“I cannot unsee what I saw,” Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah told filmmakers
Radical Futures series launches with filmmakers Carol Mansour & Muna Khalidi whose documentary tells the story of Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah who decided to speak out and bear witness to genocide.
Today, I am launching a new interview series called Radical Futures in collaboration with The Polis Project. Doom and gloom is starting to become a permanent state of mind with rising authoritarianism; an ongoing genocide promoted, funded and cheered on by almost all so called “democracies;” crackdown on protest and dissent; pure unadulterated hatred for migrants, Muslims, Blacks, women, queer and trans people; simply too much violence, a repulsive embrace of capitalism, and let’s not forget, unseasonal weather conditions at any given point anywhere. I ask myself how I can wade through all of this, and where might I seek hope and strength.
Radical Futures is not particularly different from what I have always done: create community that can allow me and everyone else to learn from one another. In a way, that’s what Warscapes magazine did for a decade and what the book clubs continue to do now with Radical Books Collective. I have been doing interviews for many years now, and it is a generative and stimulating genre for me. I was lucky to get a flying start with incredible artists, writers and activists such as Mana Neyestani, Fatma El-Mehdi, Mahmood Mamdani, Laila El Haddad, Shobasakthi and others. I made it somewhat more official with the Trailblazing African Feminists series for the BookRising podcast and then again with the Decolonize | Defund | Abolish series for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
This series featuring conversations with clever, empathetic and politically committed people might not save our world but it can foster an archive of intellectual thought and counter-narratives at a time when spaces for free expression are shrinking. Such conversations nourish me and I hope they will nourish you too.
A documentary account of a Palestinian doctor who chose to bear witness
For the first episode of the series, I sat down with filmmakers Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi to speak about their feature-length documentary A State of Passion (2024)
For almost two years, the extraordinary violence in Gaza has been broadcast live on our screens, even as those who strive to document it are being assassinated right in front of our eyes. Yet, the witnessing, documenting, archiving and narrating of the genocide of Palestinians continues, more and more from unlikely sources. Some of the most rigorous accounts of what is happening on the ground are coming from doctors and healthcare workers, many of whom have paid a harrowing price for speaking out.
Documentary filmmakers Carol and Muna found themselves wrought with distress as they watched the bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, and realized that it was unprecedented in its volume and genocidal goal. When they heard that their old friend Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah was getting on a plane to Gaza, they asked if they could start documenting his trip through images, Whatsapp texts and voice messages. They asked him to stay in touch in whatever way he could.
Trained as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Abu-Sittah has been moonlighting as a trauma surgeon for several years, and has made trips to Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq and his native Palestine over the last two decades. But his sixth trip to Gaza was different. Dr. Abu-Sittah convened a macabre press briefing after Israel bombed Al-Ahli Baptist hospital in October last year. Dr. Abu-Sittah stood at a podium amidst a pile of dead bodies, distressed colleagues staring blankly, a man seated by the podium holding a dead baby, clearly shell-shocked.
The scene shook the world. The hospital bombardments and the media’s gaslighting narratives about them altered something in Dr. Abu Sittah himself. He began the work of witnessing and narrating in earnest, sending urgent missives about what was happening on the ground through social media. Eventually, he decided that his medical expertise was not as helpful with hospital infrastructure destroyed and no medical supplies being allowed in. After 43 days, he returned to London and decided it was time to pick up the microphone and take a public stance about what he witnessed.
“I cannot unsee what I saw,” he told Carol and Muna.
A State of Passion, however, is not the story of one man but the story of Gaza, the filmmakers insist. We get loving glimpses into the doctor’s family, his eloquent and fiercely revolutionary wife Deema, who is from Gaza, and his two young boys who are proud both of their father, and to be Palestinian. Deema, in particular, speaks about her childhood and youth in Gaza and her desire for their two boys to also become intimate with their heritage. The documentary weaves in footage of the Abu-Sittahs trip to Gaza in September 2023. These sweet family videos now seem bittersweet and wrenching since Deema’s family home is destroyed and she is agonized about her aging father who remains adamant about not leaving Gaza even as the bombardment escalates.
In this interview, the filmmakers speak about how the documentary evolved, the tough decisions about structures, timelines, and tone as well as the deteriorating situation in Gaza where the healthcare community and hospital infrastructure is being deliberately targeted.
It’s title, A State of Passion, comes from a poem by Muzaffar al-Nawab, composed after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982. M. Lynx Qualey of ArabLit agreed to translate the following excerpt from the poem.
At night, sneak in.
There is an occupying soldier:
Strangle him with this sock.
Perhaps you will heal one thousandth of the hatred in your heart.
This sock is a knife.
A martyr's shoe is a knife.
His shaving brush is a knife.
A state of passion (حالة عشق) that will never come again, O servant of God, O Palestine.
Indeed, everyone from the Abu-Sittah family to the filmmakers themselves speak about a heightened state of passion -- for Palestine, for justice, for freedom. Since the release, the duo has been traveling everywhere to screen the film and speak about the continuing genocide in Palestine. They hope that their documentary can become a tool to raise awareness about what is going on in Gaza, and educate viewers about the long history of occupation and violence in Palestine. Carol and Muna urge us all to arrange screenings for the documentary at your workplace or institution. You can use this contact form here. I would also urge you to donate to The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund dedicated to critically injured children of Palestine and Lebanon.
Reading Palestine book club meets on Sunday, May 4th
We will gather online to discuss Mohammed El-Kurd’s provocative account of what it means to be Palestinian today. Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal subverts all our good intentions by cutting through the deeply problematic ways in which the relentless humanization of Palestinians has become an anathema, yes the humanization. This default discourse of humanizing Palestinians locks them into the ontology of noble victimhood robbing them of all agency and complexity. Such processes valorize only the most educated and the most eloquent Palestinians who are then given a platform but under the tacit condition that they do not any express anger, or grief, or even dare to hate those who might have murdered their own family members.
So where do we go from here? How can we engage with the struggle for Palestinian resistance without falling into these traps? Let’s all talk about it on Sunday. It’s not too late to join. Sign up here.
Love and solidarity❤️🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure