Q9F

Poet Hanif Abdurraqib

nifmuhammad: For much of my life, I have been dismantled by the limitations of witness. The pace of that dismantling accelerates now, not due to an increase in horrors, but due to how easy it is to watch them unfold and then turn back to a world that, broadly seems to be indifferent to their unfolding. This varies, depending on who the horrors are inflicted upon and where they are happening. Hundreds of children in Gaza killed in a 2 day stretch, and the world didn't stop, didn't offer any memorials. No buildings changed colors in their honor. The world is capable of this kind of memorializing, depending on the children. To protest this, to take to the street or in any way to say “I want this to stop” is deemed an unreasonable position, worthy of life-altering punishment. The thing I have to Continually come to terms with, for much of my life, is that I live in a world that will not stop when atrocities are committed on a mass scale, if the victims of those atrocities do not pass a test built and administered by their oppressors. I feel devastated because I know, and fight alongside, and organize alongside so many deeply caring people, and we are living in an irredeemable world. A world that doesn't stop in its tracks when so many children are wiped out in a matter of hours cannot be redeemed, and yet, it's the one we have. There is much to grieve beyond my own feelings,I am just also saying =the central root of my grief is that this is the actual, material world that I have to exist in, to pour myself into. Hossam Shabat was murdered by Israel yesterday. I think about him in the context of the limitations of witness. He, like other journalists in Gaza, many of whom have been similarly targeted and murdered, setting a life aside to document the obliteration of his people, his family, his home. Doing it knowing that he was a target, and doing it knowing that if he was killed, the world would not stop. And still, he worked, flaws and limitations of witness aside. He, like so many others, have given you so much that is impossible to ignore, because history demands a record of what was accepted by those who decided it didn't matter, how it diminished all of us in the process.