Writing as Protest: Watermelon Thoughts
I paused for weeks before writing, unable to register the horrors I watched, unable to lift a pen as the next low, and the next, just came running by. If shock halts normal responses, it equally is a precious register of loss of security. The invasive power of shock might have stopped me writing, but it pushed me to re-start, after some time for recovery. Nowadays war comes into our rooms and lives unmediated, instantaneously. In theory we can watch every round as, to paraphrase poet Simon Armitage, in Remains, it tears, rips, and ravages the lives of others. We had this not long ago, in daily abundance, with Russia’s appalling, shameless invasion of Ukraine, when statements of solidarity and flags of blue and yellow sprung up in unlikely places, including psychotherapy organisations. The yellow and blue still flies on the IGA website. With the fading of shock and habituation to war imagery, the same statements of solidarity now hang in some kind of mid-air stream, neither registered in the same way as when first issued, and neither possible to remove- nor should they be.
We write for ourselves, and for others- who matters? Who are our implied, and actual, readers? This time I write for group analysts, one of my communities of identification, but am apprehensive that it will be met with hostility by some. I hope to voice something valuable for others or add to a growing chorus of alternative voices. What I voice is not exclusively ‘mine’, but learned from and dependent on others, those of minorities and those marked by absence of power. I wrote to three therapy organisations in the UK, a brief, factual statement about the destruction of the Gaza Trauma (PTSD) Centre, for children and families, inviting messages of support to their UK counterpart charity, but not one was prepared to publish it. Ourselves? Group analysts have (only recently) embraced a (liberal?) language of ‘de-colonising’- everything from attitudes to curriculums- but do we sometimes halt in silence when those who are displaced and colonised hold a mirror to the onlooking world? We cannot detach ourselves from society and in the UK, where I live, mine is a (albeit it large) voice easily minoritized, even pathologized by the Establishment.
The worse kind of censorship is self-censorship, where fear of speaking out is the inhibiting force. The compromises are as formidable as they can be creative: use of the watermelon symbol, for example, to temper the guttural dislike by many in the Establishment of seeing the four colours: green, red, black, and white. Palestinian colours. Once banned, for decades. Not seen next to government officials here. Christoher Bollas once spoke of ‘negative hallucinations’, of not seeing what is there.
Humiliation
The stage for what burst with such indiscriminate, sadistic terror by Hamas on 7th October 2023, was set, one can say, just a few years before, when one of the most right-wing governments in American history granted every conceivable request to Israel, including ones it didn’t expect. As their new Embassy opened in Jerusalem, vital aid was cut to those people who did not pay homage to America, whilst over 200, mostly protestors, were shot at the Gaza border, a ‘Return’ protest. Bullet sounds did not disturb the Embassy opening and whist glasses were raised to the victorious host country, in one hand, the dreams of a landless and rightless people were damned, in the other. Looking away always serves the strong. In one of the last kicks of the Trump era, this Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, looking the part of a latter-day Roman, or IDF General, surveyed the lands of the West Bank- not named- and its non-people with not name, from the vantage point of a settlement. Despite his binoculars, no occupation was in sight. The already strong settlement movement was suitably buoyed, and political extremes encouraged. It is now the far Right in Israel who are ascendant, led by their (previously tarnished) Strong Man and its unique brand of civilisational populism, pitched against the hostile or pacified hordes. The Democrats fair little better, repeatedly showing themselves happy to sacrifice Palestine as a meaningful concept, and forever at the ready to supply consistent, solicitous devotion to the State of Israel. Exceptional states can vanquish lesser peoples, who stand in its course, but is not enough to defeat such people- humiliation is required. Procedural violence against Palestinians is conducted on an industrial scale, as is humiliation. Only one side is allowed to have the celebrated, the well-known, heroes, praise, the dignity of achievement.
The other, unspectacular, invisible setting against which the explosion of repugnant violence is set, is the day by day, year on year, decade on decade reduction of land, prospect, and security. The world seems to look away. Imagine an Israeli citizen, living a life that includes: inability to travel, insufficient/unclean water, food shortage, dependence on aid, barred access to relatives, mass displacement, wrecked homes, checkpoints, to name a few. To put it in another way, using an apt expression of novelist, Chinua Achebe, how do people endure the utterly seeping effects of a ‘trauma of diminished existence’?
Domicide
The situation and prospect of Palestinians has grown worse every year since a country disappeared from the maps. It is a negated history, a shrunken geography, and a barred, precarious existence, with no exaggeration the condition of Palestine, not a state, but a small portion, a broken and separated fragment of a lost country. Israel’s Other. A ‘placeless place’, to cite Mahmoud Darwish.
Domicide is effectively ‘war on the home’: houses, refugee camps, entire neighbourhoods. Syrian architect Ammar Azzouz writes about it, as evidenced in so many places in his country of birth, and now in Gaza, where the destruction of dwellings is not far from 50 %. Think of what is lost when a single home is destroyed- basic shelter, a way of life, an entire small world, and the material memories of the family who were there.
Uninhabitability
A UN Report from 2015 (but preceded by others) predicated that with economic collapse, de-development, and a debilitated infrastructure, Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020. Added to the destruction of homes is to be added, fields, orchards, bakeries, greenhouses. Livelihoods have no voice, but rubble groans. Ruins kill lives, but their stories are underneath.
The Jewish philosopher Thoedore Adorno spoke of, “The need to lend a voice to suffering”, as a “condition of all truth”. My heart goes out to Israeli victims of the terror assault on 7th October 2023. My heart goes out to Palestinian victims of an eighty-year dispossession. Far from there, what about the here, wherever the here happens to be. I end with the experience of three health service colleagues, with whom I had conversations. A Jewish colleague worries about an increased incidence of antisemitism in London, and shame about what is done ‘in our name’, far away. An Arab colleague takes time off work, distressed by what they see on the TV, upset by Islamophobia at home and slaughter abroad. A colleague from a trauma service wants to show support to the charity previously mentioned, but ‘cannot find the words’; in time, she does. As have I. Our Chief Executive acknowledged the events, with carefully excised words, naming Israel and ‘surrounding territories’. I have a watermelon badge that I will give to her, whilst mentioning the loss of so many medical and health workers, to help her remember the place that cannot be named.
Group analysts are witnesses. Or that is what we like to believe. But can we not also look the other way, like any other person? I am sure we can and I don’t exempt myself.
Palestinian writer, the late Mourid Barghouti, posed a question that could apply to those in a serious mental health crisis, and to entire peoples- how do people live on if caught between an “edge of hope” and “edge of despair”?
How to live within dire precarity? Not a question that psychotherapy or group analysis necessarily provides answers. Often it cannot. What to do with a watermelon identity?