To Be Free in Feeling Is to Open Oneself to Pain: On “Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life”

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I keep thinking of Sterling Allen Brown’s “Old Lem.” Once you’ve heard it, you live with that refrain. The poem puts us in the Cotton South, where to be black is to face constant, emboldened violence, where brutality is not an exception but a foundation. War is not limited to the battlegrounds, cruelty is not the conduct of simple human malice. Instead, what makes life unbearable is amorphously congealed into an immense, illogical, seemingly boundless force. It’s a crowd, it’s a mob, it’s a country, it’s an onslaught:

Their fists stay closed
  Their eyes look straight
   Our hands stay open
   Our eyes must fall
    They don’t come by ones
  They got the manhood
  They got the courage
    They don’t come by twos
   We got to slink around
   Hangtailed hounds.
  They burn us when we dogs
  They burn us when we men
    They come by tens . . .

They don’t come by ones. / They don’t come by twos. / They come by tens. The obliterating capacity of the legion. As much as we may fear madmen and monsters, Brown demonstrates that the greatest cruelties do not come from the individual, but the facelessness and hollowness of that multitudinous they—who cannot be reasoned with, who do not abandon their mission. One malevolent actor may sow hatred or despair, but it is the masses hellbent on annihilation that provoke truly anguished questions: Is evil omnipresent? Is it our base condition?

Out of all the horrors that have so far daunted our century, it is the aftermath of October 7, when the world was made attentive to the increasingly brutal, increasingly senseless genocide of the Palestinian people, that has most widely re-awakened this inquiry. We haven’t learned much from the conflicts that gave us our fractured world, haven’t managed to inoculate ourselves against the plague of humanity’s seemingly suicidal impetus—which has only been exacerbated by war’s increasingly technocratic apparatus. The murderers are kept distant from their victims, while spectators are drawn ever closer to the extremes: the torture and deaths of the innocent, the destruction of culture and property, the ruination of landscape, the enforced statelessness. The strategy of the contemporary war is recognizable, as familiar as every “final solution” that precedes it, but its consequences are unfathomable. They move with the alarming precision and conviction of automatons—“they got the courage”— and we are once again made aghast, speechless. We wait for justice. We attempt to gauge our complicity with the global death economy. The evidence of our evil mounts. We are no closer to finding it intelligible.

Samar Yazbek’s Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, a compilation of oral testimonies from the victims of Israel’s post-October 7 offensive, emerges as a necessary instrument in our attempts to examine and reassert our relationship to evil. For these and other simple reasons, it is, inescapably, an enormously heavy read. Ranging from young to old, men and women, doctors and mothers, the 27 individuals selected for this compilation by Yazbek have suffered more than is conceivable, and despite the limitations of language, their lives are rendered with stunning clarity. The written word, which can be so facile and insubstantial, is shaken out of its muteness by the lucidity of the speakers. Their voices are definitive about what they have lived through, and as their reader, one is charged with affirming and thus reliving the experiences that they express. “Reading,” wrote Maurice Blanchot, “does not produce anything, does not add anything. It lets be what is. It is freedom . . . that welcomes, consents, says yes, can say only yes. . .” One assents clarity over the clamor of a war that many continue to support, for here suffering is laid out for us to interpret and judge against our definitions of justice. This ongoing genocide is perpetrated in the name of justice; these testimonies crumble that abhorrent claim. What they conduct is a meeting between the intelligent act of political comprehension and the simple, emotional fact these atrocities cannot be mediated or discussed as anything other than inhumane. As such, they are capable of bringing moral conviction to its necessary partner for action: passion. This is why Wafaa Asaad Abu Samaan—who had been carrying a child when the bombs came, who saw another pregnant woman shot in the belly by soldiers in a hospital, who continued to live in her mutilated body when a hundred members of her family had died—ends her story with a plea: “Please, Samar, tell all of this!”

I am reluctant to summarize or replicate too many passages from any of these stories; they should only be experienced as their speakers have chosen to tell them—or, in our case, through the mediation of Yazbek’s patient ear and steady hand, and Leri Price’s delicate translation. What moves me to write about this book is, firstly, to underline its necessity, as this is to me the text of our thrashing moment, and secondly, to understand how we can use it to think about evil, and deny evil’s convincing pretence of being our destiny.

I didn’t scream in horror or in pain, I didn’t breathe a word. Just my hand poked out from the wreckage, like an ear­ly plant coming out of the ground, so they knew where I was. It was Ala’s grandfather who saw it, and he hurried over and began to dig around me to get me out. That’s when my mouth regained its memory and I began to scream. Horrific agony, pain I can’t describe, but I didn’t know exactly where it was coming from. My body was like tattered shreds of meat, as if I was being flayed from head to foot. This is the best I can do to describe my state in that moment: I was entirely pain. This didn’t mean I knew I was alive as, truly, pain of that kind is part of death.

Pain: it recurs throughout these stories; they are held together by it. We cannot hear their tellers cry out, nor do they venture too deeply into description; instead, pain is simply presented to us as the only tangible thing in the world. In Gaza, pain is everywhere, is the only evidence of being alive. The city is converted into a torture chamber. Most of us will never know the excruciating suffering within these pages, but we can understand that it is enough to obviate everything, even the loss of one’s child, or children. Marx’s terrible realization: “There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering, and that is physical pain.” Yazbek’s speakers do not present the fact of their pain, but develop it as the new blueprint of their existence—and here it must be said that bodily agony  overwhelms emotion  because it is stronger than the self; under overwhelming pain the constants of identity dissipate. One forgets their name, the names of their loved ones, their place, their reasons for being alive. To inflict this extent of pain is tactical: to assure the Israelis that they have the world; and to further denigrate the Palestinians by confirming them that they do not. We’re drawn into this annihilating experience, where the weaponization of physical pain—not as a means to an end but as the end—transforms the Palestinian’s world to the extent that they are unable to see their surroundings as anything but the cause of their pain. It is a well-honed tactic of torture to turn a simple domestic object, a bathtub or a chair, into an inflicting device, so that the legacy of the abuse can live on far after the pain has ended, and everyday, neutral processions will hereon be activators of deep distress. Israel has enacted this transformation onto a nation. We cannot think of Palestine without thinking of pain.

In Evil in Modern Thought, the scholar Susan Neiman outlines a time in history when the notion of evil was radically transformed. The devastating 1755 earthquake of Lisbon, she details, struck Europe at a moment when it “could shake the foundations of faith and call the goodness of Creation into question,” pushing back against the then-emerging Enlightenment ideals of superior human reason, and culminating in explosive debates about whether the disaster was a natural or a divine event. The argument was never settled, of course, it persists to present day, but by and large humanity was forced to concede that there were things we cannot understand, whether it be the will of God or the then-unknown fact of shifting tectonic plates, and so the problem of evil was temporarily quieted. Two hundred-some years later, the scholarship that emerged after the Holocaust and Hiroshima—attempting to think against the unthinkable—is what we now look towards when we take up the task of looking into evil’s eyes, these grand transgressions having muted much of the philosophies that preceded them. As Giorgio Agamben once remarked: “. . . almost none of the ethical principles our age believed it could recognize as valid have stood the decisive test, that of an Ethica more Auschwitz demonstrata.” The vital ideas that thus followed examined evil’s nature, its sources, its actions and routines—but there remained a strange sense that we could not truly fathom the monstrous appearance it took on. Confronted with all that the Holocaust brought to the surface, breathing in the wafting dust of the mushroom cloud, the general public accepted that there were things they did not understand, and moved on. It was simply too much (they come by tens), and much like the Enlightenment thinkers, a belief of human progress—weakly fuelled by a few shreds of hope—absolved us once more from examining our personal relationships to evil. The normalcy bias that saves and condemns us. So the intellectual legacy of the Holocaust is to single out the “ultimate” crime as a confounding aberration, and the aftermath of Hiroshima is a domesticated possibility of total annihilation. Now it is our task to fold these two flawed continuances into the Palestinian plight, with the determination of emerging with something usable.

“But transforming the greatest genocide in history into an absolute evil is a religious and mystical vision, not a historical vision,” Gilles Deleuze wrote in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. We were close (and because we were only close we were also very far) to understanding what Palestine asked of us then. We learned that the experience of suffering does not merit the desire to reduce suffering, that the hopeful calls of never again are no match for the victim’s own rage, desperation, or capacity for waging war. An outpouring of anger and condemnation had fountained over the world, calling for a peaceful solution to the conflict, but there was no great consequence, and the warning from one Israeli correspondent—”The incident is going to haunt us.”—did not come to pass. As with religion and myth, we were presented with opacity. The situation remains similarly impenetrable, but there is a difference between then and now, and it lies in Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, as well as the other testimonies that will surely come: that our confrontation is not with corpses and mass graves, as in 1945 or 1982, but with the living body in pain.

You know what pain is. You may not know what it’s like to lose your family to bloodshed, to be displaced from your home, to see your city bombed to rubble, to be torn from your history. But you have been hurt, perhaps enough to know that you cannot abide being hurt like that again. Yet when looking at the torturer and their victim, we are more likely to identify with the former rather than the latter, simply because in that moment we resemble more the person who isn’t in pain. In literature, however, and especially in the genre of oral testimony, we cannot be transported anywhere other than into the body of the afflicted. Writing has a way of leaking off of the page, building not in some other world but in our own present, because it is the reader who, by opening the covers, has loosened the door to a cage, and the work will recognize that liberating hand as its companion. The text is effective when language has staged itself within our perception, and so the pain of Yazbek’s speakers echo within us—not as physical sensation, but as a sharable reality. In her brilliant treatise on physical pain, Elaine Scarry delineates how pain “cannot be easily objectified in any form, material or verbal.” It does not easily find an outside reference in the same way we are able to make objective metaphors for so many of our feelings. “But,” Scarry continues, “it is also its objectlessness that may give rise to imagining by first occasioning the process that eventually brings forth the dense sea of artifacts and symbols that we make and move about in. . . . The only state that is as anomalous as pain is the imagination.” Overwhelming pain is what we have already ascertained, a black hole; it has no space for imagination. But when one possesses the knowledge of pain, without being incapacitated by its physical consequences, that is when imagination can be initiated as a moral mandate. The demand is that the world we are wont to imagine while we are in pain—which is a world without pain—is the world we owe it to ourselves to create when we are relieved.

The great writer and thinker Ghassan Kanafani once wrote, in a short fiction entitled “Letter from Gaza,” of a man whose young niece had lost her leg in a bombing. Leaving the hospital, he confesses: “Everything in this Gaza throbbed with sadness which was not confined to weeping. It was a challenge: more than that it was something like reclamation of the amputated leg!” Reaching the end of the letter, which is intended for a friend living abroad, he urges: “I won’t come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth.” I thought often of this, a young girl’s leg and the revolutionary’s insistence of its meaning, while reading Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life. The stories which gave me, like the narrator of Kanafani’s story, such powerful conviction that “this small feeling must grow into a giant deep within you,” that this anger and sadness cannot fizzle away into self-induced futility, that we cannot look at Palestine as an unresolvable puzzle, shake our heads in lament, and move on—because that would be to acquiesce to the torturer’s decree that existence is worthless:

I still remember that day, when they bombed the whole building. The iron melted, the stones mixed with earth. I felt some little comfort when I could pull out the bodies of my family with all their limbs intact, apart from my sis­ter’s young son who was torn to pieces, and I buried them with my own hands.

Reaction has a bad name in politics, associated with those who balk at the spectre of progress and liberal values, but in thinking of Palestine, I turned often to other victorious resistances of oppressive, powerful regimes: the October Revolution, the Algerian War, the Cuban Revolution, the American War in Vietnam. They have a commonality: wrath—a reactive, instinctual surge. They were greatly limited in their scope of what would come from their actions, but they operated with a fundamental sureness that their present required anything but patience. These triumphs insist that we not stifle our anger and grief, that we continue to fuel our rationality with the truth that can only come from eruption, because as soon as one turns away from pain, even in the name of temperance, they have begun to touch the irredeemable. After all, the politics of reaction has worked very well for those who have sought to make the world a more hateful place; we must continue to push against it, but shouldn’t we also learn from its strength? Seizing that primary, immediate sensation of wrongness, perhaps only there comes the impetus to rise, even as one, against the formidable they.

It must be mentioned that there is a reason Yazbek’s speakers are effective in ways that the news cannot be; the book is so beautifully written. Svetlana Alexievich, who is most responsible for the assertion of oral testimony as literary genre, has said: “Sometimes I am reproached because the people in my books are said to speak too beautifully. In love, and in contact with death, people always speak beautifully. At these moments they transcend their ordinary selves, they rise up on tiptoe.” Here, the stories are incredibly evocative, transfixing; they often resemble poetry, with the sudden emergence of a human truth amidst a flurry of recollection, or a terrifying lyricism in evoking the unthinkable. Poetic language, unlike its usual associations with wonder and beauty and transcendence, is really more suited to agony. It is, as Hélène Bessette knew, “the everyday normal expression in Times of war,” because it is fractured, torn, disagreeing on temporal and spatial materialities. In its best form, it is unfettered, indelible. It lives in harmony with the silence that provokes it. It discovers and locates us. This is the language across all of the stories in this book—a beautiful one not because it speaks of lovely things, but because we are still capable of recognizing beauty in the truth.

In her original introduction, written in the autumn of 2024, Yazbek is resolute about the necessity of her project, stating that the act of recording these testimonies “into history’s safekeeping . . . is our duty as writers, activists and intellectuals, the very least we can do, to challenge the act of destruction. . .” In an amendment just over a year later, however, she is despondent: “Perhaps . . . for all these lives I collected, believing I would defend victims who resisted death and lost pieces of their bodies and lives—perhaps I have done nothing but add a black stain to human history.” A great deal happened in those months, evincing that those early stories heralded “only the beginning of a systematic process of murder.” It is a completely understandable concern, but I do not share it—no writer really does. In Shelley’s words: “. . . let none trouble themselves to heap the dust of oblivion upon their efforts; the pile they raise will betray his grave which might otherwise have been unknown.” I will not speak more about the essentiality of these testimonies in contributing to the annals of history, nor will I wonder about the frivolity of creating art in times of horror; others have done so eloquently, and literature always finds its necessity. It will once again do so when this book finds its rightful audience.

One may think that the warlords of Israel want only to kill Arabs. It’s not true. Knowing that the world is watching, they have their targets set on us. Or, to be specific, the best part of us—that is compassionate, that feel pain and therefore the desire to not be in pain, and thus can be morally awakened. The torturer looks down at someone screaming in agony and feels the satisfaction of a job well done, having reduced an individual to a vessel of torment, and this is how the perpetrators of genocide look at a largely complacent world, soporific with the opiates of reason and sensibility. Whether it is the atomic bomb, the impassive soldiers of the Third Reich, the earth opening up beneath our feet—they come by tens, and our modern world must admit time and again that evil incomprehensible is not impossible. Herein the lesson of Gaza: you do not have to theorize before you revolt. The fury of the they is in fact, a singular one; they act with a blindly unified motive, and as such it can be countered—if not physically then psychically, persistently, through even minor actions of continual steadfastness, by the individual’s fury. For this we have the words of Nasma Al-Farra, Samir Al-Agha, Khaled Abu Samra, Muhammad Fadi Saleh, Nada Eisa Ayyaash, Shaimaa Naji, Muhammad Hamdan, Hajir Abu Samaan, Muhammad Yasir Abu Saeed, Amal Adham, Ibrahim Qudaih, Jihan Bakry, Muhammad Alaa Abdelaal Quarmout, Saja Yasir Salih, Abdullah Yousef Aakila, Huda Sufyan Saeed Al-Baghdady, Abdel Rahman Eyad Abu Hamada, Wafaa Asaad Abu Samaan, Isra Muhanna, Sujoud Abu Halib, Muhannad Radwan, Nour Ashour, Ahmed Abu Radwan, S, Bushra Al-Ghalban Abu Sabih, Bara Hamada, and Firas Sheikh Radwan—that have breached the distance with a pain that summons you, me, to chip away, piece by piece, at what is only seemingly omnipotent.