Today, writing gives the impression of planting the proverbial tree in the face of the apocalypse. Decades ago, I started writing so that words mean again. When I fled as a refugee from Bosnia in Sweden in the 1990s, there was a time when words stopped working in any way possible.
I couldn’t even say “tree” and connect it to great things outside the camp. I was crazy like Hamlet, crying “words, words, words!” Sound and fury. Meaning nothing.
We, the Bosnians, were reluctant to use the word “genocide” until the powerful court tells us that we could, and even then, or above all, the denial industry of preventing us from calling a cat . The negators have taught us that the words have weight. Good words can lead to action. Not like these empty sentences, we have heard of the genocide of the Palestinians.
I learned English late in life, mainly because I was ashamed that the Swedes talked about it well and that I could not chain two words to save my life. Over time, I learned that the stories of our forced exile, although unique, reflected the experience of moving millions of other people. In one way or another, they created magic intimacies with people who were so different from us, who were sometimes from places that I had never heard of, but they had heard of me. They had read my stories.
I imagined that this miraculous human connection is akin to what I fell in love with this foreigner to death for a long time called Shakespeare at the University of Stockholm. His words came from the mouth of a tiny Pakistani teacher with the greatest voice I have ever heard. Ishrat Lindblad, which she rests in peace, had gray hair, a colored sari and a British accent. “To be, or not to be, that’s the question,” she would recite in class.
She would become my teacher, my most fierce critical, then my biggest fan. Always a friend. She was also the reason why I became a teacher. She was the reason why I understood why Muslims pray for their teachers five times a day, just after praying for their parents. She was a good listener and did not speak much, but when she talked, it counted. Never an empty sentence. Never a wasted word. Always from the heart.
For a long time, I wondered why God continues to repeat in the Koran that there will be no inactive discussion in paradise. It was one of the most confusing things to read. I mean, everyone can understand that the attraction of the afterlife is expressed through things like gardens, milk rivers and honey, riches and unimaginable pleasures.
But to indicate repeatedly this paradise will be free from “trivial” or “useless” chatter was at best curious. I couldn’t imagine that nobody said: “Hey, I’m going to work hard and be good and sacrifice everything to jump all these empty speeches.” Now I can.
Remember and relive my past as we look at the most raw forms of power exerted on the Palestinian people, I am again brought at this moment when “the tree” was not a tree and I could not Chain two words even if you had the threat of firearms.
I am sometimes disgusted in the corridors of my university where people are supposed to say significant things, but what I especially hear is an empty speech. I do not recognize my Sweden, the country which welcomed thousands of us, Bosnies, at one point of its greatest economic crisis and that did after that.
A former leader of a Swedish church explained to me how he avoided Sarajevo with help, landed on a dangerous tarmac, unloaded and stolen. Everyone has contributed. During the Second World War, Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews in Hungary by emitting protective passports and sheltering them in buildings declared Swedish territories. I am the beneficiary of the Wallenberg Foundation which helped me finance my doctorate 20 years ago.
Now Sweden cuts the help. The “sustainable peace” budget for “sustainable peace” of “sustainable peace” has been considerably reduced in a few years, especially for the MENA region. We condemn and cut the links according to convenience. We help according to personal interest. The insolence of the office.
Sweden has abstained by a United Nations resolution to demand a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. There, in this large colosseum of nations, resolutions resemble new year resolutions of simple mortals, and the question is whether a decisive boost can be moved to the blow by the crowd. And so “the businesses of Grande Marelle and Moment … Turn badly and lose the name of the action”, as Hamlet said.
It has been almost a year since I wrote “The genocide of Schrödinger”, and I hope that the world has proven me the opposite on anything. I wrote because words are my tools. I wrote to the Swedish government on the future of education in Gaza, once peace. Written to friends and enemies. So many things are said and written at the moment. We are drowning with words. It is as if each word had become a meme on endless curls and that all written always had the impression of planting the proverbial tree in front of the apocalypse.
Even now, the bombing has stopped and that the long-awaited exchange of captives began, I know by our own history of genocide that crimes continue under the pretension of a ceasefire, under the silence of the media and interference of foreign powers. If the war ends really, there are other types of fires that should be extinguished by surviving men, women and children, that we will end up moving from our attention just like the others before us, allowing the cycle of their physical displacement to continue.
Their images could slowly disappear from our flows, but we must not allow convictions and calls for action to remain simple words. We must not stop asking for justice and respect for Palestinian rights. »»
“Words, words, words”, I hear the ghost of Shakespeare on the breath of my late teacher, and I wonder, is it more noble “to suffer from these slots and these scandalous fortune arrows, Or take arms against a sea of troubles, and as opposed to them?
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
