the difference between poetry and rhetoric/ is being ready to kill/ yourself/ instead of your children - audre lorde (full poem)
Exactly a year ago, my friend Urfa and I decided to rewatch the entirety of Buffy The Vampire Slayer together. When Urfa transferred to my school in 8th grade, it was the first time I had met another person my age who was also a fan of the 90s cult classic tv show. Shared fandoms were the least of the reasons that Urfa, who is warm, wise, and a whole lot of fun, became my friend though, and certainly the least of the reasons we picked up our friendship right where it left off in the spring of 2024. Of course, rewatching an old series with an old friend is good fun. But that’s not the only reason we did it.
It appears the world is ending, kids. Global temperatures don’t lie. One of the likes on my Instagram stories is always the mother of a newborn I sponsor in Gaza from where a genocide is livestreamed into our eyeballs every day. Every day we see things no human was meant to witness let alone experience. The going is rough as they say. You have to get joy where you can get it. You have to get community where you can get it. You have to remember you’re lucky if you get either.
Here is something you should know about me. I don’t like gore. I don’t like blood and I don’t like violence. I am but a delicate maiden. “Just a girl” as we say nowadays. I like rainbows and flowers and my favourite colours are pink and blue. I have no taste for graphic gore in media. So, I suppose you can consider it a testament to how compelling the characters and/or plot is that I still watch Buffy, which is not only occasionally violent but full of creepy special effects, skin-eating demons, and whatnot. Much like with Game Of Thrones I simply look away at any particularly gory scenes. And as I rewatched Buffy The Vampire Slayer after 18 years, I remembered all the other times I had encountered graphic and in my opinion gratuitous violence in media. There sure was a lot of it, I couldn’t help but observe, and that’s speaking as someone who point blank refuses to watch horror movies. Another thing you should know about me is that I mostly consume Western films and tv shows (we all have our toxic traits). “Hollywood sure is obsessed with videographing violence and death,” I thought.
I thought this in the Spring of 2024. I think the reason I thought it was that, since Autumn 2023, I have seen the following things captured on video, no special effects required:
Three babies beheaded. A 12 year old girl’s corpse hanging from a building, legs cut off. A baby’s foot, dismembered. Plastic bags full of body parts. What a grown man looks like after being crushed to death slowly by the wheels of a tank. A girl…not beheaded but with the top half of her skull chopped off (is there a word for that?). Three different adults, a man and two women, chopped around shoulder length. Beheaded would not be an accurate term for that, I guess. I have seen a boy carrying his brother’s body in his backpack. I have seen a beheaded fetus. I have seen the remains of a baby, his or her intestines exposed, his or her only intact hand still closed in the same fist my 3 month old niece makes.
I have witnessed this, and more. I have forgotten some of the atrocities i saw photos of. Forgive me. I have very little empty RAM to store pain. Losing your father and your only brother at age 25 will do that to you.
When we were unwinding after a party, cosy in my bedroom which was the alibi Urfa used to stay out late, Urfa asked me, typical of her usual wisdom and courage, how I was dealing with witnessing a genocide. You see, Urfa, like me, has a young nephew. Urfa, like me, sees her nephew in the face of every child in Gaza.
It seems Urfa has both more functioning cells in her brain and in her heart than most of my Sarah-Lawrence-educated MFA classmates.
I answered her, but my answer was far from honest. What was I gonna say to her? “I’m used to death”? I am. But not in the way you think.
Over the days that have passed since October 7th, I’ve become used to many things, and I am no longer afraid of gore.
Somehow, against all logic, gore is less scary to me when it’s real. There’s no Joss Whedon behind the scenes directing it to scare you. The images out of Gaza are not trying to scare us at all. They are nonfiction. I think what really scares me then, is not violence and blood and death itself, but the idea of a human imagining and recreating it in detail purely for entertainment.
Episode 6 of Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an interesting thing happens. We face an enemy who happens to be a demon who preys exclusively on human babies.
Israel has killed or injured 50,000 children in the past two years.
Israel has created the largest population of child amputees anywhere in the world.
Every day since October 7th 2023, Israel has, on average, killed 27 children every single day. Urfa and I have both worked as teachers; she still does. In a Pakistani private school, the average classroom comprises 25 to 30 children. Israel kills a classroom of kids every day.
Israel is a child killing demon with a multi-billion dollar budget.
We watched the episode in the summer of 2024. It ends with Angel, our longsuffering hero, saving the babies. But the episode is different you see, it marks a raising of stakes in this tv show that not everyone took seriously at the time. There are helpless babies involved. The episode felt like it was meant to feel darker, heavier than the rest. Because the death of a (fictional) infant is involved.
As I watched it, I thought the strangest, most surreal thing. It sounds absurd; it sounds paranoid. But I thought:
Is this why they did it? As preparation/insurance for the day their country would fund the biggest mass-murder-of-children in all of human history?
Is this why Hollywood imported all these scenes of carefully choreographed horror and death, so often featuring children?
So that, on some subconscious level, when Hollywood (an arm of the American government - look up the Pentagon’s involvement in the MCU) exported graphic violence to the rest of the world, positing itself as the final frontier of filmmaking - we would all be desensitised enough to not react?
Maybe that was the plan all along. If you see a baby die on screen enough times, it loses meaning. As I thought this, I was thinking not just of Buffy (which had certain restrictions to adhere to as a network tv show) but of every violent movie scene I have refused to watch which originated in the grey matter of a white american man.
Is it a coincidence, after all, that the US is the only country where parents need to buy bulletproof backpacks for middleschoolers. There have been over 300 school shootings in the United States since 1999 alone. Over 300 children have been killed. School shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon. There have been 23 this year alone, and it is not yet August.
America you can run but you can't hide/ The arc of the bullet is long/ But it bends towards/ Your own children - Sakina Hassan (full poem)
Was this the reason so many of my former American friends could ignore what I could not? Was I sensitive to the death I was seeing coming out of Gaza because I was too squeamish to consume what Hollywood was trying to show me? Did my sensitivity save me from becoming used to images of death as entertainment?
We don’t talk about it, but what’s up with that? What’s up with the billions of dollars and thousands of hours Hollywood spends on…recreating death, violence, and dismemberment in high definition? No other regional film industry is as obsessed with graphic violence as Hollywood is. SOME producer decided to fund these films, from The Human Centipede to SAW. And that human was a citizen of Global North. It appears the culture of the Global North encourages a love of watching humans be tortured and murdered. This love of torture and murder is not unique to any particular genre; sometimes its “historical” fiction, a white man excitedly recreating the past just for the thrill of imagining the violence that was possible prior to the Geneva Convention. I want you to imagine the most scary, violent thing Hollywood has ever shown you. Now I want you to imagine the most scary, violent image you have seen come out of Gaza over the last 20 months. Can you tell the difference? Is it any wonder that the biggest exporters of fictional death are also the biggest exporters of actual death?