"Once again, Egyptians are scrawling their names on their arms in a simple effort to avoid being reduced to a number in a morgue, or worse still consigned to the ranks of the uncounted. Amid footage of besieged mosques, robocop machine-gun fire and the dreadful, desperate sight of people throwing themselves off bridges to escape a maze of bullets, it’s that little detail — the writing on the arms — that always chills me the most. Like efforts by volunteers to collect and catalogue the belongings of the dead, some of whom risked their lives to retrieve plastic bags stuffed with scraps of non-life as army bulldozers closed in, writing a name on an arm feels like the most basic affirmation of presence in the face of a state committed to inflicting absence by the bucket load: Absence of heartbeats, absence of humanity, absence of anything but a narrative in which everything is black and white and people are units to be slotted into predrawn political templates. Writing a name on an arm says, devastatingly, "No — I was here too."
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 18:23:08 +0000
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