I’m finding it hard to write these days
I’m finding it hard to write these days.
Writing is a gentle place for me, but I struggle to go there.
So much to be said, and no words adequate to the saying.
How to address the enormity of the horror in Gaza? How to talk, without taking space from those who are daily being bombed? How to speak without distracting attention that should be laser-focused on those sheltering from tanks and sniper’s bullets?
How to address the descent of a nation into fascistic, supremicist barbarism? How to tolerate the dribbling justifications for genocide that emerge from its frightened, sick and blinded population?
How to avoid trite comparisons with other times when nations descended into barbarism and asserted loudly the rightness of their inhumanity? Those comparisons are powerful and scream to be spoken.
What have I to say, from the quietness of my quiet life, that has any weight? Do I just, as I am, write about how this affects me, and so turn the indescribable suffering of the Palestinian people into a self- reflection? Are words only narcissism?
How to respond to people online?
I got caught in an argument (be honest, I chose to indulge my fury — no one forced me to join in), with an Israeli military apologist — a ‘physician’ with the IDF. He wrote openly that if he had a Palestinian on his operating table, he would cause him pain — he’d be unable to resist the temptation to indulge his hatred. A doctor boasting he would cause suffering to a person who’s already suffering. A betrayal of every medical and humanitarian ethic, justified by nationhood, religion, community or some other word we use to exclude and dehumanise ‘others’.
How to write of this?
How to avoid the easy trap of othering all Israelis, or all Jews, or all Palestinians, or all Arabs, or all Westerners, or all humans? Othering lays the ground for oppression and erasure. I’ve spent my life fighting these things. How now to write of them when it seems the obvious response to this unspeakable barbarism?
Online argument entrenches positions.
Online silence suggest agreement, or acquiescence.
How to write of the silence of so many people?
Do they support the slaughter? Are they indifferent? Have they realised what I struggle to realise, that words no longer have value and silence is a more respectful response?
How to comprehend the ‘business as usual’ of friends, colleagues and the wider community, selling their services and sharing their business hacks, as children are assassinated in stranded cars, and the paramedics sent to help them are assassinated too?
How to talk with those who feel they don’t want to comment on this unfolding genocide, for fear of offending clients, damaging their brand or opening themselves to attack?
How to live in the knowledge that the last threadbare rags of Western morality have blown away, leaving us entirely naked and exposed? Our governments are not only complicit in this slaughter, we provide the weapons and the justification. We are all of us on this battlefield, murdering some of the most desperate people on earth.
Words I once took comfort in — human rights, international law, decency — taste of ashes in my mouth.
How to write of any of this when words no longer have meaning?
And how to write of the other atrocities that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza obscure? The continuing slaughter in Ukraine? Congo? The Rohingya? The Uyghurs?
How to hold in mind, and place into language, the effect of war on the other-than-human world? The terrified animals of Gaza, the birds, rivers, soil, trees, all destroyed by this human inhumanity?
The additional damage to an already damaged earth defies any attempt at language.
How do we find words to talk with, or describe someone who can describe as ‘collateral damage’ a child having to endure amputation without anaesthetic, or witness the slaughter of her family, or dying, hours after birth, in an abandoned incubator?
How do we begin to find words to address such mental sickness?
I’m finding it hard to write.
I’m finding it hard to breathe.
I’m finding it hard to think.
None of that matters, because none of this is about me.
I must write, breathe, think, if only as a wilful act of hope.
Hope for better. Hope for justice. Hope that those who survive this mass-murder will be given the space and safety to heal. Hope that the sick travesty of world governments will transform to something better. Hope that the criminals will be tried, locked away and treated for their sickness. Hope that the soil, the rivers, forests will have the space to grow back better and stronger.
Hope.
I find it hard to write of hope because I feel so little hope.
But it’s all I have.
After thirty years performing, directing and teaching around the world, now I coach and mentor artists and others to live in joy and creativity. I also still perform sometimes.
I recently published a free training ‘How to make BIG decisions when you feel really stuck’. It’s a PDF and video. Get your copy here.
More information about me here: www.johnbritton.co