Lil

We Palestinians went through so many traumas, but it's probably fair to say that this one compares only to our original one, 1948 Nakba. In collective trauma one doesn't have to live through the events themselves to be indelibly marked by their effects. I know that I carried the 1948 trauma with me since I was born, and each successive mini-trauma only further burnt it into my body and soul: 1967, 1976, 1982, 1987, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, and now 2023. I went through some and didn't go through others. But all of them somehow managed to visit and sear into me the traumatic effects of what I or any Palestinian is going through. But, because this trauma is so similar to the point of origin, to 1948, and since I am a dad this time around, I can see clearly how trauma is transmissible from kin to kin: We are more depressed; we are more anxious; we are more silent, more serious; we are short and snappy; we stop cooking and cleaning; we cannot hold a conversation; we listen to the radio, to TV every minute of the day; we watch social media; we cry here and there for no reason; and we cannot sleep on time, we wake up early; we feel guilty; and we hide in an office or a closed room to be by ourselves and/or with our people in Gaza. But most of all, by doing all of this, our kids absorb the trauma silently but incessantly: they become as anxious, as depressed, as scared and worried, as unstable, and as raw. And there goes generational trauma. It stays on. Does my trauma have to do with my mother's agony and my grandmother's prayers? I wonder if this is how causes live on? Does that mean the harsher the trauma, the longer the cause lives? And we keep going.