Hind Rajab and the weight of our silence

If there is one movie that represents the depths to which humanity has sunk in our times, it is The Voice of Hind Rajab. However, even as it depicts the depravity of humankind, the film also depicts how the most monstrous human cruelty can evoke immense kindness and love. As we hear the voice of the little child Hind Rajab, relentlessly asking to be taken away from the car in which her cousins, uncles and aunts lie dead around her, we unspool. The hard indifference that we have cultivated to blind us to the cruelties that the powerful are capable of inflicting and taking pleasure in breaks into shards that prick our vision and make it bleed. 

The Voice of Hind Rajab shatters the sedimented layers of indifference, hate, cruelty, and self-protection which we have built around ourselves as a kind of armour. The dead children of Gaza speak to us through that voice. That voice relentlessly strips the layers and layers of hard, callous indifference that we have carefully nurtured to form a hard crust of indifference over our moral conscience. Peel by peel, those layers are pulled off by the voice of a terrified child until our moral conscience is laid bare to the serrated edge of a child’s voice.

We realise that a deadly cancerous silence has spread through us and through the body politic, slowly killing the capacity for empathy and tenderness that sustains human beings with happiness and love.

We recognise our complicity in the horrible brutality that has been inflicted on the children of Gaza. By not rejecting that brutality, by not screaming with pain when touched by it, and by not condemning the evil that perpetrates it day after day, we have become complicit with that evil. Hind Rajab’s voice makes us realise how a terrible indifference has permeated into us and made us immune to the sight of children being maimed and killed and butchered and orphaned. We have become inured to
the ordinariness of brutality and violence.

The voices of love and protection reach out to Hind Rajab from the fragile bright space of the Palestine Red Crescent. But her terrifying loneliness, the loneliness of her breathing amidst the still silence of her dead family, and the loneliness of her terror surrounded by tanks and guns shatter the control of that control room, and they, like us, are unravelled by that persistent child’s voice asking for the protection that the adults in her world have promised her but are helpless to give her.

The Voice of Hind Rajab tears to shreds the clichés through which we construct our political speeches, our moral sermons and lessons on what it is to be human. In the loneliness of that car surrounded by corpses, Hind Rajab again and again pleads for someone to come to her and take her away. And that voice restores to us our terrible helplessness and vulnerability in a world that we have created, a world in which we cannot respond to the voice of a child asking us to allow her to live, begging us to help her to live.

Hind Rajab’s voice reminds us that we who have brought children into our world can never abrogate our responsibility towards them. That we bear the responsibility of building and sustaining a world that will sustain our children, that will cherish them and protect their childhood. That we have to nurture a hearing and a listening that can be alerted by the serrated edges of a child’s voice crying out in pain. That if we allow our capacity to be touched by a child’s voice pleading with fear for help to be blunted, then we are on the brink of destroying our world. That giving full rein to our greed and cruelty and demonic desire for power and domination will lead to the killing of all the children and all that is childlike in our world. And once that is done, there will be nothing to save us from ourselves.

We have to listen to Hind Rajab’s voice if we are not to become monstrous and depraved. We have to suffer listening to her voice if we are to regain our capacity to suffer the searing pain of love and to be brittle with tenderness.
We have to listen to Hind Rajab’s voice if we are to be saved as a species.

The voice of a child speaking against death, against the horror of war, against the helplessness of the adults she believed would protect her, should be a call to us, like the call to prayer. A prayer to ourselves and for our world to restore to us the capacity to be bruised, hurt, and unskinned by the voice of a child. We will be able to hear the many voices of love and tenderness only if we are able to listen to the voice of Hind Rajab and be dismantled by it. 

(The writer is a professor at the Department of English, Mangalore University)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.