"A journalist; storytelling is my craft. Words are the tools I turn to, again and again, to make sense of events and shape them into narratives that do them justice. And yet, when it comes to the genocide in Gaza, my birthplace, language feels wholly inadequate. There is a limit to what words can say. At a certain point, the instinct to describe, to explain and to make sense of what has unfolded begins to break down under the sheer scale of devastation and pain."
"One scene from the start of the war has lingered in my mind: A bulldozer burying 111 unidentified bodies, wrapped in bright blue bags, in a mass grave. It appeared briefly in the endless scroll of social media before it disappeared again, replaced by yet another shocking scene. And another. A hundred and eleven souls about whom we knew nothing; not their names, not their dreams or what their final moments were."
"Every attempt to describe in words what Israel has inflicted on Gaza and its people has felt reductive, compressing something vast, ongoing and staggeringly lethal into language that cannot possibly hold it. What remains is a tension at the heart of the act of telling itself; knowing no account will ever be enough, how do you tell stories of such unspeakable horrors? This tension lies at the heart of the Gaza Genocide Tapestry, which I am co-curating and which will be displayed at this year's Venice Biennale."
"It is an art project that brings together Palestinian women in occupied Palestine and refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan to document Gaza's destruction in real time. They tell these stories in the way they know best: Needle and thread. Mass grave. Embroidery by Nawal Ibrahim [Cou"
A journalist describes how language fails to capture the scale of devastation in Gaza. A remembered image shows a bulldozer burying 111 unidentified bodies in a mass grave, wrapped in bright blue bags, with names and personal histories unknown. Attempts to describe what has been inflicted feel reductive, compressing vast, ongoing harm into language that cannot hold it. This tension motivates the Gaza Genocide Tapestry, co-curated for display at the Venice Biennale. The project brings together Palestinian women in occupied Palestine and refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan to document Gaza’s destruction in real time through embroidery and needlework, including depictions of mass graves.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
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