Ambassador Majed Bamya 🇵🇸
Personal post…to keep going You spend years, decades, building your interior world. A fortress to protect your true self, a castle for your belief system, infinite bridges to carry your dreams against all odds. There is an intimate river and a tumultuous ocean. There are all types of flower and mystical creatures. There are verses of holy books and poems. There are reflections of encounters, faces, moments, memories. There are planets and galaxies and stars everywhere you look. There is darkness within darkness, and light beyond light. And this interior world keeps growing and helps you sustain whatever life brings your way. Sometimes storms and volcanoes erupt within it. But it tends to withstand the test of time and nature and life and human betrayal and all kinds of suffering and loss. As we watch the world falling apart in Gaza, the lives destroyed, in their literal sense, and in each of their manifestations, the destruction of human beings and an assault on everything they built, every life, every home, every school, every hospital, every family, every community, every hope, every dream, their very dignity and every right they are entitled to…I think of the interior worlds falling apart within them and within us. Every one of our certainties, what we call our humanity, our red lines, our belonging, our us. What will survive of this attempt to disappear us? What will remain of our lives, of our rights, of our dreams, of our beings, of what makes us us? What will remain of the worlds we built both within and without? I try to find in my interior world the force to save the real world, but struggle to find the way as everything is collapsing. I can’t summon the courage to fathom all this agony, so how are they enduring it, with no end in sight. I, who always strived to find the light, pray for darkness within to hide my pain and shame and despair. This feeling of powerlessness that we have no right to surrender to. That would be the ultimate betrayal. Do those who speak so lightly of our death or disappearance, or those inflicting such death and devastation upon us, imagine the worlds we have lost, the ones we saw buried and the ones we were able to resurrect or reinvent altogether? Do they know who we are beyond their prejudice and stereotypes? Do they know the simple greatness of a nation simply refusing to die? Do they know the letters we contribute to the alphabet of humanity? Do they know the depth of our faith? Do they know the place we hold in the human journey throughout history? Do they know how intricate we are to the land? Do they know we exist? That we deserve to exist? That we have paid all our dues over and over again to be who we are in our homeland? Where do we go from here? From this nothingness as our people live under the reign of pain and loss. Where the chuckles follow us from birth to death, and beyond? How do we restore our worlds, within and without, and roam freely within them?