A Glass of Water, a Burning Boy: Fady Joudah on Images From Gaza
A young man burning alive in his makeshift hospital bed singed the unspeakable into world memory—a short memory, a hyperactive memory with attention-deficit, a deliberately porous memory without industrial chronicity behind it—and do you think the executioners care? Culture of the aftermath of images and the lives they contained. National Geographic with blazing green eyes. Gender and the environment. A vulture objectively giving a moribund child his space to die of starvation. A corpse is a corpse. A naked girl screaming in pain on the road of her forced displacement, half her body burnt by an army of a people who perpetually protest what they refuse to topple. The risk-benefit ratio demands it. How many genocides were not called by their names? Anachronism or denial?
And this man burning alive, the fire starting at his feet and moving cephalad—the drama of a head spared to the last, as if the fire was doing us a favor, granting us the memory we desire for when the genocidaires’ dream finally ended them. A final solution boomerangs as a version of a pyrrhic victory with no victor. Burning alive, the man had no name, only titles of what he was and was not to us. A Palestinian in Gaza. Age unknown. His arms raised stiff to guard his face. His arms raised stiff because the fire had engulfed his torso so fast it contracted him into a narrative that wasn’t there. Will you allow me the vulgarity of saying that his arms were a zombie dance pose of Michael Jackson’s Thriller? Is the language of his killers not part of our life? Is there a death we have not cheapened? There is, the chorus quickly replies. The man burning alive could not scream. A physiologic thing at that point. He in total shock. We in total awe. He beyond nociception. Irrelevant larynx.
After his murder, his name came alive, his vital face and beautiful black hair, the stories about his genius at school, his ambition to become a physician—and he might have become a gifted trauma surgeon serving in a state-of-the-art burn unit somewhere civilized. This wouldn’t be possible without your resistance in a system that keeps alive, by proxy, those it chars by proxy. We keep them alive in our name, though not in our name we char them. Intifada emerges against a horror on a wheel of conditioned call and response.
A charred soul, like invisible ink, once burned, becomes visible in lieu of the body it once illuminated. Also, the charred soul soots the killer’s soul. Yet the killer’s body goes on being, washing, exfoliating, doing things to advance life on earth. Does the camera make the unspeakable more speakable in the digital age? Is that a good thing or just a thing? The horror not subject to live-streamed narration versus the horror that is. More books. In search of a clarity hellbent on extracting the categorical imperative out of the universal. Until what remains of the universal is life as autonomous thing ticking away indifferent, reproducing itself whatever the form. It drives humans insane that they can’t be better than life. All that talk and cortical thinking. All of it extraneous to life that reproduces recurrence. Do you think the universe cares about lifeforms according to our definition of what constitutes a living thing? But time is long, and time is now. If you convince yourself that now is long and yours, you own time.
Billions of us on the planet living in conditions better than in any other era in human history, we’re told. As if humans before us did not understand the meaning of life as we do. Or did understand but were unable to attain the means to that meaning as we have. For example, I love detours as much as the next pronoun. What did efficiency ever do for life that inefficiency didn’t? The word for pronoun in Arabic doubles for the word for conscience. The root shrivels within. On the day of the footage of the burning young man. Did you know his younger brother who was also burning was saved from the fire by their father but then died a few days later from his wounds? What was his name? Their father asked the eldest for forgiveness because he made no attempt to save him. He spoke the words, Same’ni Yaba into the blaze. The father did not shout them. The roaring fire like a raging ocean no sound penetrates.
A couple tossed a blanket over the burning body, but the flames devoured it at the moment of contact. One less blanket, the winter approaching.
When I first saw the video, a man out of the frame was shouting, “Pull him out, your religion be damned.” He was talking to the panicked group of young men darting around the blaze looking for an opening that permits their courage to slink away from their fear—a couple tossed a blanket over the burning body, but the flames devoured it at the moment of contact. One less blanket, the winter approaching. And the blasphemous phrase the man shouted in renunciation of the divine as a renunciation of the human or the self in the human. “Your religion be damned.” When the phrase enters English, it lives, if it lives at all, inside a mirror. The body from which it came disappears. The image in the mirror casts no shadow. I watched the flames and listened, urging the past that had already happened to remain unaltered, as I spoke back to the blasphemer and the confused young men in search of a window for rescue: “Let him burn,” I snapped at the screen, my reflex at their reflex, code red for code blue: “Leave him be, let mercy in, your religion be damned.”
The hospital I work in, at, or for spends millions of dollars to drag a single American life out of imminent death. This spring a retired physician wouldn’t let his wife go for three weeks of instrumentation, so that they would get reconciled with futility on their own terms. The diagnosis doesn’t matter. And then one day, past his delusion, he started demanding more hydromorphone to be administered to her more frequently. A patron of the arts that taught her only about beauty, not mortality, she said to me one day before she called me Dr. Death. She couldn’t know I was in the middle of my genocide. From one medical team to another, we passed the baton of patient rights, knowing fully well we were attending to a miserable endgame. The machinery of technology routinizes my numbness and reliance on what numbs me. What neutralizes my ethics. A health system borne of a system that spends gazillions to annihilate other lives in wars. To say nothing of who gets what control over their body, the life that is the life within, and when? Who gets to override another’s body, domestic or foreign? The autoimmune can go eat itself. In Gaza, pregnancy has become a threat to two lives in one body. Attritional to more than two.
Sha’ban, the man burning alive, named after the month that precedes Ramadan in the Islamic lunar calendar. His brother also perished. What was his name? Their sister is hanging on by the skin of her teeth. What will become of their father, mother, and other siblings? What is your memory a slave to? And then more footage came through. A young girl wailing over the wholesome corpse of her father laid before her in his house thobe. Yet to be shrouded, he looked asleep. Perhaps shrapnel killed him without disfiguring him, or the force of impact, an internal translational injury, finished him off. She looked like she was nine years old but could have been six, now orphaned and unchilded.
Her little brother was also conjoined with her, no mother or woman around them. He was crying, though less intensely than she was. That’s how young he was. Absorbing his sister’s wailing but unable to match it. Stuttering his cries. His mind saving him a little since it knows more about life than he currently does. And his sister’s eyes darting up and down her father’s corpse, refusing to settle her gaze on his face, addressing his abdomen and legs, and screaming, “Will you wake up, Yaba, just for one minute, you’ll be okay, you need to wake up.” As if he was in one of his lazy moods, and she was ready to be driven to her favorite cousin’s house or to go to the beach as promised.
She kept scanning him up and down in sync with her screams that recalled another girl whose father was gunned down by Israeli forces, along with seven family members, while they were having a family day on the beach 18 years earlier. Darwish wrote about it, and the footage reached the far corners of the world. And here we are. She abruptly turns to her father’s serene, departed face and says, “How about a glass of water, Yaba? Shall I bring you some water, Yaba, a sip of water?” Her tone softening into tender negotiation. Countless times during her few years, he’d been thirsty and looked beat, and she offered him water, or he asked her for it. Sometimes it was after he woke up from a nap on the couch or before bedtime. And she loved it, and would cherish watching her little brother, who had reached the glass-of-water carrying age, get in on the action. Water mapping love in their brains before she or he knew what that beautiful thing was that was mapping itself inside them. And she would soak it all up.
A categorical imperative. I still get my parents water before they ask for it. And when I ask my kids for water, I feel my parents in me and feel my kids feeling good. Haven’t you recited back to your parents this verse of water they had recited to you?
