Beyond suffering: Reclaiming the Palestinian story

It’s time to move beyond stories of pain and imagine Palestinian joy, writes Yuki Lindley.

What does having to share your trauma so publicly do to your psyche? Are you going to carry around the lifeless bodies of your babies and demand that the world see their lives as painful and act accordingly?

Unfortunately, this has become part of what it means to be Palestinian. For generations, they have been trying to show the world their humanity in the vain hope that this time change can happen.

In one of many examples, 2018 Return MarchPalestinian families gathered near the Gaza-Israel fence to picnic, fly kites, play music and dance, hoping to show the world and their oppressors their humanity and desire to return home. Numerous independent reports UN Independent Commission of InquiryIt was determined that Israeli snipers deliberately opened fire on children, healthcare workers, journalists and disabled people who did not pose a threat, and that this constituted a war crime.

But again the world shrugged, “they are always fighting there” and let the news flow continue.

What does this do to the soul? Born of a people constantly forced to display their pain and suffering on the world stage, have they never had the dignity of mourning in private? Sharing one’s most intimate pain with the false hope that the world will start to care and your children won’t have to carry the ongoing burden of trying to convince the world that Palestinian lives matter, too.

These are the questions that bother me while listening to the doctor and the writer. Jumaana Abdu We are talking about the double trauma endured by Palestinians, forced to pour their hearts out to a world that has been trained to ignore their humanity, in the vain hope that it will bring about change.

Being born Palestinian often means being the embodiment of pain, others seeing you through a single lens, becoming an object of mere pity. in it TED Talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie He talks about the dangers of the single story, the way it reduces the complexity of a people to a single, incomplete story. While pain, loss and dispossession are at the heart of every Palestinian story, we cannot forget that there is also life, celebration and joy.

As I listened to a returning doctor talk fondly about how Gaza was one of his favorite places in the world, because Gazans really knew how to have fun, I realized I was surprised because I, too, had fallen into one narrative; life under occupation is framed by a lack of resources and self-determination. But he spoke of the resourcefulness of Gazans that come from living under an occupation that aims to control and restrict every aspect of their lives, and of the famous Gazan hospitality and generosity that ensures every visitor is well fed.

He taught himself to become one of the best in the world through YouTube videos, thanks to the perseverance of his close friend, a world-class surgeon who could not leave Gaza to attend international conferences. These stories are at least as important as the tales of suffering and provide a truer picture of the complexity of Palestinian life under illegal occupation.

The danger of a single narrative is that it suffers from the single lens through which Palestinians are understood and expected to perform. The prospect of reenactment for a Western audience largely uncaring about one’s trauma and pain is the double trauma that Jumaana Abdu reminds us, and refusing to comply with these demands, focusing instead on Palestinian resistance, return, and joyful futures, can mean a restoration of power.

A quote often attributed to a Palestinian poet Mahmud DervişHe who writes about a young girl says it is ‘It’s time to move from something that will make them pity us, if we can, to something that will make them jealous of us.’.

It is this feeling that many Palestinians, like Jumaana Abdu, want to hold on to; a feeling that no longer focuses only on the suffering of Palestinians, but also looks at the future of Palestinians. Because if we are stuck thinking only in terms of pain, we lose the capacity to imagine Palestine’s joyful future.

For those of us who have not been directly affected by the dehumanizing and degrading effects of the last two years, this is a question worth pondering. At what point is enough enough? When will we shift the focus from Palestinian suffering to shining a light on the West’s indifference? To ask uncomfortable questions about our own society, our own communities, and question why it is socially acceptable to ignore a genocide that is directly supported by our own media and government? To shift the power dynamic from a place where we imagine ourselves as white saviors to a place where we hold up a mirror to our own complicity?

This is not to diminish the work done by Palestinian journalists who gave their lives documenting their own genocide to show the world their humanity, but to ask the question: Where to from here? When did the display of Palestinian suffering become more harmful than beneficial? Will one more photo of Palestinian suffering make a difference? Is it time to tell a different story instead? Something that doesn’t appeal to the white savior mentality, but instead centers around the return of Palestinians, the joy of Palestinians, and the future of Palestinians?