Go Emily! Go Tristan!
Emily and her specialty arty eye wear
Resistance is the secret of joy. Alice Walker said it and – while she also said “everything we love can be saved” and I still feel mad at her for that cos however way you look at it that is heartbreakingly not true – sometimes, sometimes, I believe the one about resistance. It looks like Emily does too. Still attached to FreeGaza twitter texts, I have just followed a link to discover 21 year old Jewish-American Emily, whose eye the Israeli army removed with a tear gas cannister last month, singing the cheerfulest blues I’ve heard in a long time about the whole thing, on her own blog, Thirsty Pixels.
As a fellow injured-by-the-Israeli-army international, I’m the luckiest I know of the collection, despite having been one of the more dramatic originally. I’ve no longterm affects (unless lead absorbtion starts to send me crazy at some point, like Van Gogh and his lead pencils, let me know if that looks to be happening, ok?) and I don’t know of any of the others who can say that. So I’m not going to speak on behalf of someone like Tristan Anderson, who has paid a much, much higher price for his resistance…as have his partner and his parents. His was the injury we all dread much more than death. Yet, now there is finally more news of him, I discover Tristan has fought back much more than I ever imagined possible. He’s finally got back to the US, and he’s made it to a wheelchair.
Sometimes the pain of resistance seems as if it will crush you to death all by itself. Everyone in Gaza knows that. I bet Gabby does too. I guess Emily, who is an artist, will have days when the loss of an eye seems a targetted cruelty she can’t rise above. But sometimes, sometimes, for us internationals whose resistance comes with the luxury of choice, the joy found in fighting injustice takes us beyond the anger, to a knowledge our lives have been given a value we would have never found on any other path.
Love and rage.
A year after his shooting, Tristan has made it back home
August 18, 2010 at 3:20 am
It’s so hard to explain these things to people who haven’t felt what it’s like to be part of a resistance movement. As usual, you’ve written about such intense, complex and contradictory emotions with eloquence. Beautiful post.
August 27, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Thank you Laura! As I feel about so many of your posts. I don’t know how or when it may happen, but I do hope we get to meet one day
September 28, 2010 at 5:56 pm
I hope so too! I’m sure I will make it over to your side of the ocean sooner or later.