I want to write about Gaza but I don't know how to write about Gaza

You can listen to this piece below:

Trigger warning: This is raw and emotional, speaking about the genocide in Gaza and is not intended for young ears. If you have children listening, please save this for another time.

I want to write about Gaza, but I don’t know how to write about Gaza. ‘About’ is already too distant. Because to write about is to already remove oneself. But writing is what I have.

So I pick up the nearest thing. It is a pencil and there is a feather stuck to its tip.

Go with wings.

So I want to tell you that I can’t fathom what is happening. I can’t fathom how many mothers are burying their children, how many fathers are burying their children, how many children are burying their mothers, their fathers.

I can’t fathom how food is being used as a weapon of war, how civilians are being seen as collateral in that war.

I want to tell you that I am looking at the news, but the thing is, incredibly, it’s not making the news, and when it does, I see three children’s shrouds being swaddled by their mother and I can’t look. I can’t keep looking and yet I need to keep looking because if we aren’t looking, the news will go away and soon we’ll be told that the news of the day is about how tariffs are on or off or on again, and even that is making me dizzy. So I switch to something about puppies, literally puppies, but when I am in that half-dream/ half-awake place, all I can see is a mother holding three shapes which once were her children.

So I want to write about Gaza, but there have been so many words already. So many words. Still I take up my pen and instead of words, I begin to make marks. One, two, nine thousand and fifty seven, eleven thousand three hundred and seventy two, fourteen thousand. And counting.

Last week, these dots were the lives of children at risk of starvation. This week, nothing really has changed.

I want to say: I know there are histories, different sides, but what I really want to say is, future history does not have to tell this history.

I add three more dots, and think of that mother.

So, you can see, it is hard to write about Gaza, because Gaza is the worst of humanity, of how we can look and not look, of how we can turn away, of how we dare or not dare.

And the truth is, I don’t know what to do. I do know that Gaza is also elsewhere. Gaza is Yemen is Sudan is the populations we other is the refugee crisis is the climate crisis is the meta crisis.

Puppies are suddenly more appealing again.

But then there are even more dots and more counting and more shapes.

I want to write about Gaza, but I don’t know how to write about Gaza. But on my pencil, there is a feather, which once was an implement of flight. I think about where the bird came from and where the bird has gone. I think about how it can do a miraculous thing.

I want to still believe in the miraculous.