All beauty dies

In writing, you usually want to start off with a strong lead, something to grasp the attention of readers, something to lure them in.

What would that be in this case? This case, the most recent in a series, is the killing of Hassan Eslaih, the videojournalist who was, in a way, one of our eyes witnessing the horrors in Gaza.

Should it be the story of Hassan himself, the latest spoil of the Israeli systematic murder machine? It’s a gripping story, but gripping stories lose their edge when it comes to Palestine. We try to make our telling of their story as personal as it can be. (We should). Maybe we use photos and videos that embody the person behind the story, the way they speak, the way they laugh. But the mere fact that Palestinians still, after all the slaying and the hunger and the mayhem, need this representation disgusts me. And it doesn’t seem to work anymore. The killing machine and the global order behind it made sure we go through months of horror, to come out with a bit of our humanity lost. As if giving up this pound of our humanity was the only way to keep the remainder of our sanity intact. This is why the personal doesn’t cut it anymore.

Maybe numbers would? At the start of the war, we kept reminding ourselves that we should not succumb to the tendency of journalism to think of tragedies in scale. Statistics kill the human. Not just a number, we insisted. But since the personal doesn’t cut it anymore, maybe numbers would? Trigger action? So here is a number: 215. That’s the total number of journalists killed in Palestine since this war began more than a year and a half ago. Hassan was the latest among them. In every coverage of the fact, you will read that this is the largest number of journalists killed in a single war ever recorded since the record started decades ago. Here is another number: 52,928. This is the total number of people killed since the war started. Hassan has finally joined the long queue.

Enough? No. At some point, scale is rendered meaningless. Anything beyond a certain volume becomes practically the same. In the large scheme of things, 53 thousand is not that different from 50, and 50 not that different from 55. Even when we resign to the cruelty of statistics, scale eludes us.

Infographics and illustrations are a tool to navigate this cruelty. An invention designed to reconcile the abstract metallic scale of tragedy with what it really means for people experiencing it. I have seen all sorts of them. Infants are dying of hunger witnessed by their helpless mothers. The amount of clean water per capita. The siege. The burning alive. The hissing drones.

Minds have been trying to come up with appropriate ways to present the facts. As if, behind every attempt to find a clever way to show a fact, there is the echo of desperate souls crossing their fingers and praying, just praying, that this one might do the trick.

Well, they don’t. Nothing does anymore.

So, maybe poetry is what I need. But I can’t. I try to steer away from touching the accumulating grief. I can’t find it in myself to process this darkness. I only tap into it to keep my rage. Rage is our only protection against going mad.

I sit now, trying to write this, thinking of my colleague who worked closely with Hassan. I call her posing as the sound of wisdom, the neutral consoling outsider. But the crackling in her voice called my bluff.

I encourage her attempt to write something about losing Hassan. I try to convince myself that, through words, we can create meaning. I trick myself that if we manage to summon all our feelings, transform them into a beautiful text, we might find some solace.

But the moment is crushing. There is no solace. I don’t want to turn this into something beautiful. All beauty dies. Hassan followed the others, they were brutally killed and that is just that. No poetry will save us.

I fixate on this feeling for a moment but then I try to brush it off. In an interview while recovering from the injuries of his last targeting, Hassan said he knew he would be targeted again. He will probably be killed and die in the same hospital bed, he said. I try to imagine that. What is it like to occupy this space of waiting? Of knowing that this death will only be followed by another?

Yet, he summoned the will to continue. This has been the Palestinian story for decades. I resist compressing single deaths into a small capsule of meaning but I still embrace the poetry of the whole. In that, there is power that would help us grieve the deaths and still refuse defeat. And if death is inevitable, then maybe silence is not. May our screams echo throughout history, may our ghosts guide the rest into a new dawn.