Bearing Witness

Literary disruptions and other discomforts

I saw the picture of the boy with the blown-up face first thing in the morning. Downstairs, in my kitchen, waiting for the coffee to drip. I’d brought my kid his bagel and yogurt and blueberries. I’d selected the day’s mug, a black one from the Roadkill Café in Seligman, Arizona, where me and my husband had stopped for breakfast during a Covid roadtrip. The waitress encouraged us to not wear our masks – this was a spot that prized freedom. You could tell from all the American flags, and the Fox news on the teevees. I picked up my phone, and I opened it, and I saw the picture of the boy. He was a very beautiful boy. His eyes seemed golden, that hazel. His eyes shone with such life but also looked somewhat blank, expressionless – or is it that we just rely on so much more of the face than just the eyes to be able to detect an expression? And he did not have more than his eyes. I wondered if he was in shock – he would have to be in shock – which led me to wonder how he could possibly process what had happened to him, and I felt a no like a dark wave, a monolith of rolling storm clouds pour in and over that thought. Don’t think about it. I thought about my son, about the same age, not yet having approached his breakfast, burritoed up in a fuzzy blanket. He too is a beautiful boy. His eyes are darker than the boy without a face, and they tilt. He is white, and American. He is sweet, with a sharp eye for injustice. His likes to joke and tease, lately he likes to dance, and so I’ve been asking him to dance various things, like dance what your day was like, or, dance frustration, dance excitement, dancelike a chubby baby. I imagine my son with his face blown off. Like those books where you flip a bunch of pages to mix-and-match different animals: a monkey with hummingbird wings and the webbed feet of a duck. A beautiful, young boy and flip the maw of a monster, blasted outward, charred and dark, a mashup of boy and void, I can only liken it to horror, body horror, alien movies. In a cinema it would be hard to look at. I would maybe hide a bit behind my fingers. In my kitchen I force myself to see it. Just once, you only have to look at it once, I tell myself. I know that my country paid for this - to call it a mutilation, it’s not enough. I find myself hoping he’s dead, and scold myself harshly. Would I rather my own son be dead? No. I hope in my heart that there are doctors who see this too and some doctor will be a hero and he will pledge to fix this boy for free, and people with money will bring him here and they will repair his face. Surely if I am seeing this and I am in such pain about it, others are too and someone, a helper, what Mr. Rogers called them, a helper will find him and get him and help him. How his face looks like it was turned inside out. A stop-motion photo of a drop of milk and the arcing droplets are his face. His face a stop-motion picture of a war crime, I look at it this one time and feel lightheaded. I meditate on my country having done this – paid for it, supported it, provided the weapons, opted not to stop. I know there is much more than this boy – so many boys, girls, small people with futures that will be hard, very hard, if such futures even exist. The boy may be dead now, I realize. It seems hard to imagine someone surviving this, but people survive incredible injuries, impalements and whatnot. But still. Infection. He is so small. I think of my own son, a little sack of bones, but such power and force inside him, how he whacks and kicks at his Muay Thai classes, how he loves to exert himself. What did this boy love to do, in his body. Will he remember what his face used to look like, if he lives? Will he remember a time before total horror eclipsed his days?

 I will see the picture accidentally throughout the day as I move on and off my phone. I get better at expecting it, seeing it peripherally only and scrolling it out of view. I think about how one filament of thought and feeling that overtook my body when I was shocked by this picture was No and angry No, and for a second I thought, This is too much I am going to have to hide Frankie – my beautiful friend who posts these things. It is too much to see this while I am reaching for a coffee cup, innocent in my morning Americanness, just wanting to feed blueberries to my sweet American son. In the 12-step programs me and Frankie go to they say, ‘You’re not responsible for your first thought.’ You are responsible for your second thought, and your first action. I thought about Frankie having found this photo herself and having seen it, having had to look at it as she post it. Because I know all humans are more or less physiologically the same, I know she also probably felt flooded, hot and cold, repulsed and inconceivably sad, truly horrified. Frankie also has children, two beautiful children, one around the age of the boy whose face was exploded. I think that probably a few people have hidden Frankie’s posts, as she regularly posts photos of the atrocities that are occurring daily in Gaza. I would have little visual understanding of the real nightmare of war if not for her photos. And it is, I think, important to bear witness to the reality, and so I will not hide her. Recently I was talking to a man I am hoping will become a spiritual teacher of mine, and he was thinking about how fucked our bodies and psyches are from ingesting so much real horror, impossible images, and then having to carry on with our lives. And I said that I don’t really see very many images, actually, only the ones that my friend Frankie posts, and I became very alarmed and concerned for Frankie, like, is she okay? To sit with these images, and to battle the battles she’s no doubt having to endure online. I texted her and we went for coffee and a walk. What are our responsibilities as ensouled humans with nervous systems and tender hearts, with emotional interiors and senses of justice, of right and wrong, and with very little power – what are we to do while the very money we make with our hands and bodies and mouths and brains, while some of this money goes to buy the bomb that explodes the boy’s face? At the very least, we know that it is true, that it is truly happening, in the same world we live in, not only in a weird dissociated portals called our screens. If we happen to have a feeling about it we maybe sit with it, the terror of it, and maybe we have to explain to our child while we’re crying or our coworkers why our eyes are puffy or why we’re late for our appointment. It is truly the very least, the very very least we can do, we who can do so very little.

I’ve thought a lot about another photo that is very painful to look at, “The Terror of War’ by Nick Ut, commonly known as ‘Napalm Girl’ as the composition draws your eyes to the young girl in the middle, totally nude, screaming, running with her arms away from her scrawny body, being chased by American soldiers. She has been doused with napalm, which burned the clothing from her body. As much as I read about napalm I cannot fully get my head around what it is. Liquid fire? Sticky, liquid fire, but worse? Chemical fire that sucks away oxygen and makes the very air explode? Worse than the girl, whose incredible vulnerability, her nakedness, her-girl-ness, what is hardest for me to look at in the picture is the boy in the left of the frame. Like the girl he seems to be about nine. He is dressed. But his face holds a look of terror and anguish like I have never seen. His mouth is large with it, it looks as if its turning liquid with despair, cartoonish almost. There is something unreal about it, but it is only that I have never seen a child make such an astonishing expression of grief.

The girl in the picture lived. Her name is Kim Phuc. She is one of the only people who survived the apocalyptic napalm attacks America unleashed on Viet Nam. She is in constant pain, but she is a Christian, and she is grateful to live. It took fifty years to complete the surgeries her body needed. Her recovery began almost immediately, after the photographer scooped up her and the other children and somehow transported them to a hospital. She was there for over a year. The photo won a Pulitzer Prize. Since that time, in the wars that have followed, there has been efforts to not show war photos that disturb. We know that Bush forbid the photographing of coffins of dead American soldiers returning from the Persian Gulf in the early 90s. The ban was kept for almost twenty years, until it was lifted during Obama’s tenure. The photos that Frankie is posting, someone on the ground in Gaza took them. Someone who could not scroll up and away from the horror of the sweet boy’s face. That person had to stand there, and take it, and hope to survive long enough to get it out - to us. To the world, which we are. Ayah Shiadah, a Palestinian-Mexican photographer who has been documenting Los Angeles Ceasefire actions, said,

“I guilt myself into watching the gut-wrenching videos of shredded flesh, limbs, and corpses obliterated by powerful bombs. I have to watch because Palestinian citizens and journalists risk everything for us to see for ourselves the unfiltered, harrowing truth, and the endless atrocities funded by billions of American tax dollars.”

The journalists risk everything, and so many of them have been murdered now, we do not even get as much documenting as we need to. There are so many horrors deprived the tiny, tender justice of being witnessed. A sliver of justice. Being seen and known in your pain, by a stranger, for a moment, before they but their shoes on and left to take the kid to school.

Later in the day I get a text from Myriam:

‘Do you want to know what happened at the PEN event the other night?’

YES PLEASE, I text back.

I had already seen the footage of the award-winning Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar retaining dignity while being dragged out of a Los Angeles PEN/America event in her chair. It looked so chaotic, and violent – she wasn’t being physically harmed, but the whole action around her, the removal of her in her chair – it just struck me as violent. It must have felt violent, scary. PEN is an international organization that advocates for writers, and they have a special interest in protecting writers who may be being harmed by their government. They’re known for being free-speech advocates. PEN International have long been advocates for justice for Palestinian; they called for investigation into Israeli war crimes against the nations back in 2021, and likely earlier, citing the targeted destruction of bookstores and media centers. The organization seems to have a Palestinian branch which was founded by writer Gharib Asqalani, who had served as the Director of Literary Creativity in the Palestine Ministry of Culture as well as founding the Palestinian Writer’s Union.

PEN/America – which I have won an award from, whose parties I’ve loved to swish around, whose emerging writers programs have been so helpful to writers at the starts of their careers - had this event a couple nights ago, Mayim Bialik and Moshe Kasher in conversation. In her own words, Bialik is ‘a staunch Zionist’.’ She’s posted gratitude to Israeli soldiers on social media, thanking them for ‘defending our right to exist.’ She’s donated money to the IDF for ‘bulletproof vests.’ She’s against a ceasefire.

Upon learning of this event, two authors – Angela Flournoy and Kathleen Alcott – canceled their appearance at a different PEN event, horrified at their platforming of Bialik, as well as PEN/America’s ‘reluctance to take a stand against the genocide in Palestine, and particularly the targeting of writers, journalists and artists,’ Flournoy wrote in an email posted to LitHub.

The Bialik/Kasher event was a co-production with the lit org Writer’s Bloc, which canceled an event around Nathan Thrall’s book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama in October, citing it as ‘too polarizing.’ What was an organization that toots its horn about being dedicated to free speech and international justice even doing pairing with Writer’s Bloc, an apparant early adapter to the trend of censoring Palestinian stories and punishing those that support them? Writer’s Bloc + Bialik = a pretty strong anti-Palestine vibe. DURING A GENOCIDE.

The text from Myriam comes in:

‘So, Randa and I were seated near the stage where Kasher and Bialik were conducting their interview. Both of us had brought in speakers. About 10 minutes into the interview, we played an audio of Randa’s voice reading the names of 13 Palestinian writers murdered by Israel since Oct. 7. Security guards approached us and ordered us to leave. We remained. We waited for about 10 more minutes. Then, we played an audio recording that chanted how often a child is murdered in Gaza. During the playing of that recording, Randa and I were swarmed by security. They escalated and began to drag her out of the auditorium. She was trying to hand informational fliers out to people as she was being dragged but no one would take them. The director of writers bloc took the mic and spoke to the audience, condemning our actions. While the recordings were playing, Kasher dramatically popped a mint into his mouth to demonstrate how little he cares about Palestinian life. I filmed the entire thing and they dragged Randa outside and slammed the door in her face.’

I read Myriam’s text and I watched the videos she sent me. She said they’re drafting a letter to PEN demanding they establish a program to get asylum for Palestinian writers – which I’m actually shocked they haven’t already done, consider their mission, and how many writers have been murdered in Gaza. She said that the security guards threatened to call LAPD. She sent me PEN’s statement about the event, the protest, and it is weak, and it is emblematic of the terrible place we find ourselves in, where good people, people who would never not care about war, who care about books and whatnot, somehow don’t get that there is an honest-to-god, not-that-complicated genocide born of colonialism, and that their country is paying for it with their money. The piece of the statement that felt the worst to read was:

A number of audience members said that while they might share the political beliefs of the protesters, Kasher’s book had nothing to do with the conflict, and that no one has the right to shut down another person or conversation.

I want to give the audience at this shady event a little more credit than the absolute village idiots PEN makes them sound like, but I don’t know. They ‘might’ share the political beliefs? No, they do not. Because the political beliefs of the protesters is:

If your country is co-signing a genocide, funding it and refusing to stop it, supplying the weapons and using tax dollars, than NOTHING IN AMERICAN LIFE should be free from disruptions that remind us of this horrible fact. Even if your little book party gets messed up. I am a curator of literary events and have been for decades. If a bunch of protesters stormed in and demanded we all instead listen to the names of writers we are – like it or not – complicit in killing, that we sit together with the reality of children being killed by our government, than FUCK I think that we do what the moment expects from us. We’re flexible. We give the attention to what needs it. We thought it was your book, but – nope, it’s genocide. And then we all go on with our privileged and safe lives, where no one’s face will be blown off before the night is over. Pretty fucking sweet night, amirite? Oh, wait – you thank the protestors. For being the conscience of the collective. For taking a stand, which feels dorky and scary and vulnerable. Which risks them being physically hurt or having cops called on them. You thank them for redirecting the group’s attention to where it needs to go.

During the wars in Afghanistan, the phrase IT’S NOT THE WAR IT'S THE WAY WE LIVE was spraypainted around San Francisco. This is the war, it is all about this war, a war which has been inevitable since the Palestinian people were driven from their homes, since a hundred years ago when Great Britain decided a great way to get rid of the Jewish people Europe couldn’t seem to love or protect was to evict a bunch of Brown people and put them there. But, it is the way we live. We ought to be living as if our country is sponsoring a genocide. I’m not sure what that looks like, but I know it means not looking away, bearing witness, honoring the protesters who give us the gift of disruption, forcing us to meet our grief, inspiring us towards new ways of throwing a clog into the American machine, to make it so that there is no business as usual when something this enormous is happening.