1 photo, 1 song: #4
Sometimes, in film photography, you get this phenomenon of overlapping negatives: where for whatever reason, the film got stuck inside the camera, didn’t advance like it was supposed to, resulting in two images blurred into one.
Ever since October 7th, I have felt like an overlapping image: two negatives, struggling to fit into the same frame.
In one image, life is pretty good! My third book just came out, and while I have more insecurities about this book than perhaps anything I’ve published before, and while disappointments perhaps just start to stack up with each book as a mid-list author (if I can even call myself mid-list? who knows), overall, people have been very kind about it. It is very neat that I have been able to traditionally publish three books. I finally got to announce my YA debut, a book that brought me a lot of joy to write. While it’s still winter in the Northwest, which means lots of rain and clouds and wind, the sun shows itself, occasionally. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the garden. I feel deeply in love with my wife, my son, my house, our life.
In the other image are dead children hanging out of bombed-out buildings with their legs blown off; a child desperately calling for help in a car surrounded by her dead family, until Israel eventually kills her and the medics who tried to help her too. There’s a child with limbs blown off in the middle of a dusty street, shocked eyes open, chest heaving as they take their final breaths. Their death is witnessed by the thousands of people who view Motaz’s videos; nothing changes. There’s a child lying on the dirty floor of an overcrowded hospital, medics on their knees, trying to flush out a wound on the child’s forehead that is so large and deep that any passersby can easily see their exposed brain. There are doctors and students and lawyers and farmers arrested and detained without cause, tortured, dying, hopeless. There is Wael Al-Dahdouh, weeping over his grown son Hamza’s body, weeks after he’d already weeped over the bodies of his wife, two other children, a grandson. Each bomb, each death is paid for and supported by my country. There are people preventing aid from reaching civilians trying to survive a genocide, people protesting at a border saying, the enemy deserves to starve.
Sometimes, I’m unable to ignore the ghost of this image. In December, we went to Zoo Lights, as we do around the holidays every year, and while Zoo Lights can sometimes be bitterly cold and wet and overcrowded, this year it was mild. We got there early enough that the crowds weren’t overwhelming; we even got to see some live animals in addition to the lights—elephants, mountain goats. And the whole time I walked with my seven year old and my chest was tight with a kind of suffocating panic—how is this fair? How many children are never going to get to experience something like this, all because of the cruelty of cowardly men?
Almost every piece of media I consume now, every thing I read, is filtered through this second image, now forever attached to the first. I read a psychology book about healing from trauma, for writing research, and I wonder if Gazans will ever even have the opportunity to try. I read a book about cults and it helps me understand Zionism, maybe, a little bit. (I still don’t truly understand, as much as I try to be humble, as much as I try to recognize the power of growing up with a belief so central to your identity, what it must feel like to have the harsh underside of that belief exposed, why our brains aren’t wired to recognize that exposure. We are all, after all, as the book expressed, cultish—all in search of societies and spaces where we are told, definitively, that we belong.) I read issues of National Geographic and almost every article seems relevant, somehow. An issue devoted to advances in space exploration: how absolutely fascinating, how simultaneously infuriating to spend billions on space instead of solving the issues of poverty and education that would heal the world. What a privilege, to have enough time and safety to dream of the stars. An issue devoted to the last surviving World War II vets: a reminder of how horrific the war truly was, why there are so many books written about it, the depths to human cruelty. Perspective doesn’t help me feel any better, really, but it’s still good to have it. How heartbreaking, most of all, that the lessons of the Holocaust have not truly been learned, that the propaganda is now even targeting the organizations that were built after World War II to prevent this exact thing. (No organization is perfect, but when your enemy is Doctors Without Borders? When your enemy is United Nations relief organizations? When your enemy are health care workers? I don’t know, man.) I read an article about Kosovo, one of the newest countries in the world, and the difficulties and sort of wonder of creating a brand new government out of nothing. And how tenuous it is, how Serbia still doesn’t officially recognize Kosovo’s existence, how much hatred is still there, but…somehow, because of a whole complexity of reasons, Kosovo is able to at least try. To create departments of labor, economics, education. To be Kosovan citizens. I read that article, and I think about Israelis saying, if only we had a partner for peace, and I think, maybe if you stopped throwing all the partners in jail, maybe if you stopped killing all the partners, maybe there would be a chance. Because there is always a chance. There is always possibility, with support. I read an article about Poland’s transition to more humane leadership after years of right-wing rule and I think, maybe the Knesset can change one day, too. But I don’t feel hopeful.
I study maps. I think about how, before October 7th, I had heard the terms Gaza and the West Bank, heard about Israel and Palestine, but I probably couldn’t have really pointed any of it out on a map. Couldn’t have told you every bordering country. I can now. I can tell you every major city. I can point out Golan Heights. I can tell you about Areas A, B, C. I know that Jerusalem is partitioned, know the history of the Sinai. I know the word Knesset. The word Nakba. I know of the intifadas, the Great March of Return, the swirl of differing opinions around Oslo. There are many things I did not know before that I know now. Each thing reminds me how much I still don’t know; each thing reminds me how little of an expert I am, but still, I wonder if Israel knows how much we are learning.
This negative is not confined to Gaza; it cracks in different directions, especially as time goes on. Sometimes it stretches to all the things I don’t know, around the world; the gauzy over-image only highlights how Westernized I am, how little I know of so much. It cracks when I see neo-Nazis marching in Nashville, when the next American presidential campaign is entirely rooted around the crisis at the southern border, a crisis rooted in poverty, that only results in hatred: the cruelties of the world repeat, over and over. Sometimes it cracks when certain activists use the same us against them rhetoric that causes this suffering in the first place; it uses the same yeah, but whataboutism rhetoric that Zionists are so adept at using. We shouldn’t yeah, but anything. It’s language of distraction, of dehumanization. It should always be yeah, and. October 7th was a tragedy and we should view it so, even if the road that led to October 7th is well documented and plain to see. And if October 7th was a tragedy, every day since then has been a tragedy of equal value. If a thousand lives lost is a tragedy, then thirty thousand lives lost is a tragedy too big to comprehend. We should be able to mourn the loss of life at the hands of violence, whether it’s the civilian being shot, right now, this second, somewhere in America due to the plain negligence of loving guns more than we value human life, or it’s people being massacred in the streets of Gaza, in a manner that no logical person could be able to justify. That even military experts cannot justify. Suffering is not always equal, but our ability to recognize humanity—to recognize that in every single place in the world, there are all different kinds of people who think all different kinds of things, including those who were simply born there, who have never had different choices—that ability should always be the same.
More and more, I am able to push back the second image, live more fully in the first, I think simply because it is so hard to believe that the second image is still happening, and it’s what the human brain does, in order to survive: it dissociates. It pushes aside the things that are too hard to comprehend.
But the second image is still there. Sometimes it slices in when I’m feeling particularly at peace, particularly in love with my life. It says: Remember. It says: It hurts to keep witnessing but resilience is essential. You have suffered so little. You are only experiencing an ounce of what others have experienced.
Last night, lying in bed, I searched through Google Photos on my phone. I was looking for one specific picture, but a slide of my finger somehow brought me back to the oldest photos kept in my cloud. I found myself looking through all of 2018—I was real into hiking at the time, and taking often embarrassing, narrating videos of myself while hiking—and I cringed through half of them, before smiling at the ones of my son, so little, barely talking, toddling all over the place. And then I thought, this was before the pandemic. This was before the genocide. My chest hurt.
Maybe it’s easier to feel in love with my life now, knowing how lucky I am. Maybe I should not say as much as I do; maybe I should not publish this. Maybe I can never possibly say enough.
I fell in love with my friend Alicia’s newest book this weekend, reading it start to finish in 48 hours, and what a beautiful thing to get to read books you love, from people you love, even when the book doesn’t come out until 2025 and you have to wait so long to hold it in your hands.
One of the important songs on Alicia’s playlist for said book is The Only Exception by Paramore, and so I’ve been listening to it a lot, thinking about John and Micah and feeling very warm and soft.
I hope you are all holding your negatives in place as best as you can.
xo
anita