Destitution Gaza: Girl With The Child
By Ibrahim Isam
I hesitated for a long time before sharing this photograph.
I opened it, closed it, then returned to it again.
Each time, I felt that words, no matter how carefully chosen, would betray what I had seen.
I do not know who this woman is to the little girl—her mother, her sister, her neighbor, or simply another woman brought together with her by the tent and by the same fate.
I do not know what was in her eyes when she looked at me, nor what filled the child’s dreams as she slept, sheltered against a woman who herself had nothing left to shelter her from a merciless day.
I know only one thing:
They are human beings.
Human beings asking life for something that should never have been a demand in the first place:
A night without fear.
A roof that does not tremble above their heads.
Water.
Bread.
An embrace.
And a morning in which no one has to ask, Where do we go now?
Ever since I took this photograph, I have been asking myself:
What can a photograph say when pain becomes larger than language?
And those of us looking from the other side of a screen—do we truly see what we believe we are seeing?
Or do we see only a tiny fragment of another human being’s life, and then simply continue with our own?
How was her night?
What did she dream of while she slept?
And what will her eyes know when they open tomorrow?
Who will one day tell her why she had to know a tent before she ever knew a home?
Perhaps I have no answer.
Perhaps I do not even have the right words.
But I know this:
The child sleeping somewhere tonight does not need us to choose a side for her in this world.
She needs only for us to give her back the world that should have been hers from the beginning.
To be alive.
To be safe.
To grow.
And, one night, to fall asleep without ever knowing what fear means.
And that is why, finally, I am sharing this photograph.
Not because I have found the words,
but because I have not found enough of them.
Heba
CrossFireArabia
