When there are no words, we’d better find some

I know book reviews are usually pretty subdued and civilised affairs, but this one will be furious and screaming. It speaks about the very uncivilised matter of war, and it talks about poetry that is screaming the unspeakable in desperation, and also has some hard-yet-soft prayers. I read the book Keep Telling Of Gaza (Sídhe Press) by Dr Khawla Badwan and Professor Alison Phipps in tears, in sorrow, in anger, and heartbroken for Palestine and Palestinians. 

I don't usually write in anger. Writing makes me kinder and more conciliatory. But not this time. This is different. According to a United Nations Special Committee, Amnesty International, and other experts and human rights organisations, this is a genocide. Being kinder would feel like accepting that, and I won't. The screaming poems of the book help me express an anger that has been brewing all these months.

The book contains poems by Khawla and Alison, where they express with poetry what they are witnessing. All proceeds go towards supporting educational initiatives in Gaza. The poems are in chronological order, commenting on events as they unfold. Khawla and Alison are stretching language to its limits to try to convey the depth of despair for the human depravity. It is a conversation of sorts between the two scholars, a conversation that started in social media, after Khawla answered poetically the poetic prayers by Alison. Alison's poems feel milder, calmer; they are inspired by prayers, although they do not shy away from calling the perpetrators of the genocide 'evil'. Khawla's poems scream. 

Both types are beautiful and expressive. I also wrote a poem to express my desperation, albeit not with the finesse that Khawla and Alison manage. But through that, and writing this review, I feel I have perhaps moved between anger and calm resolve too.

With their poetry and scholarly work, Khawla and Alison give us the words to articulate the grief and horror of what is happening in Gaza.  The book also invokes a sense of solidarity. Before I read it, I often felt alone and helpless in my grief. The weight of it all has been bearing down on me, and I have been refusing to enjoy my life, as that would almost feel a betrayal of Palestine and Palestinians. I think the book has helped me move from despair to anger, and to be less scared to speak about Palestine. At the same time, after having watched the webinar,  I feel I am moving towards calmly speaking out around the injustice, supporting Palestinian students to continue their studies in any way they can, and taking better care of myself so that I have the energy to support them. 

Stunned language

In their article, Hospicing Gaza ( غزة ): stunned languaging as poetic cries for a heartbreaking scholarship, Khawla and Alison talk about using language to help us process what we are seeing in our screens. We need to stretch and distort language, they say, to make it scream in order to express the horror. Hospicing is the idea that we don't shy away from looking at the death that is going on, but also, through words, we keep Palestine and our humanity alive. The authors also talk about 'stunned and stunning' language. I think that is a key word. I also feel stunned by what I'm witnessing. What I am witnessing has showed me that there is no rule of law, and that no-one is safe. 

I first encountered Khawla's screaming poetry on LinkedIn. Khawla is a Manchester Metropolitan University colleague, from a different department of the university. Reading her poetry gave me a mixture of emotions: I felt proud to be her colleague, I felt proud that our university and city has supported and nurtured her (a huge difference compared to what is going on in the USA), I felt heartbroken by what she and her family and her people are going through (her family is trapped in Gaza). Not everyone speaks about what is going on in front of our eyes. Many people are scared to do so, they fear losing their jobs and livelihood. But Khawla and Alison put Palestine and their grief for its extermination at the centre of their work, our work.

Psychology in crisis 

While studying for an undergraduate in Social Anthropology and social policy in Athens, Greece, some of my lecturers talked about the crisis of Social Anthropology in the 1960s. These scholars expressed their unease at the involvement of social anthropology in colonisation and taking advantage of the societies that Britain colonised. It stayed with me, but it all felt irrelevant and historical. In my naïve and unknowledgeable mind, I thought we had moved on from all that. Growing up in Greece in the 1980s and 90s, to my apolitical eyes the world seemed to me to be marching on to progress and peace. 

Over 25 years passed, and I find myself in Britain. The horror is back. In fact, perhaps it never left. People, including children and babies, journalists, professors, psychologists, physicists, poets, are slaughtered mercilessly. And I am not a naïve student anymore, I am a senior lecturer in psychology now. I am an intellectual. I agree with Noam Chomsky that it is our responsibility as intellectuals to speak up. It is doubly our responsibility, as 'ethics is so central to what we do as psychologists'. 

So, what are British psychologists doing? Some of them are speaking up, but we are generally silent aren't we? Are we supporting colonialism and genocide now? What about 'decolonising psychology?' What happened to that, hmm? From where I'm sitting, Psychology is in crisis, just as Social Anthropology was in the 60s. Psychologists, with our silence, we are supporting a genocide. 

Khawla and Alison say: 'Your silence is a curse, It is lazy', 'Our silence is shameful', and 'Silence testifies to intellectual ruins'. As Khawla mentioned in a recent webinar, she started writing poems partly because she could not quite believe the silence from her fellow linguists and educators. I cannot quite believe our silence either. 

Moral injury and witness poetry

Fawson (2018) suggests that an important part of moral injury is lack of trust. How can we trust anyone, including psychologists, if they, we, are not speaking up when a genocide happens? Fawson (2018) also suggests that 'witness poetry', a phrase that perfectly describes the poetry by Khawla and Alison, expresses the grief and loss of moral injury, and helps us to find hope amongst the destruction. They specifically focus on the context of small group therapy. This book by Khawla and Alison creates a community among the writers and the readers, and has a similar effect. Witness poetry can create opportunities to identify and lament human suffering and to express the intricacy of emotions in non-linear and fragmented ways. This is important, because some experiences can leave us speechless, and our innate ability to create worlds from language crumbles under the weight of the moral injury. Language breaks when we experience trauma, and that can lead to isolation. Reading and writing witness poetry in community can help. We can convey conflicting feelings, unresolved tensions and psychological fragmentation. Our poems don't need to be straightlaced, neat and sanitised. On the contrary, the poems embody with their form and roughness the fragmentation and even the resilience that help us deal with the pain of moral injury. In other words, writing in fragments allows us to accept our imperfect and injured mind, the fragmented thinking, inconsistencies and memory lapses due to our trauma, we are not asked to erase them. That is very healthy psychologically and it helps us move on. 

To paraphrase Behar (1996), cited in Khawla's and Alison's paper, Psychology 'is nothing if it does not break your heart'. Psychology should break our hearts and minds to make us more empathetic to others' pain, and to work towards a fairer future for everyone. By not including what is happening to Palestinians in our studies, in our teaching, in our writing, in our magazines, we become complicit in a genocide and we lose faith in ourselves and others.  Intellectuals are meant to speak truth to power, so why don't we just do our bloody job for once?

If you are a decolinizing psychology scholar 

and you are not referring to the genocide in Palestine,

 aren't you just pushing paper around 

so that you get a promotion?

Yes. You. Are. 

Enjoy your promotion, 

I hope you can live with yourself. 

You are asking if I am well?

 You are worried about me? 

Well, no,

 I am not well,

 thank you for asking. 

I am sick from genocide. 

Why should I be well, 

when all those Palestinian

 colleagues,

 students, 

children, 

mothers 

are dying

 in such a horrible way? 

 How dare you be well 

in a time of genocide?

 What is wrong with you?

 Where is your empathy,

 and the care that you are supposed to have 

for humans

as a psychologist? 

Didn't you become a psychologist 

To help people?

All people?

Did the dog eat your conscience?

Don't let me keep you,

Enjoy your warm beer,

Your shooting computer game

And your war-related movie.

In your comfy sofa. 

You'll make an excellent soldier.  

• Dr Aspa Paltoglou is a Chartered Psychologist, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, and a member of the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee.