How do we thrive in a burning world?

Boys inspect a destroyed classroom in the aftermath of Israeli bombardment on a school in Gaza City on October 2. Pic/AFP

These days I am afraid of the news. Every day a new form of escalation. Missiles fired. Missiles intercepted. Whole residential blocks turned to rubble. Bodies in flight. Bodies dislocated. Bodies evaporated into thin air. Bodies rendered indistinguishable. Bodies dehumanised, subtracted from soul. The blinding pursuit of land at the expense of those already inhabiting it. Lives torn away from their relational systems. Bodies in flight. Bodies that were seeking refuge from flight having to flee again, and again, and again. The horror!

Being a mother makes every loss feel more acute, even if it is not your own, even if it is not connected to you through flesh and blood. If you are a mother; if you are feminist; if you are capable of feeling, it is impossible not to grieve for the monumental devastation that seems not to cease, that doesn't pause to catch its breath, only escalates, only accelerates, growing more colossal with the hour. I grieve for our collective humanity, because I don't know how we can go back to the world we knew before the repercussive actions after October 7, 2023, when misinformation and sentiment were mined to justify the siege of Gaza and the subsequent and ongoing displacement, destruction and devastation. International law has been flouted so often; it doesn't mean anything. Since the Israeli forces do not hold themselves accountable to anyone, there is only impunity. There is an audacious commitment to the military-industrial complex. There is only the might of weaponry. People are being killed like flies, like their existence, their subjectivities never mattered.

Who wins from all this? Not the earth, not the soil, not the rivers, not the air. And those of us who delude ourselves into thinking we are not affected by something happening remotely live in the dark about cause and effect; how one thing influences another, causing a chain reaction that has already been manifesting as a climate crisis. How can we justify any form of war in an age of accelerated climate change?

The earth cries out and we choose not to listen. We evade the subject of grief through distraction. We choose not to wrestle with the idea of complicity. We try to go on with our lives as if all the casualties are just background noise. War is ambient sound that we incorporate into our everyday life, a symptom of our growing sense of helplessness.

As I continue to nurse the life that is growing inside me quietly, and the one I birthed two-and-a-half years ago, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, I think a lot about inflections in vocabulary, and how they are used to infect public opinion and manufacture consent. When Russia invaded Ukraine, there was no twisting of language. But when Israeli forces launched an on-ground invasion of Lebanon, their actions were interpreted as just and valid, because it is the western world that seems to have wrestled for itself the right to decide who is a terrorist and whose lives are dispensable. Can you imagine if there was word of an Arab person linked to a terrorist organisation tracked to a location in downtown Manhattan, would the IDF have blown up an entire residential block? When the Notre Dame in Paris was on fire, the world watched with gaping mouths, but no such mourning for countless early Christian sites in Palestine or revered mosques that pre-date Parisian sanctuaries? The imbalance is deafening. The spectre of neo-imperialism haunts us all.

It's hard not to interpret the news coming in from around the world - hurricanes, floods, right-wing electoral victories and the eruption of war - as a harbinger of what awaits our everyday lives if things continue in this direction. How do we reconcile our private joys with these global crises? How do we live and love and enact our joy when it feels like the world is burning?

I've no answers, and only enough reserves of hope to fuel the growth of the foetal being inside me. The schism between the personal-political and the global-political grows wider each day. We are all expected to continue with our domestic and professional chores as if everything is dandy. It reminds me of Celebrimbor in episode six of Rings of Power, who, unknowingly trapped in Sauron's mind prison, feels a creative bliss he has never known before that is, in fact, only meant to enable him to create the rings that will give Sauron the ultimate power he craves. In the opening sequence of season two's episode seven, we see him standing on the balcony of his foundry nursing a cup of tea while, unbeknown to him, his realm, Euregion, is being destroyed.

These days I feel like there can be no merit in any form of art that evolves from escapism, that doesn't take cognisance of the complex nature of our mutually lived realities, that doesn't dare to be intersectional and that doesn't embrace the political. Now, more than ever before, artists need to speak up for all those being silenced and repressed, no matter what the cost. We need to make art as if we have nothing more to lose.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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