For Bisan Owda, a Living Avenging Angel in Gaza

There is a downcast grandeur to Bisan Owda, an indisputable glow, so that when she chants, “Hi, this is Bisan, I’m still alive, these are the updates..” we’re soothed like children are by lullabies. Maybe the genocide happening all around her will spare her. She’s the protagonist at the end of history and as Westerners, naive and needy for happy endings that let us reenter our world and operate as aggressively passive workers and consumers, she is our great undeserved comfort. Here we need heroes because we don’t know any. Bisan is a twenty-five year old Palestinian woman trapped in Gaza during Israel’s current siege on the region, which has killed forty-six journalists and over ten thousand civilians in the 29 days since it began. Bisan is sheltering in the garden of Al-Shifa hospital along with thousands of other displaced Gazans. Yesterday, the entrance of the hospital was bombed by Israeli forces as ambulances were departing en route to the Rafah crossing into Egypt where the wounded could receive adequate treatment. The hospital is packed with the wounded, cadavers of the dead, and evacuees. Bisan sleeps in a tent and hangs her clothing from trees. They share a charging port for their phones and electronics. She uses hers to tell us all of this day after day, night after night, massacre after massacre. I’m afraid to write about her location because she is surely a target as she relentlessly and meticulously documents this crisis, the mass murder of civilians under the guise of trying to find Hamas among them, a guise that has somehow now sanctioned the killing of over 4,000 Palestinian children. In the process Israel has also bombed 60 of the 200 Israeli hostages it proposes to be seeking for safe return.

One evening Bisan filmed a modest and generous epiphany, even while displaced and besieged, she picked up her camera to tell the world to enjoy our lives, to cherish every breath, to know how lucky we are to be alive. 

One woman on Tiktok has warned that her mental health is tied to Bisan’s aliveness and if anything happens to her during the current siege on Gaza she will welcome madness and whatever it inspires in her. Another woman has promised more out of vengeance than madness, ‘if you touch a hair on Bisan’s head, it’s up, we can all go talk to God about it.’ The call and response between Gaza and those of us in the West who despise the genocidal impulse is dead sunflowers turned into transnational radio antenna. A field of olives flooded with bombs, confiscated, burned, the family goat killed by the Israeli army, the fishing boats of the emaciated and starving burned, a refugee camp bombed, a whole family wiped out, bloodlines dating back thousands of years gone forever. If these news items are delivered as procedural abstractions in the detached tone of news anchors they slip into our subconscious minds and form habits of complacency. We expect them like the sun, we invite them like rain. Bisan turns these events raw and graphic and frees them from the antiseptic of lists of statistics. Bisan is one of the last points of access to what feels like the truth about this tragedy. And built into her capacity to report is our capacity to meet her with gratitude and not pity. She should pity us, we have no heroes left but her and the world around her is disappearing.

We turn to the inflection of another’s voice to decipher their intent. Bisan’s inflection suggests the scorned confidence of a born survivor of a nightmare, not the enclosed surrender of a martyr. She intends to survive. It feels unethical to demand that the hero survive as human being after human being falls around her, as she is forced to witness all of the corpses, to thirst for clean water and stand in hours-long lines for a slice of stale bread, but there is no ethics of genocide and everything is divided between heroes and villains during its constant reenactment. I think we believe that if she survives, our screams are being heard by God and what one Palestinian man called ‘the angels coming to collect the souls of the martyred’ will be spared. Or maybe she carries the messiah archetype and we trust her to be our witness and without her we would feel abandoned by God too. We need her more than she needs us. She is the keeper of our redemption unsung. She changes the frequency of what’s happening, the unrelenting ethnic cleansing of a people documented for the whole world to see; she gives us hope that when it does finally cease there will be someone who possesses the stories so we don’t all go mad when the denialism arrives on the theatrical heals of the too-late cease fire. The faked pause, the faked death of empire. Her music is charisma in the face of struggle, the keen refusal to glorify struggle coupled with the refusal to look away, and the sense that the heart of one woman can resuscitate a dying civilization. 

As I’m writing this she has posted to her Instagram for the first time today, the text atop the video reads “Dangerous Update.” She tells us this may be her last update, she’s not sure she will survive until tomorrow under the current conditions. She warns the Israeli army has started targeting all sources of survival in Gaza: the water supply, the food supply, the electricity. They’ve threatened to bomb any bakery that opens. They will bomb the incoming wheat. They will torch the generators. Gaza City has been without clean water for four days. No one native to the region is allowed to leave. Ships leaving are likely to be taken under by the army. One Israeli official has suggested that dropping an atomic bomb is not out of the question. They have already bombed the area in a quantity larger than that which was dropped at Hiroshima. Disaster is not beautiful, these people are sick and mad. We cannot turn this into Oscar winning films of atonement later to save the soul of the West. It is finished. Bisan is very beautiful. She is our avenging angel. If she doesn’t make it, who will? 

What I started writing to ask is, what is the role of music during an active genocide? Do we even deserve the solace it brings? I think Bisan is, the only music we deserve is the human voice of the direct witness backed by the militias drumming their sad machine guns around her. And the widening silence of the genocide denialists already revving their retreat into deeper fragility as if victims of circumstance themselves. There is no music that can cover this level of collective betrayal of one another, or shield us from it. Our karma is that we must listen closely to the bonfire of our souls in her tone and survive it. These are the updates.