Our Guernica

I live in Nicosia, Cyprus, just over 400 kilometers from the Gaza Strip, a short boat ride through the Mediterranean. And yet, right now, this neighboring land seems to be further away than any other place on the planet. A quick search for directions on Google Maps generates a mere “can’t seem to find a way there.” 

In every sense of the word, Gaza is cut out: a piece of land that is inaccessible, out-of-reach, forbidden, off-limits, a place without a way to get there.

This prohibition is eerily familiar to me. My childhood unfolded against the backdrop of the so-called “dead zone,” the forbidden strip of land that cuts across Cyprus from east to west, separating the north from the south and dividing Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots into the “us” and the “them.” I grew up with the sight of barbed wire, patrolling soldiers, and military barrels full of bullet holes neatly stacked along the streets of my hometown. The prospect of war still features prominently among common childhood phobias here, even though there hasn’t been active warfare since 1974. I know all too well that every cut-out land is filled with leftover wounds, visible and invisible, insidious and malignant. 

Wounds in Gaza won’t heal for generations. While still in the torrent of ongoing destruction, they continue to multiply, deepen, fester. As I try to wrap my mind around the harrowing testimonies of Mohamed Abu Shawish and Hala Al Sarraj, around what is unfolding currently, at this moment, just 426 kilometers from my current location, my mind’s eye intuitively conjures Pablo Picasso’s monumental 1937 painting Guernica. Over the past several months I have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pictures and videos of emaciated women and children, of buildings reduced to rubble, of vibrant streets turned instantly into a single shade of gray, of death. And yet, at this very moment, I resorted to this man-made image of war, which art historian T. J. Clark aptly described as “our culture’s ‘Tragic Scene’” (2017, para. b). Clark’s use of the phrase “our culture” is both intentional and meaningful:

And for once the phrase “our culture” seems defensible—not just Western shorthand. There are photographs by the hundred of versions of Guernica . . . being carried in anger or agony over the past thirty years in Ramallah, Oaxaca, Calgary, London, Kurdistan, Madrid, Cape Town, Belfast, Calcutta; outside US air bases, in marches against the Iraq invasion, in struggles of all kinds against state repression, as a rallying point for los Indignados, and—still, always, everywhere, indispensably—an answer to the lie of “collateral damage” (2017, para. b).

Guernica, as a violent scene of destruction, death, dismemberment, despair, does indeed stand for “the lie of ‘collateral damage,’” the human cost of war, and, as such, it deservedly became “our culture’s ‘Tragic Scene.’” Picasso created and named this painting after the bombing of Guernica, “the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition” (Steer, 1937, p. 17), which was carried out by Nazi Germans in collaboration with General Franco and, according to historian Xabier Irujo, possibly even as Göring’s birthday gift to Hitler (Irujo, 2021, p. 43). The entire town was levelled to the ground almost at a whim. It is not surprising then that it came to represent “the lie of ‘collateral damage.’” What was most uncanny about my sudden turn to Guernica at this moment, though, was finding out that Picasso created the painting immediately after reading the account of George Steer, then special correspondent for The Times, who published one of the first eyewitness reports of the bombing. Quite literally, Guernica, this “Tragic Scene” of “our culture,” emerged as a response to a testimony that sought to describe to the world the horror of witnessed destruction. Steer writes for The Times, two days after the bombing:  

When I entered Guernica after midnight houses were crashing on either side, and it was utterly impossible even for firemen to enter the centre of the town. The hospitals of Josefinas and Convento de Santa Clara were glowing heaps of embers, all the churches except that of Santa Maria were destroyed, and the few houses which still stood were doomed. When I revisited Guernica this afternoon most of the town was still burning and new fires had broken out. About 30 dead were laid out in a ruined hospital (Steer, 1937, p. 18).

Hala’s testimony of the destruction she witnesses in Gaza is equally detailed, yet even more disturbing:

They bombed everything in Gaza: civilians’ houses, restaurants, hotels, universities, schools, hospitals, private sectors, shops. They even destroyed historic landmarks and any sign of civilization. They killed mothers in front of their children, killed children, and burned the mothers’ hearts. Within all of that and much more, there were no medical supplies; they targeted doctors, hundreds of them were killed with their entire families.

Whereas Steer makes use of the passive voice to describe the consequences of the bombardment (the churches “were destroyed,” fires “had broken out,” the dead “were laid out”), Hala uses an active voice (“they bombed,” “they destroyed,” “they killed”). Her voice is filled with agony, anger, disbelief, and it is incriminating: the “they” points to a man-made catastrophe, calling out “the lie of ‘collateral damage.’” Each image she paints so vividly becomes an inflicted wound, it contorts the face of humanity, it molds into Guernica.

Mohamed’s testimony of what he experiences and witnesses at a Gazan hospital where he works is similarly telling: The doctors, he describes, operate on “the principle of differentiation between the wounded: whoever has more hope of survival is dealt with”; the rest are left to “die in peace,” and Mohamed is left to witness the pieces—the insufferable losses of devastated relatives, their wailing cries, their fall into bottomless despair. What he is forced to witness, bear, and bear witness to, is truly impossible for anyone outside to fathom, to conjure, except perhaps as a painting. 

Up close, Guernica is admittedly a shocking spectacle, massive in size and disturbing in content. I still remember vividly when I first saw it, as the centerpiece of the 2017 exhibit “Pity and Terror: Picasso’s path to Guernica” at Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum. Looking at it, one is initially flooded by images of humans and animals in anguish, and then, very quickly, the painting produces a striking sense of spatial disorientation, such that one is forced to ask: Where am I? Guernica’s spectator is unsure as to whether the scene that is being witnessed is unfolding inside or outside, within walls, under a ceiling or in an indeterminate outside. This spatial entanglement is so prominent that in his analysis of the painting, Clark asks: “Can we talk of an ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ at all in Guernica? Are the two kinds of space distinct?” (2017, para. i). 

This collapse of the boundary between inside and outside, which induces in the spectator a sense of profound spatial disorientation, is paradigmatic of the collapse of the parameters that sustain a basic sense of reality in experiences of catastrophe. In war, this collapse becomes utterly literal: the actual destruction brought upon familiar spaces, both private and public, material and spiritual, bodily and mental, renders the distinction between “inside” and “outside” obsolete. The experience then inevitably becomes one of disorientation, disbelief, foreignness, unreality. When the parameters of reality collapse, the relationship between time and space falters and the guarantees of consistency and predictability that lend reality its symbolic support collapse, so that one is left to contend with an existential doubt which undermines the very experience of being human in a knowable world. This is the question that Mohamed so urgently poses in his testimony: “Do we really live in a world that understands the meaning of humanity and its rights, or we are in a jungle devoid of all feelings and humanity?” Like the spectator of Guernica, utterly disorientated, Mohamed seems to be asking: “Where am I?” How might one position oneself in time and space when living in a dystopia where the living merge with the dead? In her own testimony, Hala speaks to this effect, and her words are haunting: “Literally, you are not aware enough to ask yourself, ‘What is this? Is this real, or am I watching a terrifying movie? Am I awake?’” 

The dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside, so brilliantly rendered in Guernica, is at the same time a dissolution of the social link—the network of relations that lends us a sense of belonging, that shields us from alienation and, by extension, annihilation. Hala’s words capture this well: “I am still wondering, did we survive or did those who die survive, and it’s not us?” In this context, Mohamed’s agonizing question becomes especially urgent, echoing out from within a “dead zone,” as if to grasp on to the social and the simply human: Is Gaza part of a world which understands the meaning of humanity, or is it cut out, part of a “jungle” outside any guarantees of legitimacy? 

The disruption of time and space, inside and outside, before and after, makes sustainable living impossible; it engenders prolonged fear, despair, hopelessness, helplessness, death. As Mohamed so aptly explains, “Experiences of loss became great pain and trauma, initially thought to be long-lasting, but as the war intensified, the shock of death diminished, overwhelmed by the daily chaos, as the death reached beyond comprehension. The shock of loss lost its luster.” How can we receive these devastated words, these intolerable experiences? What frames of reference do we have in order to assimilate a state of being that has surrendered to death? How can we create an opening so as to allow these cut-out experiences to enter, when they come from a place where “the shock of loss lost its luster”? 

Over the past century, especially since World War II, the mental health professions have developed numerous models of intervention to deal with human response to disasters, from psychological first aid to elaborate models for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and complex trauma. We have even answered the call to produce interdisciplinary approaches to trauma (Caruth, 1995), by bringing together perspectives from disciplines as diverse as neurobiology and psychology, literary theory, history and anthropology. However, all of our accumulated knowledge seems to center around work with survivors, it presupposes a future, it assumes there will be an aftermath to catastrophes, a space and a time when we can attempt to restore, once again, the boundary between inside and outside, the guarantees of legitimacy, and a sense of consistency and predictability. But for Mohamed and Hala, and the multitudes of people trapped in cut-out lands, the horrors of the present are ongoing, enduring and continuous. It is plainly absurd, an oxymoron, to even speak of post-traumatic stress responses while in the midst of trauma. 

In a recent interview, Dr. Samah Jabr, the chair of the Palestinian ministry of health’s mental health unit, highlighted the impossibility of capturing the mental catastrophes experienced by individuals who are caught up in a never-ending living nightmare, through currently available diagnostic systems: 

Trauma in Palestine is collective and continuous. PTSD is when your mind is stuck in a traumatic loop. In Palestine, the loop is reality. The threat is still there. Hypervigilance, avoidance—these symptoms of PTSD are unhelpful to the soldier who went home, but for Palestinians, they can save your life. We see this more as “chronic” traumatic stress disorder (McKernan, 2024, para. d).

Indeed, in the aftermath of a catastrophe, the very symptoms of acute distress may prove symptomatic; in the war zone, they become necessary survival skills. And yet, when employed long enough, systematically, daily, they can just as easily lead to a breakdown of one’s capacity to go on living, both mentally and physically. After having to tell a seriously injured man who came out of a coma that all of his family members except his son had died in the bombing that injured him, Mohamed felt the weight of his experience in his body: “I felt extreme stress, collapse, and terrible pain in all parts of my body until I could no longer stand.” 

Mohamed and Hala, both of whom are mental health experts, draw attention to the impossibility of forming a psychological response under life-threatening conditions of extreme and prolonged distress. Living in a war zone where no space is safe, where necessities are lacking, where death is always already imminent, exceeds and exhausts every human capacity for adaptation. “Succumbing to the clutches of depression was not an option for people here,” writes Mohamed; “the depletion of life and its necessities, the life of displacement, living in tents, high prices, and the inability to access the basic necessities of life made succumbing to depression a luxury that the people of Gaza did not have.” In her own testimony, while struggling to make sense of this inassimilable reality, Hala arrives at the same conclusion:

I sometimes ask myself, what reactions should we have to all of that? What amount of emotions and tears? What yelling and shouting should be heard? Will our hearts keep beating? I saw the answers reflected on the faces surrounding me, and on mine. We have no reaction to all of that. Is it numbness? I do not think so, but we do not have the luxury to grieve.

The psychological realities that Mohamed and Hala describe, where having an internal experience commensurate with a terrifying “outside” becomes a “luxury,” simply exceed not only our ability to intervene as mental health professionals using the tools available at our disposal but also, insofar as their realities remain cut out, our ability to really, truly bear witness to the “inside” of their experience. From within Gaza, even the dead seem to be cut out. Mohamed’s testimony makes a brief but chilling reference to the vanishing of the dead, when he recounts his experience of losing a childhood friend and resonating with the words of his uncle who lost his son and said of him: “He left as if he never existed.” When the future seems foreclosed, the function of the past, of memory, loses its meaning so that loss and death amount to erasure. Mourning the loss of loved ones in collective disasters is not an individual affair. Without a community to contain, remember, and honor their passing, they too become cut out, and vanish as if they never existed. 

How can we receive these harrowing voices then that come from within this ongoing catastrophe, from a cut-out realm, from a place where we very literally “can’t seem to find a way there”? And yet, these testimonies are offered to us as possibilities. Mohamed and Hala somehow, admirably, find the courage to write from within a war zone; they risked their lives to produce a testimony which resists the collapse of the social order and the resulting “nothingness” of “guarantees, ideals, and legitimacies” (Davoine & Gaudillière, 2004, p. 15).The act of offering their testimonies defies silence, and their voices cut into the world outside, from within violence and destruction; they signal out to a social link. “When the boundaries of inside and outside have been breached, it is only in between that it is possible for anything to be shown,” write Davoine and Gaudillière (2004, p. 59).  Mohamed and Hala produced a testimony despite the destruction of all guarantees, thereby carving out a space between the inside of their lived horrors and the world outside, where it becomes possible for something that would have otherwise remained invisible, inaudible, to be revealed and to be known. It is not clear to me what miraculous life force propelled them to speak. For “when the guarantees of speech have been destroyed, how to construct an Other to whom to speak?” (2004, p. 16). And yet, they both manage to do so, and they do so powerfully, resolutely. Perhaps they were propelled by the same life force that led Hala and her family to go on being despite knowing that “there is no safe place in Gaza.” “We kept reassuring our two kids that we were moving to a safer place,” she writes, “although we knew we were lying to them.” Mohamed, too, carries on with grit and determination, in part, to support his son and his family. While living in a tent, he carried on working and supporting: “My passion for work was mixed with the feeling that I was helping myself and my family to recover. Work diaries became nightly stories, helping my family members endure through shared common humanity.”

While the war in Gaza has shredded the communal fabric to pieces—not only through displacement and killing but also, like in Guernica, through the destruction of collective memory, of cultural heritage sites, and of cemeteries—both Mohamed and Hala, and I imagine countless others, manage to sustain their humanity, for their families, for their children, for those moments, however fleeting, when the prospect of a future still seems possible. In those moments of being-with, perhaps the deadness begins to thaw so as to re-find the cut-out parts of living. It could be that elements of what Davoine recognizes as healing in the intimacy of a therapeutic encounter become engendered by these moments of familial connectedness, even from within a tent: “Only the alliance of two people sharing the experience in the present can reach these cut-out parts, by acknowledging that the dissociation occurred with reason . . . ” (Davoine, 2022, p. 56, emphasis in original).

I would like to think that our efforts to listen deeply to these harrowing voices, to all the cut-out voices of “our culture,” is a way of creating an opening through which to enter into what Winnicott so aptly called “the common pool of humanity, into which individuals and groups of people may contribute,” so that it becomes “a source from which we may all draw if we have somewhere to put what we find”; this is what constitutes, for Winnicott, “the location of cultural experience” (1967, p. 370, emphasis in original). Drawn out from under the rubble and placed within “the common pool of humanity,” the testimonies of Mohamed and Hala are no longer cut out. Like Guernica, they paint the “Tragic Scene” of “our culture” and form “still, always, everywhere, indispensably—an answer to the lie of ‘collateral damage.’” One can only hope that as their voices are increasingly heard, they can become transposed, from a cut-out realm to the location of our cultural experience.

Guernica is painted in shades of gray in its entirety. If one survives looking at it long enough, closely enough, one will, sooner or later, discover close to the bottom of the canvas a small white flower clenched in the fist of a dismembered hand.

 

 

References

Caruth, C. (1995). Preface. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory (C. Caruth, Ed.).

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Clark, T. J. (2017, August 17). Picasso and Tragedy. London Review of Books, 39 (16).

Davoine, F. (2022). Pandemics, Wars, Traumas and Literatures: Echoes from the Front Lines (A. Jacob Trans.). London & New York: Routledge

Davoine, F., & Gaudillière, J.-M. (2004). History Beyond Trauma: Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Cannot Stay Silent (S. Fairfield, Trans.). New York: Other Press.

Irujo, X. (2021). The Bombing of Gernika. Ekin: Buenos Aires

McKernan. B. (2024, April 14). Chronic Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Palestinian 

Psychiatrist Challenging Western Definitions of Trauma. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/14/mental-health-palestine-children. 

Steer, G. (1937, April 28). “The Tragedy of Guernica.” The Times, pp 17−18.

Winnicott, D. (1967). “The Location of Cultural Experience.” The International Journal of  Psychoanalysis, 48:368−72.