Feeling Powerless in the Face of War
One small thing I've learned in my years of reporting on displaced people
This one is short. I’m at the residency for the MFA program where I teach at Wilkes University, in the middle of one of my busiest weeks of the year. Like many of you, every chance I get, I’m checking my phone to find out what’s happening between Israel and Iran.
It sure seems like we’re on the brink of war.
One of my best friends is visiting her family in Syria for the first time since the Assad regime was toppled, and she says they’re “watching the missiles flying over us as well.” When Israel intercepts missiles from Iran, the pieces are falling on houses in Quinitra and Daraa (where Hasna’s family is from and where many of her loved ones now live).
Whatever you think of a country’s government, there are always innocent people who will pay the price for warmongering rhetoric. I’m deeply concerned about the families of some of my dear friends in Israel too. And I don’t have to know anyone in Tehran to know there are millions of people there who feel panicked and powerless too.
In times like these, I find the stereotypes of the Middle East especially come into play. People in the US who know little about the area will say: “There’s always conflict over there,” as if they’re a group of people uniquely prone to conflict and not a region of the world that colonial powers dominated and divided for centuries, creating the roots of the conflicts today.
The clip of Tucker Carlson berating Ted Cruz has gone viral (surely a sign of the end times is how many of us now find ourselves cheering on Tucker Carlson), and I think his point about the population of Iran is an important one. US stereotypes of the Middle East tend to imagine Iran as a backwards desert country.
I’m not defending the way Iranians, especially women, are currently treated in Iran under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But with ten million people, the city of Tehran alone is bigger than New York or LA or any other city in the US. The lives of millions of people are at risk currently.
Most of them are powerless to stop this.
It can be easy, when headlines hit, for those of us who are not in the line of fire to panic about how this escalating tension will affect us. And I’m not taking away from how absolutely scary it is right now for every single person in the world.
But I am going to suggest to those of us who are not living in Iran or Israel or neighboring countries that we center the people who are most affected first.
We feel powerless. There are people who are actually powerless.
I cannot tell you what the work of Carolyn Forché has meant to me. Her Angel of History got me through the process of writing After the Last Border, and then the pandemic. (I’ve written about it before.) The title for After the Last Border was taken from one of her translations of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. Many times, for me, her poetry has served as a wakeup call when I need it most. Today, I read:
“It is not your right to feel powerless.
Better people than you were powerless.”
It’s from The Country Between Us, a 1981 book about Forché’s experience as a poet and journalist serving witness to the horrific civil war in El Salvador.
These two lines short lines are a slap in the face. I share them with you now in case you need it too.
What I take from these lines is that, in times like these, there is no room for panic. I cannot succumb to a feeling of powerlessness. I have no idea if what I’m doing is enough. The voice in my head tells me often that there’s nothing that I can do, that even the things that feel to me like doing something are really a waste of time.
We keep going anyway.
We protest. We call. We post. We share. We yell. We debate. We write emails. We sign petitions. We talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. We interview and write. We pray. We beg. We scream. We do not look away.
It is not the right of most of us to feel powerless—not yet, anyway. Do not give in to that feeling. Stand up and fight, for as long as we can in whatever way we can, for those who are truly powerless right now.