Fadiah Nadwa Fikri
It was late at night and I remember being drawn to the TV. The world news was occupying the slot. I saw tens of thousands of people flooding the streets of London protesting the Afghanistan war. 2001 was the year. I was 18 years old. The sight of the plethora of protesters standing together to register their opposition to the war stirred something within me.
At such a young age, I couldn’t grasp the politics behind the devastating war but I knew it was something no human being should have had to endure. Incapable of speech, I was struggling to make sense of what was unfolding at that point in time.
Footage of the raining bombs, the invading troops, the countless deaths, the displacement, the tears and sorrow of those fleeing the violence, mourning the loss of their loved ones and the destruction of the place they called home was also accompanying the news. I was engulfed in a heavy sense of numbness having had seen it. The horror was paralyzing, how human lives instantly faded into obscurity.
Amidst the intense emotions, the sight of the people protesting the war wouldn’t stop flashing in my head. There was something about the protest I saw on TV that night. Something I couldn’t articulate but was somehow able to deeply feel. Something I still carry with me today to help me understand the country and the world I live in, their realities, complexities, and contradictions.
The world is replete with history of violence, oppression, and marginalization. War, poverty, racism, sexism, sectarianism continue to form the essence of our present reality. Some lives are given recognition and some aren’t. Some voices are heard and some are ignored. Coming to terms with this harsh reality compels us to accept the fact that we live in a world that is unequal.
In an unequal world, the injustice, misery, and suffering the oppressed and the marginalized among us are subjected to seem perpetual. The precariousness of their lives is perpetuated and aggravated by systems that are built to exclude, marginalize, and exploit – systems that are never built to accommodate their existence – systems that are run by power and enabled by those who benefit from them.
The operations of these systems result in dehumanization of those living on the margins of society. Dehumanization is necessary to justify the denial not only of their right to survival, but also their right to good life. This is evident in the narratives surrounding these precarious lives – how their lives are reduced to numbers and treated as an academic matter or a matter of opinion.
In the face of the seemingly indestructible oppressing power, choosing to stand idly by, letting oneself immerse in a sense powerlessness and indifference is undeniably appealing. Any opposition to the injustice plaguing the world we share seems futile given the might of the systems that is confronting us.
Why do we resist? One might ask, when defeat appears to be the only possible answer to the question.
As humans who are also known to be a walking contradiction, it would also be an impossibility for us to escape from being moved by the injustice around us. With this consciousness, we would inevitably find ourselves to be at constant war with the world we live in, the pain it carries in its hand, and the unimaginable atrocities it inflicts on those we share our common bond of humanity with. These warring emotions would consequently demand that something is done. To transform these emotions into action is to breathe meaning into the bond that binds us – the bond that would save us from fading into bottomless oblivion.
Throughout history, we have witnessed scores of courageous men and women fighting tirelessly on different fronts to protect the pristine bond we share. Some live to tell their stories and some don’t. Some pay for what they believe in and stand for with their lives. Tears, loss, humiliation, and alienation appear to be the recurring themes in stories of their struggles.
Remembrance of past struggles, no matter how tragic the stories, has a way of teaching us that not all is lost. It takes immense faith to plant seeds of hope not knowing if they would survive and grow into a force that would unshackle the chain that is choking us. It also takes immeasurable perseverance to replant those seeds of hope after they get brutally crushed by the power that is standing in the way. It requires an unconditional conviction to persistently insist that a fractured hope is still a hope.
Nobody can guarantee that the struggle to reclaim what is rightfully ours would eventually be victorious, not in the literal sense of the word. But the meaning is in the attempt, as it has always been. We resist to honour our shared humanity. We resist because our liberation is contingent on the liberation of the damned among us. We resist simply because we have a right to be free.