When her grandmother died after a long illness, in Jaljulia—a small Palestinian town in Israel, near the West Bank—Reem Kassis was thousands of miles away, in her Pennsylvania kitchen. At the news, she struggled with how to process: “one peaceful death compared with the thousands of violent deaths happening in Gaza; a woman who lived nearly nine decades compared with the children suffering from malnutrition and starvation who might not live nine years; a death witnessed by family compared with entire families erased, no one left to carry their names.” theatln.tc/wo7QdyXB
“A name exists for this reflex: disenfranchised grief,” Kassis writes. “It is mourning that may feel unearned, inappropriate, underacknowledged, or too small for the world’s attention.”
“Grief never exists in a vacuum,” Kassis continues. “For most Palestinians, since 1948 and what Arabs call the Nakba (‘catastrophe,’ in English) … our private sorrows have been refracted through the lens of the public pain we carry. Usually I, like many Palestinians, can carry both personal and collective losses. But in this moment, which finds me living in relative safety as so much of Gaza has been razed, the scale of atrocity has left no room. My grief from witnessing what has been done to my people is so vast, so relentless, that sadness over my grandmother’s death feels like something too indulgent.”
Video and images since the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, and since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, have deepened that shame for Kassis. “Each image recalibrates what feels worthy of my grief,” she writes. “But it’s not only Palestinians who carry this burden. Social media has democratized access to atrocity—anyone with a phone can witness Gaza’s devastation in real time.”
“Even when grief seems illegitimate beside mass atrocity, it doesn’t disappear—it just finds a different outlet,” Kassis writes. “After my grandmother’s death, mine kept getting rerouted by the sense that my sorrow was lavish when so many others weren’t allowed to mourn, when I had a lifetime of memories with my grandmother to look back on, while others died without the chance to start making theirs.”
The Atlantic
When her grandmother died after a long illness, in Jaljulia—a small Palestinian town in Israel, near the West Bank—Reem Kassis was thousands of miles away, in her Pennsylvania kitchen. At the news, she struggled with how to process: “one peaceful death compared with the thousands of violent deaths happening in Gaza; a woman who lived nearly nine decades compared with the children suffering from malnutrition and starvation who might not live nine years; a death witnessed by family compared with entire families erased, no one left to carry their names.” theatln.tc/wo7QdyXB
“A name exists for this reflex: disenfranchised grief,” Kassis writes. “It is mourning that may feel unearned, inappropriate, underacknowledged, or too small for the world’s attention.”
“Grief never exists in a vacuum,” Kassis continues. “For most Palestinians, since 1948 and what Arabs call the Nakba (‘catastrophe,’ in English) … our private sorrows have been refracted through the lens of the public pain we carry. Usually I, like many Palestinians, can carry both personal and collective losses. But in this moment, which finds me living in relative safety as so much of Gaza has been razed, the scale of atrocity has left no room. My grief from witnessing what has been done to my people is so vast, so relentless, that sadness over my grandmother’s death feels like something too indulgent.”
Video and images since the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, and since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, have deepened that shame for Kassis. “Each image recalibrates what feels worthy of my grief,” she writes. “But it’s not only Palestinians who carry this burden. Social media has democratized access to atrocity—anyone with a phone can witness Gaza’s devastation in real time.”
“Even when grief seems illegitimate beside mass atrocity, it doesn’t disappear—it just finds a different outlet,” Kassis writes. “After my grandmother’s death, mine kept getting rerouted by the sense that my sorrow was lavish when so many others weren’t allowed to mourn, when I had a lifetime of memories with my grandmother to look back on, while others died without the chance to start making theirs.”
📸: Images courtesy of Reem Kassis
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