Sitting in this office building, the view from the window is barely thought-provoking. The horizon is lined with the concrete urbanity of the city and the sky is tarnished with motes of effluence. But even in this moment of uninteresting wretchedness, the mind is at ease: making plans for dinner, imagining the bustling of the city traffic, and the assured luxury of the comfort of a home. The imaginative mind is least troubled in its unbothered tranquility.
But don’t we all function on this modality? Planning away our oft-perceived systematic lives in its sheer unsystematic irrationality – every day, twenty-four hours, seven days a week, and 365 days a year.
This is the peace and freedom that we all take for granted. A luxury that seems almost negligible. The mere guarantee of a sense of security, although most often void, makes us so unconsciously ungrateful. But at the same time, it also makes us oblivious to the desire for these ‘very small things’ in the hearts of those who live a life of incarceration, trauma and oppression. Yes, the imagery this evokes is unfortunately unambiguously Palestinian.
The Nakba continues to this day, as Ilan Pappé rightfully asserts. The coloniality of a systematic apartheid regime becomes ever more oppressive and continues to impose a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that has become a Palestinian reality since 1948. This is colonialism-in-continuum – from one colonizer to the other.
It becomes nothing less than a living nightmare where the Israeli state-sponsored terrorism inflicts injurious morbidity incommensurate– both physical and psychological. The badge-bearing ‘boogeymen’ on the streets being always ready to haunt the weak and to crush them under the immense burden of colonial genocide imbued with a [false] sense of superiority, ownership and arrogance.
It aims to eradicate their voices, their hopes, their liberty, and to cuff them into a draconian captivity that is filled with sinister, often nauseating, dissonant chants of ‘death to Arabs’.
This structural violence is a fascist agenda, almost transcendental and very Social Darwinian, since it perpetuates itself and reifies by seeping deep into routine sociological structures and ecological worldviews, into patterns of subjectivity and especially into traumatizing memoirs that plague the mind with macabre images of violence and injustice. This turns itself into a psychological working model which is almost cosmologically mimetic in nature because it unjustifiably becomes an embedded reality of life.
The objective this literary endeavor aims to achieve is not to highlight the patterns of violence which manifest themselves through the grotesque Israeli sin committed against Palestinians for it is self-evident and needs no rationalization. It is neither to silhouette the egregious Israeli human rights violations nor to highlight the arbitrariness and the exclusionary nature of international law.
