S is for Silence

Every now and then, language dies.
It is dying now.
Who is alive to speak about it?
– Fady Joudah, 2024 11.Fady Joudah, ‘From time to time, language dies. / It is dying now. / Who is alive to speak it?’, bostonreview.net, 2024

I’ve taken my time before writing this letter, which I’m sending today to my dearest ones as a wish for a year of collective liberation. It was 'too soon' a year ago - so they said - but now it’s too late. Too late to break the silence on Gaza’s destruction, and too late to pretend that Palestine can be wiped out from our collective memory. Our silence cannot cover up the past year: silence is the name of the year 2024, and the year stands as a testament to a world that chose to look away from a genocide aired in real time. The most brutal, relativised, and well-funded genocide, supported by Western governments and others. Those who sought to stop it through international law faced harsh and disgraceful condemnation, while the perpetrators were, and continue to be, shielded, supported, and justified.

Sooner or later, we will discuss this, when words regain their power and silence becomes unbearable, even for those who remain silent. We will talk about what we saw and what we chose not to say. We will reflect on how discourse was not just limited by the threats over our every word, but how there are no words to adequately express what is unfolding. How do you express 'horror' when words no longer shake you to the core? Another newborn dies of cold in the quiet of Christmas, his sister missing her legs, his brother destroyed by a drone made in our universities, his mother lost in childbirth, and his father killed months ago. No further words are needed.

We will talk about how history records even silence, because the support for the destruction of an entire population will leave an indelible mark. We will reflect on how we were all aware we were witnessing a catastrophic moment in modern history, with profound moral, political, and social consequences, both now and in the future. But eventually, words will reveal how the language to describe it seemed somehow lifeless. A death imposed by the forced use of vocabulary and prescriptive grammar: what can and cannot be said is a result of the repression by complicit governments and by our own actions. Thus, language also died by suicide, stifled by everything we didn’t say while turning away from the destruction of a territory, its history, its homes, its infrastructure, its roads, and its people. Have we even acknowledged the most brutal extermination of journalists in history? Or the trucks of sandbags used to starve two million people? Have we mentioned that no independent international journalist has yet entered Gaza? Or the ambulances that explode like popcorn? Schools, universities, cultural centers: nothing is left. Did we acknowledge it, or did we avoid it to spare ourselves from confronting the most contradictory aspects of our present?

We were labelled anti-Semitic, dismissed, ostracised, removed from our roles, stripped of income; we lost friends, faced assaults, lost awards and grants, were excluded from conferences, investigated by police, and sometimes summoned to court. Yet, we too shaped the boundaries of our thinking, constructing silence with our own tongues, drawing both imaginary and real lines between what is acceptable to say and what is not. This, too, we will address - the fear that is human, and the cowardice. How we absorbed the law of silence while resisting the power of the strong. A surveillance of language, which is also a surveillance of thought, perpetuated by those who accused and defamed the ones who broke the silence. Those who kept calling for a debate on words, using language to uphold speech, inside-out, outside-in, clapping our lips to make the world more understandable, driven by the need for a shared memory, to prevent death by silence.

And while it's clear how such a collapse of language demands collective reflection, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya walks resolutely towards the end, clad in his white coat. The year 2024 ends with this image that speaks all the words we lacked the courage to utter together. The silence that allowed yet another Israeli assault on Gaza’s health infrastructure - perhaps its last hospital - echoes in the pixelated grains of this image. Dr Hussam Abu Safiya moves through the rubble, like Handala, the crumpled child by Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali, and like Handala, he heads towards a horizon we can no longer clearly see - will these ruins be ours? As we cultivate silence in the name of 'morality,' the inevitability of 'collateral damage,' the set tables, the 'right to self-defence,' the liberal etiquette, the 'democratic' and revisionist decency. While we linger in this polite silence, it quietly erases each one of us, forcing us to the insignificance of 'common sense.' We will speak of this eventually, when words find their strength again: about how we succumbed to the ethics of 'moderation' and the seductive complicity of 'calm,' about what remains of thought when language collapses, about what remains of the world when we confine speech.

Dr Hussam Abu Safiya walking away through our rubble is the last image of a year that will never be forgotten. A year in which a population, besieged for decades, confronted the world with the courage ignited by the desire for liberation, a way of life we have unlearned but can reclaim through words - our words - to assert that it is neither 'difficult' nor 'complicated.' Genocide is genocide, ecocide is genocide, colonial occupation is genocide, the destruction of social infrastructure is genocide, preventing a group’s reproduction is genocide, silencing all criticism by accusing it of 'terrorism' is genocide, the impunity Israel has enjoyed since 1948 is another form of genocide. The extermination of Jews was genocide, as was that of the Herero, the Kurds, the Armenians. From Turtle Island to Rwanda, genocides have persisted without end. One genocide does not negate another: it is always pronounced 'genocide' and read as a scream against the horror of death by the greed of certain humans.

Those who renounce language, therefore, both kill and die, because silence is a weapon difficult to master. Silence offers no protection, nor does it make our lives any less fragile or fragmented. Thus, these are some of the words we will speak in the coming year, to revive ourselves and feel truly alive together; to pose the questions that matter to us, those that challenge first our very existence. What life is there without language? For whom and for what do we toil in silence? Is it worth navigating spaces and times where speaking is forbidden? To live again, for those of us who can afford it, means rejecting 'common sense' and the privilege of remaining politely silent, choosing instead to voice these words out loud as an essential act. To feel alive once more, and to make ourselves heard again.