As the world looks on...

After reading a moving piece on the Israeli raids in Gaza, a friend of mine wrote the following exposé. I found it quite poignant and took the liberty to reproduce it here in its entirety, despite its length.

All I hear is silence punctuated by an occasional sniffle from me and a momentary wail in the near distance. All I see is darkness saturated with guilt and shame staring me in the face, mocking and taunting me. All I feel is the nothingness of my life, prying and probing the most sacred parts of me giving no respect to my privacy. I rock back and forth in my misery as I sit here in a corner of the world. My head is tucked in my hands and cradled between my legs, and my heart is cradled in your hands.

Today shame has found a home; today shame resides here with me... in me. Today my manhood fails me and I am reduced to a heap of desolation drowning in my failures. I am humbled in my nakedness. My frailty is seen in my tear-stricken face and there you are looking dead at me. My bones are protruding from underneath my skin and my skin is pale and broken in many places. My lips are patched and my nose has a trickle of blood coming from it. My eyes are as empty as my stomach. I barely have the strength to weep, but yet I weep and all you do is stare at me.

My depressed silence has been rudely broken by gunfire. The darkness has been illuminated by flames and wild eyes full of fury belonging to strange faces. I hear footsteps. In the dancing flames I see shadows that scream out loud in terror as the wild eyes chase them down. I am so scared. I want to run but I know I will not make it far. I have been running for as long as I can remember and in my quest for help, I have found rejection. People have looked at me with disgust and spat in my face, just as you do now. I have to get up; I have to run. I have to protect whatever remnants of my life I have left, even if it is to live it in misery. I have lost all dignity and sense of humanity. So I pick myself up with no shame exposing my body in its entirety to you as I make my last valiant effort to run.

The eyes are accompanied by cold voices that bellow and echo all across my corner of the world. They are screaming for my blood at the top of their lungs. I don't know where to run. My eyes are clouded with tears and my mind with fear. All the same, I make my way in the general direction of the fleeing animals that we have become. I feel a sharp pain in my head and I know that my time has come. Maybe it was a rock or maybe it was a piece of metal; I am not sure. When I come to, the wild eyes with cold voices full of fury are standing over me and there you are among them looking at me. I thought I saw a glint of mercy; a solitary ray of hope but it was short-lived. Your eyes soon became void of all feelings and emotion.

Suddenly I smell the stench and I recoil trying hard to cover my nose as the smell of rotten corpses hits my senses. By the dancing flames, my corner of the world is illuminated and I see the corpses lying there, a mere hint of what they once were. The corpses vary in shape, size, color and sex, but they are all me. The babies are me. The carved out fetuses are me. The old men and women are me. The young men and women are me, as are the crippled. I have died a million times before and I am about to die yet another time. I fear it won't be the last time. My familiar assailants have decided to wait till daybreak before they drain my blood so my cries can be heard by all living souls.

I am strung up and dragged through the streets in the dirt. I have been whipped and kicked. I am cut and bleeding. My head has been shaved with a razor and some of my appendages have been detached from my body. I am a helpless sorry sight. The people make fun of me spitting and throwing rocks as I am dragged, making a ridicule of my humanity. I am covered in blood - my symbol of life - and it is just as red and warm as yours. I leave a trail of blood in the earth but the earth soon swallows it up as a sign that she will welcome me once again, prematurely, but with open arms nonetheless. She has never spewed me out. No, not once has she. When I went to her as a child, she received me as did she when I went to her as a man, a woman, an elderly, an African, a Caucasian, a Jew, an Arab, a Christian and a Muslim. Each and every time she welcomed her child back home like the true mother that she is. I have some short-lived comfort stopped only by the thought of how my end will come. Yet again, I see you in the multitude, your eyes resting on me one more time.

They have brought accusations against me. Some of my assailants accuse me of being black, others accuse me of being white. Many of them just accuse me of being a different color from what they are. They hate me because of the language I speak and the hate me even more because of the god I worship. They will kill me because of the texture of my hair. They will leave my corpse to rot in the streets for I am not worthy of a burial because my nose and my eyes are not shaped like theirs. Eventually, my mother the earth will claim me as hers and give me a place in her endless bosom to rest. You have a place here too, right beside me in the bosom of our mother, for one day you too will return home to her. I have thought of myself as human, but with all the accusations brought against me, I have been judged and found to be less than human. They hate me. They will kill me and mutilate my body even after I am dead.

I also have wild eyes and a cold voice. I am going to be killed at daybreak and I am going to die at my own hands. You still stare at me, your eyes falling upon mine one more time. This time, it is the last. Now I am in the crowd and you are being dragged. You look at me for mercy. I am your assailants and I am the crowd that looks upon you with disgust, kicking you, bruising your body and your soul. You scream and you plead. You swear to forsake your humanity and you even beg for one more day alive. But your time has come just as mine had a million times before. You are still looking at me begging me with your eyes, asking me to intervene and save your life. Our gaze is locked and we are frozen in time even after your skull is wedged in repeatedly with the butt of a rifle and your heart is carved out through your chest. Even after your head iscut off and impaled for the world to see, you still look at me.

I am the wild eyes with cold voices. I am the owner of the dismembered and impaled head. I am the angry kicking multitude. I am JFK. I am Saro Wiwa. I am Yitzhak Rabin. I am Rwanda, Georgia, Russia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, The Gaza and The Chad, Israel, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, USA, Sierra Leone, Liberia. I am the world and I am you. My blood is yours. Each time I die, you die as well and each time I die, it is you killing me or maybe it is me killing you. Either way we are one. It is the realisation of this unity and dependency upon one another that will stop me from dying another time.

All I hear is silence punctuated by an occasional sniffle from me and a momentary wail in the near distance. All I see is darkness saturated with guilt and shame staring me in the face, mocking and taunting me. All I feel is the nothingness of my life, prying and probing the most sacred parts of me giving no respect to my privacy. I rock back and forth in my misery as I sit here in a corner of the world. My head is tucked in my hands and cradled between my legs and my life, cradled in your hands, slowly slips through the cracks in your fingers. You look at me and do nothing. Your death is a prelude to mine yet I look at you and do nothing.