By DW McKinney
These words—the ones in this note and the ones in this issue—are difficult to write. Do not look away from them. Let them sink into you.
I am writing this editor’s note after I have seen a father carry his son, blown to pieces, in a yellow bag, and I fought (and failed) to keep my obsessive compulsive disorder from replacing the man and his son with me and my daughters in my mind. I am writing this editor’s note after I’ve watched a mother wipe her son’s blood off the tile floor, which I watch again after poet Maira Faisal mentions it in her poem “In Pillars, the Prized City” with a link to the video as reference, as proof, that this atrocity has been done. But Faisal didn’t need to show me proof because she has seen it and I have seen it and we won’t forget the mother’s grief.
I am writing this editor’s note after white phosphorus has clogged Gazan skies. After I have listened to videos of people wailing in panic and fear and anticipation of their own deaths. And when jets from the nearby air force base shook my house while I watched these videos—which ones, I couldn’t tell you, there were so many—I trembled in fear and tried not to be sick. I am writing after I have seen too many murdered babies lying in dust-covered streets, after too many orphans have wandered through obliterated cities in search of murdered family members they will never find, after I have seen a man half-buried in rubble resting his bloodied head against a stack of paper, and I prayed he was alive.
As I watched news reports and recordings from Gaza, one thing that consistently struck me was the way that Israeli soldiers aggressively erased Palestinian history. Bombed libraries, universities, and cemeteries. Erased entire lineages, cultural traditions, and mythologies. The thing is it wasn’t—isn’t—just happening in Gaza. It is (still) happening in Haiti and Sudan and Lebanon and Myanmar and Ukraine and and and. . . . The endlessness of this, its global reach, is why Saheed Sunday laments, “. . . to the heated flame of this hell i call a country” in his poem “In which a country becomes a song that dies on your skin,” and why Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s mother proclaims that all political leaders are terrorists, in Friedman’s essay “They Are All Terrorists.”
“Amplified Voices,” Writers Resist’s special issue, is an attempt to be an archive for what has been lost and must be remembered. This special issue is an elegy. It is a whispered prayer for those never to be forgotten. It shines a spotlight on horrors occurring in the past, in the present, and likely in the future.
The countries razed and barraged by artillery fire are many. The complicity in terror is grand and far-reaching. Sometimes it seems like we are trying to scoop a flood into a barrel with a spoon.
If you find yourself wondering how to move forward in a world that’s shifting toward silence in the face of ongoing genocide and tragedy, I’d like to share a few recent words from folks on social media that have given me much to consider:
“How must I disrupt my own life to counter the disruptive violence of the world?” – Black American poet Danez Smith (@Danez_Smif) on X/Twitter
“its not as easy as simply believing in decolonization or in a free Palestine. if you live in the west you have to kill the part of you that is western in reflexes, that believes your joy and comfort come before that of those in the global south” – @cutemuslimgrl13 on X/Twitter
“The arts are supposed to lay bare the atrocities of the world, not distract from it.” – South African author Terry-Ann Adams (@TA_4Short) on X/Twitter
I am writing this editor’s note with a lot of grief in my heart, but also a lot of gratitude for those who thought us fit to amplify their voices in the midst of chaos.
Wishing you all peace,
DWM
Guest Editor, Amplifying Voices
DW McKinney is a writer and interviewer who resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is a 2024 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and has received fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Shenandoah, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Voodoonauts. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, TriQuarterly, and Narratively, among others.
Photo credit: Zaur Ibrahimov on Unsplash.
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