#OutlookMagazine Year-ender & Anniversary Issue | We Bear Witness - video Dailymotion

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#OutlookMagazine Year-ender & Anniversary Issue | War is an ontological devastation. This is an issue in protest of the reduction of people, their lives, and their dreams in their minds and in the minds of others. All wars must be resisted. By pen and in our hearts. It is not easy to record ordinary human conversations during a war. It can make one very, very sad.  It isn’t easy to read testimonials from an ongoing war on Gaza. The war is never elsewhere. The war shows us who we are. The war is a lot of things. Economics, politics, etc. The war is also people.   We decided to talk about war in our anniversary and year-ender issue. In these 100 pages, people tell us their stories in their voices.   #War #WarOnGaza #GazaGenocide #Politics #Palestine #Children #Women #Israel #Hamas #IReadOutlook #ReturnToReading

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00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the Year-Ender issue titled "We Bear Witness".

00:06 The issue is dedicated to the people of Gaza and what they went through.

00:11 In the introduction to the Year-Ender issue, editor Chinke Senha writes,

00:16 "We bear witness". The introduction opens with lines of Moruid Bargoti, Palestinian writer and poet.

00:25 Here I am walking towards the land of the poem, a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, a guest,

00:32 I do not know. Is this a political moment or an emotional one or social, a practical moment,

00:40 a surreal one, a moment of the body or of the mind? It is all of these moments for us,

00:47 political, emotional and social. A surreal one too. War is an ontological devastation. This is

00:55 an issue in protest of the reduction of people, their lives and their dreams in their minds and

01:03 in the minds of others. All wars must be resisted by pen and in our hearts. It is not easy to record

01:11 ordinary human conversations during a war. It can make one very, very sad. It isn't easy to read

01:19 testimonials from an ongoing war on Gaza. The war is never elsewhere. The war shows us who we are.

01:27 The war is a lot of things, economics, politics, etc. The war is also people. We decided to talk

01:36 about war in our anniversary and year-end edition. In these 100 pages, people tell us their stories

01:43 in their voices. We were inspired by the documentary story approach of the Belarusian

01:49 investigative journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alekseyevich, who also won the Nobel

01:55 Prize for Literature for her work in 2015. Right after the war, Theodor Adorno wrote,

02:02 "In shock, writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." My teacher, Alice Adamowicz,

02:09 whose name I mentioned today, with gratitude, felt that writing prose about the nightmares

02:16 of the 20th century was sacrilege. "Nothing may be invented. You must give the truth as it is.

02:23 A super literature is required. The witness must speak." Nietzsche's words come to mind.

02:30 No artist can live up to reality. He can't lift it, she says. In her lecture, she says she became

02:39 the human ear. Conversations are important. I ask myself what kind of book I want to write

02:45 about war. I'd like to write a book about a person who doesn't shoot, who can't fire on

02:52 another human being, who suffers at the very idea of war. Where is he? I haven't met him,

02:59 Alexei Wick says. We wanted to write about those people in this issue and ask them to tell us what

03:05 they went through. In these pages, we talk about love, a difficult thing to talk about in this day

03:12 and age where fear and hatred reign and we lose by the day. Even as I write this, bombs are falling

03:20 on people, their homes and their children. Many are lost to us. What I see from the war are bloodied

03:28 shoes of children, their toys, their little lifeless bodies. The images haunt me. The act

03:36 of bearing witness is a primary responsibility of a journalist. That very act has been replaced

03:42 by cacophony and othering of people in the media. We weren't on the ground, but for weeks,

03:49 we had searched the social media for people who were posting about their lives in war.

03:54 We reached out to them with the hope that they will talk to us. We remain grateful to them and

03:59 I'm also in awe of our reporters and everyone in the team who kept at it despite the odds.

04:06 There were times when we would write to dozens of people and receive not a single response,

04:12 but we never abandoned hope and we never abandoned the story. It is wartime and all wartimes must be

04:19 recorded. Alexiewicz says she's interested in little people. She says, "The little great people

04:27 is how I would put it, because suffering expands people. In my books, these people tell their own

04:34 little histories and big history is told along the way. We haven't had time to comprehend what

04:41 already has and is still happening to us. We just need to say it to begin with. We must at least

04:47 articulate what happened. We are afraid of doing that. We are not up to coping with our past."

04:54 In Dostoevsky's Demons, Chateau says to Starvorgan at the beginning of their conversation,

05:00 "We are two creatures who have met in boundless infinity for the last time in the world. So drop

05:07 that tone and speak like a human being. At least once, speak with a human voice. This is that voice,

05:14 this issue. For everyone to read and understand and be human, this issue is to tell the people

05:22 who are suffering that we bear witness." For this and more, read the Year-Ender issue of Outlook.

#OutlookMagazine Year-ender & Anniversary Issue | We Bear Witness

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