…I knew that nothing I could do in the present could ameliorate or change this fictional fact; no, all I could do was remember it, and tell myself I was remembering it—so that it wasn’t forgotten, although with the mental proviso that suffering has no purpose in reality. To the suffering person suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil-rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.3
It’s true that pain and suffering can only truly exist existentially; all language of pain, derivative. And it’s true, too, that pain and suffering have always existed in equal measure, since the beginning of dawn, an argument so often twisted and used to rationalize and scapegoat contemporary tragedy. People suffer! You can’t just name an atrocity and have the moral high ground!
And yet, perhaps Zadie Smith never understood the nature of suffering at all, perhaps, no writer or observer can. As in an essay titled Shibboleth, likewise published in The New Yorker, she wrote:
The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.4
I, too, write often about “Israel/Palestine,” and cannot make my words material, nor sentient. They will not die, and thankfully, they cannot kill (though words can inspire such things.) They will not allow their letters to be amputated away without anesthesia. They will not grow nerves that trigger synapses full of otherworldly pain. They will not be sharply pierced by bullets to the chest. All words refuse to bleed out. They refuse to mourn. They will not grow horrified. They cannot express the depths of sorrow. They will be deemed, again and again, too emotional, too irrational, too personal. They will not resurrect the dead. Words cannot stop physical suffering, dismemberment, or the mental anguish of war.
Current material reality means I am an American and thus, indirectly responsible for the death and destruction I am observing from the safety of afar. Beyond the physical, there is the spiritual suffering that derives from their physical loss, of losing sanctuary, of living in tents upon untenable rubble (tents often bombed), without access to food, water, or medicine, of losing limbs. I live fairly close to Columbia and hear the incessant chatter, about language and meaning, about what was said on campus and in protest. The children pulled from the rubble won’t care much about my words of sympathy, my language of sorrow. I paid my taxes like a good girl, and regardless of which administration rises to power, regardless of my politics or what I write, I will assist, unwittingly, again and again, in sending bombs abroad. My politicians might even sign them like amulets.
Suffering is not symbolic to the dead, but might be to the living. Those who survive moments of suffering might desire a witness, or for their suffering to birth something new.
Today I detest the limits of language but must wield it anyway, however futile. Between every image of death and destruction there are the others, of immigrants and students muzzled of language, some ambushed and kidnapped by officers on the street for their political speech, detained and/or deported. A student’s language treated like weapons of mass destruction, by the conductors of tangible, actual murder and violence abroad.
One day, something material might pierce our own physical reality and render our intellectual pursuits moot. It might be so evil that we won’t be given proper time to philosophize…we will live or we will die. But if we live, we will require language to reconstruct our existential suffering, we will require our suffering to be understood, to have meaning and be useful, for ourselves and for others. Hopefully, most of us will realize that violence will not beget understanding, but only cycles of endless pain. Words will be all that we have.
And our words will fall short, as words do.
“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.” - James Baldwin in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.