Writing Violence
Shaiq Ali
What are the contours of violence? At its horrific worst, it is genocidal. Life is always at war. But at its most subtle, it is chronic, slow. Writing about these contours involves a consideration of what writing amidst such violence means. Does it mean archiving? Is it to narrate? Is it cathartic? Is it merely art for art’s sake? Can the martyr writings on the walls of a Palestinian Hospital be considered art for art’s sake?
I remember quite distinctly when on 15th December 2019 the police forces brutally entered the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia, a Muslim minority institution where I was studying at the time. Students of the university were protesting against the discriminatory CAA-NRC laws from early December. As a young student like many others, one is always overtaken by a sense of delusion, a pacifying fallacy, that the university space is not of violence, somehow safeguarded. This quickly evaporated when news broke out that the police personnel were firing tear gas shells inside, at the students. A student inside the library lost his eye, a professor and some of his students locked themselves up inside a small canteen, and a police officer brutally assaulted one of my friends inside the toilet and students were paraded out of campus, like prisoners. I, along with two of my friends, narrowly escaped via a broken barrier wall at the far end of the campus. A part of the fear is still quite fresh while I have since graduated from the university. It still seems like a strangely lovable place, a place to stroll around in the evenings, but memories betray images of violence now and then. Tear gas shells, upturned library chairs and cries. Huge protests erupted later and pogroms were orchestrated against the Muslim community in North East Delhi. Thousands of people in the area felt the shockwaves of the events of those six months. But as others wrote and continue to write, there still remains a lot to be told by the victims themselves. But how does one do so?
Writing as an act records the interactions of the personal with the familial, communal, social and even global events. And it takes time for those interactions to settle down in memory – it takes time for the blood-filled veins to hold the pen and the heart to beat along with the strokes of the pen. While encountering violence, differentiating between the real and the fantasy becomes hazy, dimmed. The heart of a Palestinian girl rushing to her father shot down by an Israeli sniper has captured an image that is too cold, too inhuman. Yet and immediately, this proximate inevitability of death is to be suffered simultaneously with the ordinary acts of living: to put your faith in Allah, to fast for Ramadan, to arrange for food, to have moments of laughter, to go on walks. But as writing involves a certain level of direction and focus, the image in the heart of the girl will never be on the page unless the memory of that image has been watered down and recast within the daily events of life in the course of years. The girl locates the death of her father as one event in her life that defines it but it is still a life to live.
On one of those saddened lockdown evenings in the Covid pandemic in 2020, I would go around to shop for groceries for a brief period from 5pm to 8pm.. The streets teemed with people and the by lanes joyous with the concentrated elation of at least existing in relation with the external world: that a community exists, that we are not just brick houses and a collection of wants and desires. I would wonder whether there was any collective memory of what happened in the past year. Muslims had fled from North East Delhi to Jamia Nagar, selling their land at throwaway prices. Bare necessities of living were not only unavailable but were not even in sight. The nature of everyday risk had changed from suffering amidst physical violence to enduring amidst systemic violence.
Maybe that is why when one does read fiction of persecution from conflict areas, it is the home, the mosque, the family or the food that is central, and not the all-pervasive violence. In such situations, the more one deals with violence on the corporeal level, the more crucial, ‘everyday’ becomes in writings. In Randa Jarrar’s short story from the collection Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women, the child-narrator watches women at a checkpoint being strip-searched by Israeli soldiers and wonders why they are forced to remove their shoes. She notices as a woman becomes furious with a soldier, accusing her of stealing her sandals while frisking and she shouts, “First my land, now my Guccis. God damn it.”
This everyday narrates the chronic, underlying condition of the total effects of persecution on the individual that is in an unceasing state of instability within oneself and with the community, fighting also the conflict of Islamic faith with the modern. It is in this very time, that writing becomes the medium, not of reconciliation or resolution but of eyeballing the conflict, in all its bareness, moving from a stance of aversion, lest it become too tormenting, to a mode of confrontation. The conditions that allow one to write about one’s condition are the very conditions that prevent one from questioning one’s persecution. Therefore, for Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian activist and writer or for Aime Cesaire, the Martinican writer and politician, or for Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian writer, the act of writing is at once resistance and intricate story-telling. For the writer, this means that he has to write, or rather, to overcome the conditions of his persecution that bind him down, he must force himself to write.
Enmeshed in one’s own personal agonies, there lie familial traumas, community persecution, social stigma, ecological concerns and the list is endless. It is only through noticing everything in its absolute detail that one can really find what one should write about. Write, then, not of a death, but about how elegantly the chinar leaves fall on the janaza* of a martyr at sunset.
*funeral procession
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