I have never yet thought about how much of a luxury it is to have the privilege to grieve; yet after reading Loubna Mrie’s Defiance chapters, I have never felt so lucky.
I see a lot of myself in her. Her drive to report on what she sees as necessary, her passion for her country by way of seeking its change and revolution, her love for her family that leads her to regret not giving her mother that hug before she left for the last time. She too finds the value in the grief she can’t afford: “The sadness of realizing that I never imagined experiencing a war where I would be overwhelmed with uncontrollable jealousy toward someone because he was able to bury the upper half of his mother’s dead body” (Mrie, 257).
The almost inconceivable level of brutality she lives through over and over, both through the viewing of online documentation of torture and governmental corruption and through her own lived experience informs a reality I will never be able to relate to, and one that many others will not be able to either. Even the well-meaning Egyptian activist workshop leader, seeking to have Mrie prove that “as an Alawite and a Kurd, we can engage in conversation and share the fruit equally between us” (240) is so far removed from the breed of viscerality Loubna has experienced that she may as well be trying to teach activism to a person from another planet. The aid that so many Western countries believe they are giving to these activists can be so much less than is needed that it becomes a condescension, a mockery of what these people have already suffered.
I cannot say I can see myself in this part of Mrie’s experience, but I can see it in the way she tries to move on from it. Disconnect from her sister and a sense of insult at the prospect of needing help through therapy are familiar feelings for anyone who has suffered from mental health crises or from the loss of a loved one. It is this humanity that ties not only me to the narrative of her life, but also the numerous Western media outlets interested in her story following her post of her mother’s murder leading her to further online abuse. This media affiliation leads Mrie to later reflect that it lifted her “family out of extreme poverty, making them one of the wealthiest Alawite families in Syria” (254) while also being the presumed cause of her mother’s death.
Media, defined only as the flow of potentially information, is both a lifeline and a death sentence for her, and its reliability even on the basis of truth is contentious; the call of mother’s death and the complete lack of clarity or closure, the documents signed by families sacrificing truth to the government to recover their childrens’ bodies, and the communication that led that woman back to her town to be stoned to death all functioned as media that was meant to seem truthful. The same vehicle that can and will bring about revolution brings about the same death it seeks to prevent.
The strikingly relatable, human personal narrative of these refugee stories connect audiences just enough to have a taste for the pain suffered, but not enough to ever understand the scope of the cost of the migration they undergo.
The same may be said of Abdul Hadi in Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage; ever the young impassioned child, Abdul’s first spark was seeing the sacrifice made by women protesting. All they had to lose outweighed what they had to gain, and Hadi’s call of “What’s our excuse?” echoed the call of so many mobilized by media of protest. But that truth that mobilized him similarly steered others away; “Once word spread of a disturbance downtown, people avoided the area entirely. Fear was still their master” (Gopal, 137). Even here in the United States, the constant inundation of suffering in the media both at home, particularly through ICE raids and continued police brutality, and abroad, through the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, exposure to information does not equate to activism. For all those it radicalizes, it similarly numbs; in seeing so much pain we lose the impact and motivating value of it.
As Patrick Kingsley’s The New Odyssey, all the disgust of the pain and brutality of migration and what it entails becomes something normalized and accepted; “Perhaps the most extraordinary part of this scene is just how ordinary it has become” (Kingsley, 4). It is no wonder that after so many years of main, migration, loss of identity, and regaining it, those who have finally taken root and whose families have grown up on shores not familiar to the parents’ don’t feel like they can lose their new stability (Washington Post, The New Arab). They have spent more of themselves trying to achieve this dream than many can understand, even when looking directly through the eyes of Mrie, Hadi, or Hashem. The media that can communicate this information has become distrusted, unreliable, and numbing– only through an intentional empathy and critical understanding will necessary change be made in the way we tell stories, how we understand them, and how we employ them to make those tales of suffering no longer ‘ordinary.’
