on living happily during the war

The view from the living room of the apartment I share with E in Northwest Washington, D.C.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

I awoke at six o’clock yesterday morning. Like I always do.

E was still asleep in bed next to me. I showered and got dressed, trying not to wake her, then went out into the living room to get a few hours of writing done before work. I was only moderately productive.

Around nine o’clock, I closed out of the essay I was working on and opened Slack. (I work from home.) I had a few calls, sent a few emails. Around noon, I took a break from work to get lunch with E at our favorite local cafe. After lunch we parted ways, and I walked down to the lobby of a nearby hotel to get some more work done. (I like a change of scenery sometimes.)

When it was nearly five o’clock I gathered my things, stopped by the grocery store, and then came home to find E waiting for me. We ate grapes and cheese and crackers and finished Mad Men. We started a game of Scrabble (we didn’t finish, but I was losing badly). Our friends texted us, asking if they could come over, and they did. We made a salad and played another game of Scrabble. (This time we did finish, and I did lose badly.)

After our friends left, E and I got into bed and read for a while. I finished Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. Eventually, we turned out the lights and fell asleep in the same position that we always do, curled up against one another with my arm draped over E, holding her close.

It was a good day.

• • •

Yesterday was the 166th day of the genocide in Gaza.

Al-Jazeera reported that in the latest 24-hour reporting period, at least 65 people were killed and another 92 wounded by Israeli attacks, bringing the total death toll to 31,988.

The World Bank warned of an “imminent risk of famine” for half of Gaza’s population. (I wonder how the World Bank defines “famine.”)

Israel’s siege of Al-Shifa hospital entered its third day.

In the West Bank, three Palestinians were killed by an Israeli drone strike on a car in Jenin.

Once again, Netanyahu rebuffed Biden’s warnings against launching a ground invasion of Rafah.

These are, of course, just the stories that made the news.

• • •

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “We Lived Happily During the War,” published in 2019 as part of Kaminsky’s critically-acclaimed collection Deaf Republic. I came across it on Twitter recently, but I first saw it making the rounds in the weeks immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (Kaminsky is Ukrainian-American). The poem reads as follows:

We Lived Happily During the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house—

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

It’s a beautiful poem. What makes it so arresting to me, however, isn’t its technical mastery of craft or form, but rather the haunting parenthetical—(forgive us)—that Kaminsky places at the end of the poem’s penultimate line. Those two simple words, I think, capture the essence of what Kaminsky is really writing about—an acknowledgement not merely of the horrors constantly taking place at a remove from the comfort of our daily lives, but of the fact that our very ability to go about our daily lives in comfort is itself a form of complicity in those horrors. We lived happily during the war—and for that, we must beg for forgiveness. Of whom we must beg that forgiveness, whether it will be granted us, what happens if it is not—all these are questions that remain, as yet, unanswered.

• • •

There’s a strange and terrible cognitive dissonance to the feeling of going through the motions of your daily life with the knowledge that at any given moment, while you are brushing your teeth or standing in line at the grocery store or losing to your friends in Scrabble, there are people on the other side of the world being slaughtered by the thousands in a genocide that is being carried out with the endorsement of your government and the support of your tax dollars. There is something uniquely paralyzing about the sense of helplessness that arises from attending rallies and protests and marches (never enough, never as many as you wish you could), and then coming home and opening Twitter to read about another neighborhood leveled, another bloodline wiped out.

And then you close the computer, and you look around you. You look around at the life you have made for yourself, at the warm apartment from the comfort of which you passively absorb report after report of violence and death and destruction. You look at the walls, bedecked with beautiful pictures and still standing intact; the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets in which uneaten food quietly rots; the faucets out of which crystalline water can spill for hours and hours without ever running dry—these violent delights that you enjoy, in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money. Our great country of money and bullets and bombs.

You look around you at all these beautiful, terrible things, and you want to scream, for you know the price that others have paid—still pay—for you to have them. You know that it is only by a mere accident of birth that you are not the one being bombed and displaced and massacred so that others like you, on the other side of the world, may bask in these imperial comforts. You feel completely and utterly powerless, at a loss for what to do when all you even know how to do is write down your pain and horror and outrage—and yet even that feels like some sort of betrayal, an act of shameful self-involvement in the face of others’ unspeakable suffering.

Haunted by this terrible awareness, you look around and find yourself suddenly overcome by the desire to perform some extreme and desperate act of penance. You want to tear the pictures from the walls, the rotting food from the kitchen shelves, the very clothes from your back, and cast these things onto a sacrificial pyre before running naked into the street, screaming your contrition and begging for forgiveness.

But of course, you don’t do any of this, because none of it matters, not really. You can self-flagellate all you want, renounce every last material possession you have, disappear into the mountains to live in a cave somewhere and survive on foraged berries and squirrels that you hunt with a sharpened stick, and none of it will make an ounce of difference. The bombs will continue to fly; the bodies will continue to pile up; the blood-soaked dollars will continue to flow like a poisoned river across mountains and borders and oceans and back into your great country of money. The men and women with tiny flags pinned to the lapels of their thousand-dollar suits, gathered like a wake of vultures under that gleaming capitol dome, will continue to smile and shake hands and congratulate themselves on a job well done as they set aside their petty partisan squabbles and come together to send another blank check, another fleet of missiles and drones and bombs, to the architects of a genocide halfway across the globe.

And you will continue to live happily during the war.

• • •

I (forgive me) awoke at six o’clock this morning. Like I always do.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox: