He Had Two Babies
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
He had two babies. Twins. Aysal and Aser, a boy and a girl.
Mohammad Abu Al Qumsan had two babies and a loving wife.
Now he has nobody.
An Israeli airstrike killed both his babies, and their mother, and their grandmother, while he was out collecting their birth certificates.
They had just been born.
There’s a video of him screaming, screaming the way any of us would scream. The screams of a man who suddenly lost everything a man could possibly lose. Screaming Gaza’s screams.
Sometimes it feels weird that we’re not all screaming like that man all the time, as long as we share a planet with this nightmare. Sometimes I kind of want to.
After Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in protest of this genocide I remember reading someone say something like “I understand the man who set himself on fire better than I understand the people in my own community going around like nothing’s happening.” Al Qumsan’s screams remind me of those words today.
It often feels like an obnoxious sacrilege that our civilization hasn’t stopped dead in its tracks while this happens day after day, month after month, with the full-throated support of our own western governments. How we’re still going to movies and dinners and laughing and joking while those bloodcurdling screams are erupting from Gaza. It feels like waltzing outside the extermination camp and trying to ignore the smell of the black smoke coming from the chimneys.
We look like lunatics. We are acting as crazy as someone whistling and dancing in the middle of a roaring house fire. Surely it would be a hell of a lot saner to be screaming all the time than to be going along our merry little way like this horror isn’t happening.
But that would be socially inappropriate. It would make people uncomfortable. Here, in this dystopian civilization, it’s considered rude to even bring it up.
Here in Australia the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has canceled the performance of acclaimed pianist Jayson Gillham after he dedicated a piece to the historically unprecedented number of journalists who have been killed in Gaza since October. The MSO called this dedication “an intrusion of personal political views on what should have been a morning focused on a program of works for solo piano,” adding that “The MSO understands that his remarks have caused offence and distress and offers a sincere apology.”
“Offence and distress.” At a dedication to murdered journalists. At a concert hall.
Forget about Mohammad Abu Al Qumsan’s “offence and distress”. After all, he only lost his babies, his wife and his mother-in-law to an Israeli airstrike. He wasn’t made to feel emotionally uncomfortable by someone talking about the bad things Israel is doing at a fancy classical music venue.
Forget about Al Qumsan, and forget about the two million people like him who’ve been screaming the same screams and living the same nightmare. What matters is our emotional comfort, and our ability to psychologically compartmentalize our mainstream political beliefs away from the realities of their consequences.
Nobody should set themselves on fire. But I can understand why one did.
Here in this fake, fraudulent civilization, we ignore the screaming.
We ignore the screaming and we go to concert halls in our best dress and our finest jewelry and demand an apology if anyone around us should make us feel uncomfortable with our support for a murderous apartheid state that is currently conducting a genocide.
We ignore the screaming while slowly dying inside, cut off from truth and authenticity and a sincere connection with our fellow human beings.
We ignore the screaming while yearning for sincerity like a Palestinian trapped under a flattened building yearns for open air and a bottle of water.
We ignore the screaming outside of ourselves. And we ignore the screaming within us.
Mohammad Abu Al Qumsan, I am with you tonight.
Aaron Bushnell, I am with you tonight.
I scream until my voice is gone.
Tonight I have nothing more to offer than this.
___________________
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Featured image via Mohammad Abu Al Qumsan.
Caitlin thank you for expressing so powerfully what I’m feeling facing this pain. Thank you for giving it voice in our world. Thank you for speaking out so incorruptibly.
Hell, I scream in the profundity of unrelieved frustration every freaking day. Living alone with one soundproofed room gives me unlimited opportunity. I screamed at the clapping seals in Congress, I scream every time I see the well-fed faces of Bibi or Smotrich trying to sound rational as they behave like serpentine vampires; I screamed when I saw that father's stunned face as he displayed his dead daughters' birth certificates. I scream at Kamala, at Trump, at images of my former shitlib acquaintances whose brains have turned to duopoly jelly. Only dispensation is that I've stopped screaming at Biden; even if he could hear me, what remains of his squash would likely process applause. Short-term therapy only: it's all still there when the heartrate decelerates.