Still far from Gaza
Two years since the Gaza war was set in motion, our state of disquiet has never quite dissipated. There is a sense that the spectacle will now wind down and violence can be restored to routine. Now nations will convene and power will be brokered. A new configuration of order will be established which will look not so different from what was before. And we will be left wondering after the meaning of what we witnessed. What has it all amounted to? Liberation seems too abstract a notion in the midst of the grinding reality of realpolitik.
Soumyabrata Choudhury began writing Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza just as the war began in 2023. He confronted the impasses of that moment—the drive of the media spectacle, the scenarios we constructed to explain the world we saw, the image of a brutal enemy that sanctioned the worst brutalities. He asked if we could think of a Palestinian world, a real, living, breathing and vital world, that was much like our own. As we found ourselves consuming and being consumed by the war, Choudhury asked us what it would it take to escape from that paranoid imposition? What would it take to assert freedom—in Gaza and far from Gaza?
Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza tells us that though the war may end, its reality can never end, unless we can imagine a different world. Can we continue to think with Gaza beyond easy truisms?
Soumyabrata Choudhury is also the author of Now It’s Come To Distances: Notes on Coronavirus and Shaheen Bagh, Association and Isolation, a book that emerged from moments of crises we witnessed more viscerally: Shaheen Bagh—which renewed questions of belonging—and the pandemic—which forced us into isolation. Thinking through these events in conjunction, Choudhury raised questions about what it means to live in a society to which one does not belong. Read the book and join him in an immortal association that rejects mere existence.