I didn’t think that this assignment would be hard at all. However, not only was the reading really long, but the content was also really heavy. The article is such a sad one, to be honest. If you would like to give it a look, you can access it through here.

1. A sentence, expression, or paragraph that you found beautiful

“In a few minutes,” she writes, “the bullets stopped falling and my father came down and carried me into the house. Two bullets had pierced my foot, and I had shrapnel wounds all over my body. When I saw all the faces around me and all their falling tears, I tried to console them. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘I’m alive, alive, alive.’’

I don’t know how I could describe why I felt this was a beautiful statement, but I will try to put it into words. I know it is a very traumatizing event to say that it is beautiful. However, what I find beautiful about it is that the first thing that came into her mind is to reassure her loved ones that she is ok, and it is obvious that she’s not ok. She’s not concerned with the pain, the bullets in her body; she’s only concerned for her loved ones, not herself. She doesn’t want them to feel scared or sad. This I find so touching, I can’t even imagine enduring all this pain and not even thinking about it. She’s really brave in my opinion.

 

 

2. A sentence, expression, or paragraph that you felt told a very important and deep truth

“But there is no real resolution to the trauma of the collective. It lives on in all the stories you will ever tell from now on, in all the stories that will be passed down along the line of culture, even when they are about something else. It reshapes your vocabulary… When you say Sabra, or Shatila, you are not referring to a place, but to a heap of dead bodies shot indiscriminately and tossed aside like worn rags. When you say the word catastrophe, no one need ever ask which one it is you mean. It is towns, cities in their entirety become past tense.”
I do not relate to this truth because I have never gone through such a thing, but when I read it, because I was immersed, I kind of felt it. Those traumas are really there; they never actually go away. But to change a whole language and even to change your perspective on things. For example, whenever I see a facemask, I always think about covid, about the people I lost because of covid, and about the pandemic. I myself am very traumatized by cancer; I had three relatives who died because of cancer at a very young age. I am now older than them, and I am only twenty. When I watch a TV show talking about cancer to this day, I feel an indescribable heavy feeling in my heart. I am very afraid of the future because of it, so I can somehow relate to this truth. That this feeling never leaves you, it changes how you perceive and hear things.
3. A place in the article where you have a question
“When you hear me exclaim, over and over, “Alhamdulillah!”—“Praise God!”—when I hear that my son or husband has been killed by a sniper or carbomb or left gutted on the side of the road by the shabbiha… do you think me so twisted into barbarism by my baffling religion that I might truly find joy in this news, or must I add a note to explain that submitting to God’s will is the only way I have not to go utterly mad with grief fighting it?”
To be honest, I don’t have any questions regarding the article, but this is the only statement I found controversial. It is something in our culture as muslims that when something bad or even drastic happens, we praise god. How can this even be described to someone who is not of our culture? I don’t think it was clear the way the author shared it. I don’t even know how to describe it. I think even if I tried to describe it through the context of our religion, “Islam,” it would make absolutely no sense to them. I think if we could somehow relate it to the idea of providence or fate, which is something they would understand, it would make more sense, but try to comment on this and tell me if you were in their place, would you be convinced?