When your phone drips blood?!

As I struggled to finish watching a clip documenting the moment an elderly man was slaughtered in a remote village, his pure white robe stained with blood pouring from his body, beneath the edge of a knife that ran across his neck. A floral women’s dress was draped over the fountainhead exploding from his neck, and part of the garment was covering the side of his chest, as he raised his voice, reciting the Shahada to his Lord in the final seconds of his life. At that moment, I imagined that his blood was also dripping from my phone, to the point that I felt it on my hand.

This rather peculiar state of affairs brought me back to the question posed by the poet Mahmoud Darwish in a similarly bewildered manner:

“Can you be normal in an abnormal reality?”

Indeed, I won’t tell these berserk soldiers who document and broadcast such clips, “Please don’t point your phone cameras at our most shameful parts every day in such a crude and malicious manner.”

However, I will take the opportunity to tell you: Let your phones rest well, while the monster that is now growing steadily inside each of us is quenched with our blood.

This blood of ours, which has become the cheapest blood on the stock market today.

Imagine, like myself, that your phones could drip blood, running between your fingers, staining your hands, far removed from reality.

The solution, in my opinion, is to stop consuming such graphic images, which ultimately serves to justify, normalize, and spread the obscenity of this type of horrific killing amongst us.

At the very least, so as we don’t kill what remains of our chivalry and honor by our own hands or by the hands of others.

Consequently, we shouldn’t pollute our brains and phone storage with more sounds of groaning and images that will gradually strip us of our humanity as we normalize such killing over time, growing indifferent, as this war drags on, with no end in sight.

However, the truth remains, those who cut off people’s “throats” in such a manner, have begun to spoil our enjoyment and zest for life, based on our false, once-naive notions of what it means to be human, or at least to be Sudanese.

This necessitates that we -now- take down a number of images we used to hang on the wall of our memories to deceive ourselves or for the purpose of boasting.

Surely, there are so many bubbles we created with our own hands, then believed them to be real.

The Sudanese have excelled to a great extent at creating such significant bubbles.

We have managed to deceive ourselves and sold to others enormous illusions about ourselves, which we, unfortunately, ultimately believed, until what happened here, happened.