Erasure
“The special thing about Palestinian trauma is the collective denial of their experiences and narratives. It is a continual attack on history, memory and the social fabric” - Samah Jabr
Our histories are erased
When geographical maps do not label the occupied Palestinian Territories
When the Nakba is denied and laws are passed to erase it from Arab history books
When the hundreds and thousands of massacres of Palestinians are not known, nor the fact that Gaza has been filled with refugees for years
And we cannot even assert that what is happening now is a genocide, it is still a “conflict”
Our art is erased
When police stop artists for using the colors red, green, white or black
When they are barred from shows and readings around the world
When they are accused of inciting hate for uplifting Palestine
When our museums, cultural galleries, and heritage sites are emptied and bombed
Our identities are erased
When we are outlawed from wearing our keffiyehs
When our nationhood is denied and deleted
When we are lumped in with all the Arab nations as an anonymous mass
When we are are pathologized for just saying we are who we are and have lived what we have lived
Our journalism is erased
When we die in a passive voice in headlines, no agent has caused our murders
When western media guidelines revoke the term: ‘occupied palestinian territory’
When Christiane Amanpour of CNN bemoans the restricted access to Gaza, ignoring all the Palestinian journalists on the ground
When mainstream news does not report that within hours of the unanimous UN security council vote for a ceasefire, Rafah was bombed
Our human rights are erased
When we call for liberation and justice, not a ceasefire, because four palestinians were killed in the West Bank on October 5, 2023; attacks and stoning took place there on October 2, 2023; and human rights agencies have denounced the chokings, beatings, and coercive interrogations of our children for years.
When Golda Meir says “We can never forgive the Arabs for making us kill their children”, our newborns already terrorists, murdered in their incubators
When starvation is engineered and mass graves are found, requiring the investigation of children shot with hands tied behind their backs, the body parts of our loved ones stolen
When we are told ‘sheket’ - Hebrew for quiet, but in Arabic, soukoot means silence, or to shut up.
Our right to affirm our rights is erased
When we are challenged with “what about October 7?” but are never asked about Palestinian rights.
When we lift cardboard kites to demand that our tuition, pensions, and taxes no longer kill our families, and are accused of antisemitism
When call out for our lives to matter, we are arrested on the streets, snipers’ rifles aimed at us
When our letters and petitions are left unanswered, and so we write poems to move you into understanding our shared humanity in the name of all our ancestors
Our occupational rights are erased
When we cannot return to our homes, doorkeys kept as symbols of grief and possibility
When our rights to rainwater are removed, and the ancient olive groves and fields of zaatar we have always tended are destroyed with illegal white phosphorus
When we teach our children our songs, recipes and dances behind closed doors or in waterlogged tents
When North American terrorism laws were first created to ensure that Palestinian resistance will be punished, our political activities for self-determination criminalized
Our stories are erased
When our journalists and intellectuals are deliberately targeted and killed
When the ‘40 beheaded babies’ - a lie -is condemned the world over, but the hundreds of Palestinian children held hostage, are not spoken of, tortured in the only country that allows the military detention of minors, requiring a separate mental health strategy, if they are ever released
When popsongs call for our ethnic cleansing yet the burden of proving our stories lie with the very people whose existence is denied
As therapists, our ethics are erased
When we speak out at the video of George Floyd but say nothing when 3 year old Reem Ali Badwan is cradled, dead, in her grandfather’s arms or when 6 year old Hind Rajab’s body is found riddled with sniper bullets, or when 7 year old Sidra Hassouna’s body - legs severed- is left hanging over the side of a building in a zone that had been declared safe, watching the Flour Massacre, seeing the deliberate creation of disability on our screens over and over and over
When teaching about our people is deemed an attack against others, and we are left standing, hypocrites, in front of our students who know better
When we are doxxed, threatened, censored, manipulated, erased for our advocacy, and left to enter classes, clinics, labs, meetings in silence, no longer fully ourselves
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Edward Said said that “No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.” To this we add that there is no rationalization or justification for the silence in the profession. There is only the actions that reveal that some groups’ feelings, opinions, comforts, or stories are superior to the slaughter of others. There is only the racism that enshrines Palestinians and Arabs as ‘human animals’
When the tides turn in Canada, and they might, they already have in some provinces. When you are not supported or funded to stand with Indigenous, Black or Trans communities, will you be silent, again? Your concerns about saying anything are a distraction, a tool of oppression, a mechanism that agrees with genocide. The organizations and leadership in Canadian occupational therapy are complicit.
It is no longer about asking for statements. It is time to condemn your silence. It is time for truth and apologies.
Feel free to fact check. Feel free to see us, name us, treat us as fully human. Feel free to uphold our rights, alongside the rights of our Indigenous, Black, Jewish, Queer and Disabled kin. Feel free to truly enact the anti-oppressive competencies of the profession, because we are no longer waiting for our freedoms.
April 2024, poem written by Hiba Zafran.
Poem and attendant text performed at the May 2024 Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists annual conference town hall by Pier-Luc Turcotte, PhD., with support from members of the Canadian Indigenous OT Collective