From Kingston to Montreal, to Kingston, to Toronto, I have often taken the train lately and looked at the great lakes through the windows of the moving cars. I caught bits of lightness, ate dessert, did yoga, I smiled sometimes, but the heaviness of a possible genocide in progress never really left me. In Palestine, the bombed hospitals, the mothers who clutch their dead child contained in a large white bag, the people who eat bread and water three times a day knowing that, soon, there will be nothing left at all to swallow. It seems that the smell of corpses decomposing in the streets, because burying them is impossible, is unbearable. We are left with more than 10,000 deaths, including around 4,600 children, it is said. There is no longer any fuel available, which compromises the humanitarian aid on which the survival of two million people depends. Just writing it makes me want to scream.
Being the daughter of an immigrant who was a political prisoner helps raise awareness of the oppressions of vulnerable populations. I was once a serious teenager. When I was fourteen, the war in Afghanistan was raging. I do not want to create symmetry between these two moments in the armed history of recent decades, only to evoke my feeling at the time, similar to the one I feel today. An asphyxiating dismay at the comfort of my life while elsewhere the atrocity was taking place and civilians were the first to suffer. I confided in my geography teacher. He replied that he understood, that the fate of the world also kept him awake, sometimes, at night. That I had to continue to inform myself without it cutting too deeply into my happiness. I felt less alone, and for a moment our solidarity in our helplessness had calmed me. Not being indifferent seemed to me the first step towards something else.
A few years later, this same professor was arrested because he tried to buy the sexual services of minors. Had he been nice to me because he wanted to take advantage of my vulnerability? Or had he just been a good teacher? Impossible to know. This anecdote, where the infamous succeeds solidarity, where comfort and the abject exist at the same time, seems relevant to me in these times when the violence of the comfort of our North American life – of the privilege of our geographical location – is undeniable. I continue to think about it, to see how this story can allow me to better understand my needs for solidarity. I continue to wonder if my joys are obscene or necessary for me, if solidarity can exist or if it is a failure in advance, if it always has hidden intentions. And I continue to light candles for all these dead whose names I don’t know, trying to send them a little light to illuminate their passage to the other side. So that the abomination of their death in no way taints the calm of their rest.