OPPOSE THE GENOCIDE AS IF IT WERE STILL THE FIRST MONTH
Photo By @kneekcap32
Like so many households across the UAE, we spent the last two weeks weathering the flu—first my co-founder Luchie, then me. That’s why I’m sharing my Nakba reflections a week late. For those unfamiliar with the term, I asked DeepSeek (no ChatGPT over here 😉) to define Nakba:
Therefore if Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe") means the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, then by logic what we have been seeing on our phones the last nineteen months is another Nakba. With all this ideology in the Western world for liberté and égalité, with all this talk of sustainability, with all the progress of our “civilized world”, here I am writing hoping for a group of people - mostly women and children- to be allowed food and water so they don’t starve. Their only sin: they’re born in Palestine. I cannot believe I am typing such a gruesome reality.
Allow me to once more share this message from seventeen months ago. It's true then and it's true now.
Jan. 25, 2024
8 AM
Back in the 90’s, my family and I used to live in an apartment that was beside a family of four. There was the dad I barely saw, the stepmom whom I remember to be tall and quite fair, and there were the son and daughter, maybe eight to ten years old. I rarely saw these kids and I don’t even remember now their faces. Being in my teens, they seemed a pretty regular family to me. Fast forward to a couple of decades later, my mother and I were talking about our old neighbors in Manila and we somehow mentioned this family of four. Mama offhandedly said that the daughter was physiologically unable to produce tears in her tear ducts. She coudn’t cry. I asked her how she knew this, and she told me that Cherry (let’s call the stepmom this) told them - the neighbors. Cherry was not convinced that her stepdaughter’s not crying was physiologic so she would put sliced onion on this little girl’s eyes. She would also whip her bad… just to be sure she was not lying; that this little girl really could not cry.
I was aghast when my mother casually told me the story. I had to ask her to retell the story just to be sure I heard it right.
“And you didn’t report her to the police or child services?” I shrieked. Mama said they didn’t.
“But who else knew about this?”
“I think everyone.”
I don’t remember details of the argument that ensued between my mother and I. I just remember that I was upset for days. How could our neighbors know something horrible was going on and not do anything? How can they be friends still with Cherry? Did they not pity that little girl? Why didn’t the father know? How can people stand by while injustice occurs?On a young girl? And I don’t quite remember what she said the reason was; if it was because Cherry was their friend, or Cherry was quite popular… it didn’t matter. There was just that little girl and her non-functioning tear ducts.
111 days after October 7 and I know very well the answer why Cherry can get away with those onions and the whipping.
It’s been a while that I wrote a personal message for Co Chocolat’s newsletter. Not because I didn’t have anything to say, I have a lot, but my heart has changed so much in the last four months. When you’re day-in, day-out watching the carnage in Palestine on your phone, pouring your anger, outrage, and tears in social media both to release these raw emotions and more importantly to get the algorithm up to raise awareness.. When you’re day in-day out seething as people in authority open their mouths and spew lies and lies, and you pray and pray that tomorrow you do not wake up to an image of another burnt child, or another mother embracing for the last time a white body bag… some light in your heart gets extinguished. Mental wirings are altered.. even if I am neither Arab nor Palestinian. I’m a mother. I have a father, brother, sister. I am human.
And this human refuses to give in to hopelessness nor pessimism. I carry faith and it has activism for legs.
I wasn’t there to report or confront Cherry when she put those onions on that girl’s eyes thirty years ago. I wasn’t there when the holocaust happened ninety years ago. But I am here now.
If I do not see the end of this genocide in my lifetime, I will have to have comfort in the knowledge that I can tell my grandchildren, “yes I witnessed it, and yes, I tried to stop it.”
#FreePalestine,
Iman and Luchie Suguitan