By Ana Gebrim and Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky*
Originally published in: https://mondoweiss.net/2024/10/seeing-and-not-seeing-the-catastrophe-notes-on-fragmentation/
In 1936, Aldous Huxley published his sixth novel, titled “Eyeless in Gaza.” Through a diary, we follow the young Englishman Basil Seal, in a narrative that seeks to make sense of the fragmented reality marked by disillusionment during World War I. Gaza appears in the book simply as a symbol of the impossibility of seeing the ongoing catastrophe. The title seems to be borrowed from the phrase that opens the book and references John Milton’s drama “Samson Agonistes” (1671), which recalls the tragic fate of Samson: “Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.” A biblical figure, Samson was made a prisoner by the Philistines, who gouged out his eyes and sent him to Gaza, where he was condemned to turn the prison’s millstone. Was Huxley prophetic again?
The historian, poet, and essayist Palestinian Elias Sanbar says he was fourteen months old at the time of the Nakba in 1948 when he left with his mother on a convoy from the British mandate that carried women and children to Lebanon. His father and one of his sisters decided to stay in their hometown, joining the resistance forces. In Lebanon, baby Sanbar and his mother were welcomed by a grandmother who had already settled previously in Beirut and therefore did not live in refugee camps like the majority of Palestinians expelled at the time. Upon arrival, Sanbar’s mother recounts that he would have gone blind, that is, his eyelids had glued together and the baby’s eyes no longer opened. When seeking a doctor, his mother heard that she might have transmitted her own terror to her son and that it should pass after some time. In a few days, Sanbar was able to open his eyes and see again. This seems to be a foundational story of the course of his exile dating from the founding of the State of Israel and leading to the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. More than seventy-six years of an exile that his parents believed would be temporary.
For over twenty years, an unusual phenomenon has been challenging the Swedish health and reception system. Refugee children from families threatened with deportation suddenly enter a deep state of apathy, some near coma. They no longer open their eyes, walk, talk, or eat. There are hundreds of cases that have led to the designation of resignation syndrome. This condition can last months or even years and seems to spread in the Swedish migratory reality as a contagion among children and adolescents. In most cases, when the severe health state is able to reverse the deportation process or even promote the approval of the refugee request by the Swedish government, the children gradually recover almost entirely their vital capacities. First, they begin to open their eyes, then to talk, eat, and walk.
Ashla’a is an Arabic word that has been employed by the inhabitants of Gaza to describe the same phenomenon, translated as: scattered body parts and dismembered flesh. According to Palestinian intellectual Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the current genocidal stage of Palestinians bombed, starved, and under massive destruction, raises a question about the political meaning attributed to the dead body of the colonized. Scattered body parts, survivors carrying the remains of their relatives in plastic bags, without ambulances, without burials, without the possibility of ritualization. This is the brutalization of loss. The dead body there can no longer be properly mourned, without unity, it cannot be covered, buried, or collectively sanctified. Pieces of meat and bones exposed and eventually gathered in plastic bags, without metaphor, this is the image of loss in Gaza. The brutalization of death reveals the practices of colonial violence of mourning and the unviability of life. For Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the body parts on the ground in Gaza or the bags of colonized bodies expose the insatiable strategy of a colonization that makes the concept of Palestinian unity unattainable. Fragmentation of death, brutalization of loss, dispersal of the body. It is the genocidal intent to reduce Palestine to Ashla’a through the racial hierarchy of mourning.
Living under the rubble. No metaphor. Life is bombarded, and the remains scattered, there are bodies in the rubble. The archeology of horror and the present here are not hyperboles. The tiles of Adriana Varejão are impossible after the scenes from Gaza. Inhotim somehow also collapses. There is no representation. We have our eyes in Gaza, and there is no possible metaphor. There is flesh under the rubble, and it is not possible to write this sentence in Portuguese. The dead cannot remain silent. Is it necessary to resort to the imperial language in order to be heard? Palestinian poet Mohammed el-Kurd asks: which me will survive? Or about a young boy facing destruction: which man will he be? The death of children is denounced, they are the innocents, but what about the men, those who also take up arms to fight? El-Kurd claims the right to fury, to the flames, over the imperfect victims. Why doesn’t everything stop? What is the area of interest at stake?
The practice of blindfolding Palestinian prisoners has been widely employed by Israeli soldiers. Not only at the moment of capture or displacement of detainees. It is a torture technique: blindfolding also for long periods in captivity. The destructive impacts are notable. It is an act of sensory deprivation that, according to Palestinian psychiatrist and psychotherapist Samah Jabr, has enduring psychic and physiological consequences: eye injuries, deep states of dissociation, vulnerability, and pain. Survivors report the indistinction of day and night, also the impossibility of sleeping for long periods or enduring darkness. For some, after being unveiled, the eyelids do not close for some time. We see survivors who come out of prison disfigured with their eyes wide open, in shock, no longer blinking. Would the blindfolded be those who had seen too much?
For Samah Jabr, Israeli soldiers blindfold Palestinians to protect themselves from the gaze of a Palestinian or any possibility of visual exchange established over the act itself. A defense mechanism that, according to her, would allow soldiers a possible distancing from the impacts of heir own brutalization practices on themselves.
In the film “Zone of Interest” (Glazer, 2023), Hedwig, the wife of the Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoss, cultivates her vast garden of flowers, fruits, and herbs a few meters from the largest concentration and extermination complex during World War II in southern Poland. Only a wall separates them. In the narrative, we are taken into the daily intimacy of a family that directly benefits from the production of extermination. The house seems idyllic, with a swimming pool where the children can enjoy the summer, a large greenhouse for flowers and plants, comfortable rooms and accommodations, servants, and an abundance of food. Weekly, the family receives shipments of jewels, gold teeth, fur coats, and other valuable belongings stolen from the incarcerated people for extermination. In the film, we can immerse ourselves in the daily life of those who endure barbarity and live from it. From the windows, the smoke from the crematoria reaches the walls. The house seems to function properly, but the cracks in its structure are as clear as a photographic negative. The horror is ingrained in every corner.
Regarding not seeing, Marcia Tiburi speaks of what must remain hidden to sustain the regime of the visible. Seeing has supplanted having, everything revolves around appearances. By remaining in the space allowed by the “administration of not seeing,” no one can truly see what is happening, even when they think they can. Complicit, all participate in the catastrophe, whether in the Shoah—as in the film—or in Gaza.
Gaza is the enclave of the world. A current laboratory of practices of extermination and unfeasibility of life, it’s impossible not to think of Gaza pre- and post-October 7, 2023. The hypothesis of Elias Sanbar is that October 7 became the first movement of a pawn in yet another chess game. But we can always tell the long story of the Gaza Strip, which, since the evacuation of Jewish settlements in 2006, has become an open-air prison. A strip of land that holds the world’s highest population density and whose land, sea, and air borders are controlled by Israel, as well as the entry of supplies, medicines, and basic survival resources. Two-thirds of Gaza’s population are Palestinian refugees from the Nakba. For the writer Mohammed El-Kurd, Gaza is a besieged territory, but not captive. For this reason also, for the first time in history, a genocide is being broadcast live. That is, in a counter-narrative, Palestinians broadcast from the screens of their cell phones—charged in makeshift power installations and with scant internet connection—the daily life to which they are subjected: constant bombardments, displacement traps, lack of clean water, food, disease contagion, destruction of basic infrastructure, and the most technological strategies of mass annihilation.
In “La voix de ceux qui crient,” Saglio-Yatzimirsky starts from the distinction between two types of silence present in psychotraumatology consultations. One is psychologically intolerable: it is a specific silence of trauma, mortifying, damaged by anguish, which does not lead to any sharing of meaning and binds the subject to itself. It is the silence of traumatic invasion, without counter-excitation. This silence, like a “powerful and frozen word” – as Appelfeld says –, is that of a being caught by death. Another type of silence, however, is not definitive. Driven by the life instinct, it is configured as a refusal to speak, a reaction to the invasive other, and a defense by the patient, who is thus constituted as a subject. The therapeutic work generally begins with an attempt to break free from the mortifying silence, that of the abyss of trauma that ruins any space for exchange. On the other hand, the more symptomatic silence, which refers to the history of the subject and the need to remain silent to protect oneself, is a silence that constitutes dialogue.
What is the nature of the silence surrounding the Palestinian issue? The destruction of a population goes beyond the dimensions of war and its laws. The immoderation of the catastrophe is present in its etymology. The etymology of the word catastrophe in Greek refers to inversion. Here, we also have the inversion of scales and all dimensions that can be grasped. It is hard to say that we did not know; there is no benefit of the doubt. The entire space-time specific to this catastrophe is immediately accessible through live images.
In “The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping,” Erwin, the protagonist and alter ego of Aharon Appelfeld, a survivor of the extermination camps, is in Italy and then in British Palestine. When the Jewish Agency recruits him to work with young Jews to found the future State of Israel, Erwin falls asleep. As he begins to learn his new language, Hebrew, while sleeping he rediscovers his mother tongue, Yiddish, and tries to communicate with his parents, even knowing that his language is doomed to disappear. It is not about a dream, but sleep, a different state of consciousness that allows us to approach the journey and transformations of reality in another way. Could falling asleep also be a form of resistance? With the eyes closed, unconscious, another reality presents itself, quite different from the one that was in progress.
Why does the young man from Mosul, who narrates having been tortured by the Islamic State and Iraqi forces, hide his eyes from the war journalist’s camera? What gaze cannot be shown? Refusal to break down – which would violate once again the honor inscribed in the eyes of the nightmare? Or still, refusal of the voyeurism of a third party who captures the trauma without filter and freezes the violence in its brutality? In the myth of Medusa, the exchange of glances petrifies the observer to death. Here we have a definition of fear.
Robert Antelme, upon leaving Dachau in 1945, said: “We saw what men ‘should not’ see; this cannot be translated into a language.” In Palestine, we see and know; the conditions of enunciation are, therefore, different from those of the Shoah. The entire world saw and knows; why the silence—since the images are translatable by language, and are in fact translated by the media, by intellectuals, by civilians, and by governments? Is it the incomparable scale of violence, in terms of its intensity and immediacy, that prevents us from forming a narrative of condemnation, and from mobilizing collectively? Is the violence that corrodes discourse and prevents it? Relational violence that involves the collective, the state, communities, ethnic or religious groups; it is political from the start. What order is the silence that does not find a place to be inscribed? However, we know of the historical echoes reflected in the presence of several generations. The destruction of Palestine involves generations in destruction. It is a transgenerational war. Here, the lack of a response (in the sense of Levinas – and of the commitment to responsibility) doubles the first violence, that of silence, and produces another: epistemological violence and ethical violence: that of non-recognition.
In “Childhood in Berlin Around 1900” and “One-Way Street” (1928), Walter Benjamin refers to the form of “small pieces” and “images of thought.” It was Adorno who clarified the twofold dimension of this fragmentary writing: to put an end to traditional conceptual thinking and, in order to do so, to adopt the fragment, the one capable of shocking, of stimulating “the energy of thought” and of “setting things on fire.” Allusion to combat and destruction, together with conceptual relief in the use of the fragment.
Could fragmentary writing approach the catastrophe? Rejecting a linear narrative there is no identified author. A fragmentary writing that raises its critical points, those of a modernity in crisis: both the crisis of the representation and the crisis of the subject. A catastrophe cannot give rise to a work of art. There is no dissertation possible. Here the fragment is the remnant, the splinter, the shard, the waste. It is also fracture, dilapidation, fissure, and schizophrenia. Israeli snipers precisely target the legs of Palestinian children. That is the target: to fragment the body. One nation under surveillance, another in psychosis, says Mohammed El-Kurd. Silences and voids are converted into the hollow inscription of loss and death. Can the fragment speak of torn bodies?
Ana Gebrim
Ana Gebrim, psychoanalyst and sociologist, conducts research in the field of the clinic and contemporary migration. She teaches at the School of Sociology and Politics in São Paulo. Her publications include Psicanálise no Front: a posição do analista e as marcas do trauma na clínica com migrantes (Jurua Ed. 2020) and several articles on the issues of migration and trauma. Is a member of Brasil-Palestine Mental Health Network.
Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky
Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky is an anthropologist, professor at Inalco, researcher at CESSMA (IRD, University of Paris, Inalco), director of the Institut Convergences Migrations-CNRS and clinical psychologist at Avicenne Hospital (Bobigny). Her publications include La Voix de ceux qui crient, rencontre avec des demandeurs d’asile (Albin Michel, 2018) and several books on the issues of trauma, exile and migration, culture and language.
