I am coward. I make excuses, lots and lots of it, to not write about Christchurch, New Zealand.
I tell myself I am not an activist poet.
I pretend to be fragile and avoid looking at any haunting pictures/videos of the attack as they might evoke emotional inspiration and angst in me which might make my fingers crawl towards the laptop and distract me from my daily errands, preventing me from carrying on with my daily, mundane life.
All along, I was looking at this from a creative perspective. I did not have anything new to add. People were already sharing posts about how the last words of a victim to his killer were “Hello Brother” or how the media is brushing this off as another ‘mental illness’ case or how these lives were not worthy enough for a profile picture filter change. I did not have anything unique to write about.
What I failed to recognize is that events like these do not need your refined writeups. All it expects from you is to keep your artist’s instinct aside and jump the bandwagon. To join the voice. To make some noise. Even if it seems redundant. Even if it seems unnecessary. Even if it seems unimpactful.
I know what Friday prayers in foreign countries are like. I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. You contain your excitement of the approaching weekend and escape the Fitnah of the outside world to find refuge inside the walls of the Masjid where you find some peace and calm. For someone to invade that in such a brutal fashion is not OK. Its not justified. And something has to be said about it. Even it that something has already been said by someone, it doesn’t really matter.
In a protest, people gather and repeat the same chants over and over again. Nobody cares about bringing something ‘new’ to the table. A unique voice is not a prerequisite for change.
Perfectly structured verses with pristine rhyming patters and emotional narratives with subtle metaphors is not what’s needed for Revolutions to happen. What’s needed is, some Noise.
To Allah we belong, and to Him we return.
