'Don't Let Them Kill Us': the campaigns to be seen as human
From 2011-2012 I lived in Bosnia because I was on a Fulbright, studying artistic resistance, responses and memorialization to genocide. During the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted from 1992 to 1996, there were so many moments where the people of Sarajevo, blockaded and under heavy bombing, did things to appeal to the international community to prove their humanity, to prove they were worth living.
Some of these responses included things like staging a performance of Waiting for Godot in the heart of Sarajevo during the siege, as a metaphor for the Bosnians who were waiting for the international community to show and up and do something while they were being murdered. And then Bosnian’s organizing a “Miss Besieged Sarajevo” contest, where models in Sarajevo held up banners during their pageant saying ‘Don’t Let Them Kill Us’, trying to appeal to the west through the use of beauty that they deserved to live.
I’m a poet, I’m Muslim, my mom and her family were all born in Indian occupied Kashmir, and my father and his family were born in Pakistan. I grew up in the United States where I was in seventh grade when September 11th happened and saw how quickly language was being weaponized against people of my faith, how we were being equated to less than human, always seen as operating with an ulterior motive that included being a threat to ‘civilized’ Americans.
This is the slow process of stripping one’s humanity: of always having to prove, time and time again, that you are worthy of a life, of breath, of care, of tenderness, of going to school, of going to the grocery store, of being able to be.
There are so many more examples, in places where genocide has occurred throughout the world, of ordinary people trying—begging—to show the world that they are human while they are being slaughtered.
I see this phenomenon, the need to prove that we are worthy of existence, in so many people, namely people of color, indigenous people, Black people, and other marginalized groups. I think about this article that Hala Alyan wrote, on how Palestinian people have to constantly audition for humanity, the demoralizing work of trying to make people care, to see.
I’ve seen myself do this over my whole life, but particularly in the last month. I’ve seen myself anticipate the truths that I know about the world (ie, people don’t care about Muslim people) and then talk about the arguments of care to circumvent around those painful truths (ie, Palestinian people are many religions, including Christian. Some of the Christian families in Gaza can date their family’s back to the time of Christ, when I went to visit the Church of Nativity I had to cross into Palestine to go see it, the family who I stayed with and took care of me in Bethlehem—which is in occupied Palestine—was Christian.) But so much of it comes back down to knowing that so many people don’t care about Muslim people, that decades of Islamophobic campaigns against us in western media have made people desensitized to our humanity. That we have to do anything else to be seen as legitimate, as palatable, as worthy.
What does this do to a single human, to be seen this way? What does it do to an entire swath of people?
In this interview with Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer who was assassinated along with his 14-year-old niece, he talks about the loss of dignity that the western world expects Palestinians to just accept by their colonial power. This interview occurred before Hezbollah or Hamas existed, in 1970. The West wrings their hands and says ‘both sides,’ when they can’t even acknowledge the fact that Palestinians have been corralled in their own homes, not even allowed to call themselves Palestinian, and are forced to live in camps on their own land, and starved.
I saw a video of the press conference that Palestinian children had, appealing to the international community in front of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, begging to be saved, insisting that they want to go to school and be able to live. They are reading this in English. At this young, tender age, they are having to beg for the world to see their humanity. We have failed. This world has failed.
It’s heartbreaking to see how much of that is occurring now—in Palestine, in Sudan, in the Congo, in Tigray, and beyond. It’s heartbreaking to see Afghan refugees in Pakistan, on the brink of being deported, explaining how many of them are older and going to have to start over because they’ve lived in Pakistan for forty years. That this, too, is their home. How Sudanese people, who the world was enamored with in their freedom struggle just a few years ago, are being discarded by western media and western powers now, as they are being murdered and experiencing genocide. How there has been a genocide in the Congo for years so that the west can have technology, and how most people in the west don’t even know that. And how two million people in Tigray are internally displaced, and 2.3 million children are cut off from humanitarian aid as they are also being ethnically cleansed.
Do these people not matter? Will they have to continually beg to be seen as human in order to have basic access to safety?
The land remembers. The land always remembers.
We are intertwined. All of us. The land holds all of us, the land knows our humanity. The idea that we could be separate isn’t possible, the idea that we could segregate ourselves, and our struggles, from one and another, is so inherently where our violence’s come from. Like the trees, our roots are intertwined. How much damage do we do to the earth, to each other, when we keep separating our roots?
When I lived in Bosnia, I went to Srebrenica, an area where the Bosnian genocide had occurred, and then had been taken over by the people who murdered them in mass. Many people who took over that land denied that the genocide had happened, probably to justify their ability to be there. I had read so much about Srebrenica pre-genocide, how amazing and multicultural it was. When I went, the land carried a heaviness that was overwhelming. The land remembered what had happened. It was painful to be there. The land was holding so much, and it was palpable.
This morning I woke up crying, my grief at knowing that I might never be able to return to my motherland of Kashmir because of the current Indian occupation. Of how few people even know, or care, what’s happening there. How I have spent my life trying to go there, and yet how I might never be able to. Because of the genocidal pogroms my family faced, because of the creation of these states and nations and arbitrary borders and quests for power, I might always live unrooted, cut off from a part of my family history, a place that continues to be occupied, where people are jailed for speaking up, where people can’t live with the freedom of movement.
I saw a clip of Mos Def saying that this isn’t a teachable moment. It isn’t. If you haven’t been seeing this, if you haven’t been fighting for the freedom of all, I don’t know what to say anymore. I’m done explaining, appealing, for humanity, especially when people are dying in mass. That’s on you.