We Bear Witness

“Here I am walking toward the land of the poem. a visitor? A refugee? A citizen? A guest? I do not know.

Is this a political moment? Or an emotional one? Or social? A practical moment? A surreal one? A moment of the body? Or of the mind?”

— Mourid Barghouti, Palestinian writer and poet

It is all of these moments for us. Political, emotional, and social. A surreal one, too. War is an ontological devastation. This is an issue in protest of the reduction of people, their lives, and their dreams in their minds and in the minds of others.

All wars must be resisted. By pen and in our hearts. It is not easy to record ordinary human conversations during a war. It can make one very, very sad.

It isn’t easy to read testimonials from an ongoing war on Gaza.

The war is never elsewhere. The war shows us who we are. The war is a lot of things. Economics, politics, etc.

The war is also people.

We decided to talk about war in our anniversary and year-ender issue. In these 100 pages, people tell us their stories in their voices. We were inspired by the “documentary story” approach of the Belarusian investigative journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich who also won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her work in 2015.

“Right after the war, Theodor Adorno wrote, in shock: ‘Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ My teacher, Ales Adamovich, whose name I mention today with gratitude, felt that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was sacrilege. Nothing may be invented. You must give the truth as it is. A ‘super-literature’ is required. The witness must speak. Nietzsche’s words come to mind — no artist can live up to reality. He can’t lift it,” she says.

In her lecture, she says she became the human ear. Conversations are important.

“I ask myself what kind of book I want to write about war. I’d like to write a book about a person who doesn’t shoot, who can’t fire on another human being, who suffers at the very idea of war. Where is he? I haven’t met him,” Alexievich says.

We wanted to write about those people in this issue and ask them to tell us what they went through. In these pages, we talk about love, a difficult thing to talk about in this day and age where fear and hatred reign and we lose by the day.

Even as I write this, bombs are falling on people, their homes, and their children. Many are lost to us.

What I see from the war are shoes of bloodied shoes of children, their toys, and their little lifeless bodies. The images haunt me.

The act of bearing witness is a primary responsibility of a journalist. That very act has been replaced by cacophony and othering of people in the media. We weren’t on the ground but for weeks, we searched social media for people who were posting about their lives in war.

Illustration: Champak Bhattacharjee

We reached out to them with the hope that they will talk to us. We remain grateful to them and I am also in awe of our reporters and everyone in the team who kept at it despite the odds. There were times when we would write to dozens of people and receive not a single response. But we never abandoned hope and we never abandoned the story.

It is wartime. And all wartimes must be recorded.

Alexievich says she is interested in little people. She says, “The little, great people, is how I would put it, because suffering expands people. In my books these people tell their own, little histories, and big history is told along the way. We haven’t had time to comprehend what already has and is still happening to us, we just need to say it. To begin with, we must at least articulate what happened. We are afraid of doing that, we’re not up to coping with our past. In Dostoevsky’s Demons, Shatov says to Stavrogin at the beginning of their conversation: ‘We are two creatures who have met in boundless infinity … for the last time in the world. So drop that tone and speak like a human being. At least once, speak with a human voice.’”

This is that voice. This issue. For everyone to read and understand and be human.

This issue is to tell the people who are suffering that we bear witness.

From the editor’s desk.