I love words – words that rumble and resonate with the incessancy of a raging bull. Words like deliberate, precocious and prowess, which seem to exist entirely by their own volition. And then there are those like, ethereal,transience and willingly, whose delicacy curves and flows like quicksilver.
I love the art of transcription, of translating the geometry of my mind into a series of letters – letters that become words and words that become sentences to be spoken and shared.
Recently, however, that love is being shadowed by fear. It is a fear of both the reckless manipulation of words for political purposes and a slow and subtle disavowal of the art of meaningful articulation. A few weeks back I read an article in The Intercept about a secret correspondence shared between an ISIS fighter and a religious scholar. I couldn’t get passed the eleventh sentence:
“The correspondence took place during the timeframe of early June to mid-August, coinciding with major events in those cities reported by international media — including the Iraqi government’s offensive to retake Fallujah and increasing pressure on the inhabitants of Mosul as the government prepared an operation to retake that city as well.”
My eyes oscillated over the word “retake.” What does it mean to retake a city?
When I hear that phrase I see in my mind a shift of power. I see a flag changing color from red to blue. I see a move on a chessboard. What I do not see is people. I do not see families, gardens or Sunday afternoons. Just a few pawns, bishops, and a sad, slow king.
“Pro-government Iraqi forces fire an anti-tank cannon near the village of al-Sejar, northeast of Fallujah, on May 25, 2016, as they participate in a major assault to retake the city from the Islamic State.”
These descriptions are cold, mechanic and detached. Where are the people of Fallujah? Where are their faces, houses and streets? Where are the plots of land that feed generations and hold in their soil the secrets of centuries long passed?
By the fifth use of “retake,” I stopped seeing anything at all. It was as if I were trapped inside that innocent childhood game where one repeats a word over and over and over again until it finally loses all meaning. This is the game of the occupier, the powerful, the institution, the bomber. It is his gaze that avoids any sight of life, be it blood or breath, for such proof of existence would collide with his said mission to free, to liberate. So instead, he retakes.
To claim that a city has been retaken is to shamelessly gloss over the intimate lives of human beings. It is to absolve those in power of any responsibility to protect the sanctity of life, and to absolve us too, as readers, of our moral obligation to preserve culture, art, memory, and experience.
What I fear most, however, is the carelessness with which words are being used to codify experiences that are inexplicably intimate and swimming with specificity. When something, anything is systematized into a code, the art of questioning disintegrates. An inimitable moment is made universal, whereby all individualizing factors are eliminated and nuance is lost. Ignorance becomes a condition, so much so that when we hear the word retake we don’t think blood and guts on the street, the splintering of families, or rape, plunder, and starvation.
The souls who manage to break free of the codifying chains, who dare to think deliberately, independently as logical persons rather than as raw nerve endings, face the imminent threat of death or a lifetime in prison because in today’s system knowing something makes you guilty.
In prosecuting more people under the espionage act than all other presidents combined, Obama has waged a war against the potential to rethink and reimagine things as they are. He has relished in the spoils of ignorance, too afraid to sit uncomfortably and be forced to stare at the blood. This behavior is part of a larger grammar of oppression that, word by word, is stripping our bellies of raw thought as if it were fat to be trimmed off a piece of meat.
Now as the reader, we have a choice, to either sync or collide. We can look on with the desensitized gaze of the oppressor or we can close our eyes and dig, letting the flesh peel off of our knuckles as we search for shades of meaning.
Protecting the intricacies of the human experience in cities of Iraq and across the globe requires acknowledging our role in the appropriation of words that allow conflicting ideas to co-exist. And so, this is a call to unborn thought. This is an urgent request to listen to your body, to let yourself react and hold on to that reaction, because not only is it beautiful in and of itself, but it is the beginnings of something so indescribably and unknowably great.
Jessica Merino 