I refuse silence.

In honour of Aaron Bushnell and all people who refuse to be silent and complicit (trigger warning: contains strong language, mentions of violence and self-immolation.)

This week, on a normal day seemingly no different than any other day, I saw daffodils for the first time this year. Some of them just emerging, ready to burst through their leafy green cover; the others already in full bloom, a beautiful splash of vibrant yellow against the still dull looking ground. Here on the northern coast, the wintry weather is still relentless, with nights often hovering at 0 °C. The daylight hours are gloomy, filled with more dark clouds than sunshine, and it's guaranteed you will get soaked the moment you try to take a walk. This season is always predictable in its unpredictability. The day my toddlers were finally over their perpetual coughs, sinus infections and sore throats, we took advantage of the rare dry hours and found the first daffodils. My elder zoomed around on his bike and I shook my head in disbelief at his size, speed and confidence. Sometimes it feels like he was that little baby with a flat head and a bad tongue tie just months ago. For my younger, who finally decided to start walking at the beginning of the year, this was the first time he was willing to stroll around instead of holding onto me, scared of the unfamiliar and unsure of the stability of his own legs. His first big day out. I found some joyful calm in observing how he explored different textures under his little feet — grass of different lengths, pebbles, concrete paths, shallow puddles, an old patch of sodden brown leaves in the corner.

Photo by Toby Schumacher on Unsplash

It was a freezing cold day like any other in late February. Everything about that day felt normal, except it didn't.

Things are not normal.

For the last few months, I have a morning ritual of waking up before my children so that I can, with a lump of dread sitting in my throat, open Instagram and check the latest photos and stories from as many Gazan journalists as possible, hoping that they've all survived the night. Every day, there is at least one who hasn't. The death toll now sits at around 150, an unprecedented number, a number that my mind desperately wants to be wrong. I do this before my children wake up so that I can try and dry my tears before they wake up; so I can try to preserve some sense of normality for children too young to understand the world. I keep repeating to myself: none of this is normal. Don't you ever normalise this. Don't you ever accept this is a normal part of your day. Don’t you ever let anyone tell you it is normal to have children's bodies reduced to ribbons of flesh hanging off a wall that was once a home. A day will come when my children will be old enough to understand and ask questions. At this moment I'm not quite sure how will I explain this destruction to young souls that know nothing of destruction. To explain it I might need to explain what is the meaning of normal first — and I’m not sure what is the definition of normal myself. I know what was sold to us as normal growing up, as a teenager in the post 9/11 world, a world of unbridled capitalism that sees a human life as good for nothing but sacrificing at the altar of money, a world where absolutely everything is transactional and conditional. I know this much — that normal is not normal.

In this alleged normal the powers that be are trying to sell us, I wake up every day to several hateful messages or comments on social media. In this alleged normal, a mother of two small toddlers gets hate for saying that I care about children who aren’t mine, who live thousands of miles away and whose death is unacceptable no matter what justification someone tries to provide. Know your place! Mind your own business! Fucking Ireland with their lack of understanding of politics, these messages tell me — the ones that resemble some sort of civility. The ones that don't tell me that I should be raped and beheaded, the two things we all know Zionists are obsessed with. In this alleged normal we've been fed for decades, it's controversial to say that such a thing as a justification for murdering children in their thousands doesn't exist. No justification; a simple matter of morals, says my mind, assuring me this thought is that of a normal human being. They are all born terrorists! No such thing as an innocent person in Gaza, says the violent voice in a message on Instagram, and I shrug my shoulders in horror, trying to process just what is normal in this person's head?

Curious thing, social media. I've always been a very reluctant participant in it, and as the years pass, I'm steadily reducing my time on it. I need it for my small business (thank you, oh thank you, gods of capitalism) which I neglected long before October ‘23, partly because of two maternity leaves, and partly because social media is simply a cesspit of entitlement and inhumanity that drained the life out of me. So much can be said about social media if you're a business; about strategy, reach, engagement, but I won't tell you anything of such things that left my dictionary a long time ago. I will tell you one thing — if you’re a (small) business on social media, people who “follow” you will act as if they own you. They will erase you, the person behind the small business, and drown your voice in the sea of consumerism and entitlement. Inactive as I was, before I came back to Instagram in October ‘23 to post about Palestine, my last post was made on Christmas ‘22. I can imagine some of my “followers” were surprised by what they saw in their feed after they haven't seen anything from me in almost a year; a blood stained placard calling out  Israeli apartheid and genocide that I was holding at our first march in Belfast. What I can't imagine is that there are people out there whose thought process isn’t “Ah! Would you look at this, this small business I've been following for years isn’t some faceless money-grabbing corporation, but a real person with real values. She puts her humanity before business”, instead it's “I'm here for the art. I don't want to see anything else from you. YOU bow to what I tell you to do. The world is about ME!” I don't think I had many Zionists among my followers, but I had a surprisingly big number of followers who felt a need to tell me they live in their bubble and Gaza doesn’t concern them, then mock me for caring. I can’t process what’s in their minds, it feels repulsive, yet these people are here. I have no idea who hides among the thousands of profiles that follow me. All I know is these unknown people act as if they own me, as if I owe them; their minds unable to comprehend that my only duty is to humanity. My duty is to humanity whether I speak personally or as a small business and I frankly dont't care whether you agree with it or not; the moment you followed me didn’t give you some magical veto card that you can flash around to make me do your bidding. If you suffer from such a notion that everyone owes you what you want, you might have been exposed to too many atrocities committed thanks to the butchers from the US vetoing the humanity. The problem is you. Sit back and shut up.

The thing is, my follower, no, nothing is about you. Not in the slightest. There was such a time when starting a small business felt like freedom; a break from the system, or at least an attempt to feed the system a bit less. There was such a time when as an artist I put art first and invested my entire being into my art. And then the reality of living under the boot of capitalism hit. Soon enough I wasn't making one-off art for the soul anymore, I was fulfilling order after order after order, coming from customers who lost any regard for handmade and gained a huge appetite for an Amazon-like shopping experience.  The thing is, I refused to be a cog in that machinery. I refuse to dedicate my life to what capitalism is dictating me to do. I still refuse it and I will keep refusing it at the risk of spending my life as the proverbial broke artist. Being broke with morals beats being well-off without morals any day. I grieve the years when I actually felt that social media mattered and I was afraid of losing followers. It seems pathetic and trivial now. So let me tell you, random person who finds speaking up for humanity offensive: you are, in fact, in my territory. My space is completely and entirely about what matters to me — and me comes with everything that makes me me, in no particuar order. The art in all its forms. The socialist Irish Republican who believes in a liberated, decolonised 32 county republic. The silly, forgetful human who likes to explore her spirituality. The mother with a birth trauma that broke her mind. The wife of a particularly wonderful man. The adult who only discovered her autism and ADHD in her 30s. The concerned citizen of this planet who brainstorms how to lower her environmental impact for the sake of others every single day. The writer and journalist who returned to writing after a 10 years break. And yes — the person who decided that me doesn't exist outside of the community, the world, the humanity. The brilliant Anti-Zionist Jewish activist Katherine W Bogen put it in words beautifully today, saying that “as an architect of my community, I am responsible for showing up with care, compassion, and authenticity.”

Yet here we are; you’ve given yourself the right to tell me where my place is. I didn't even know you were a writer, I followed you for the art, you say, and I say — I don't give a fuck why you're here. You expect me to stay silent about our world being shred to pieces, you expect me not to put my platform to good use, you expect me to appease your own silent inability to process discomfort. Every now and then, curiosity kills the cat and I click on your profile when I see your embarrassing comment. You’re a white American, self-branded Buddhist telling me I post about Palestine because of my ego. You're a white English woman who imagined she's fighting modernity through freebirthing and anti-feminism. You're the person who thinks I owe you — needless to say, you’ve actually never left a penny with my business (not that I’d owe you anything even if spent thousands with me). The entitlement, the silence, the colonial comfort you live in are your normal. So be it — I can't control what your priorities in life are. I'm also not holding a gun to your head and you're free and welcome to unfollow at any time. Announcing your departure and proudly proclaiming that you don't care about other people isn’t the flex you think it is, it doesn't provoke the reaction you think it does. It provokes pity for you and more resolution in me. As Katherine again succinctly said, “the people doing nothing always have plenty to say about the people doing something.”

What I can control is my own response and my own priorities. I refuse to accept that it's normal to boast how mass murders don't concern you if they don't happen in your backyard. I embrace that my normal is to care about every child in Palestine, Congo and beyond as if they were my own, playing in the garden next to me here in Ireland. I embrace that my normal is to wish for a child in Gaza what I wish for my own child. And I wish the same to you — may you get what you wish for a child in Gaza. If it's nothing, because a child in Gaza doesn't even exist in your mind, may the same silence and indifference befall you when, in a couple of years, your child grows up and comes to you screaming, “How the fuck have you ever thought that you could build a world for me without building a world for every child?!” I refuse silence. I refuse to be intimidated or ridiculed into silence, as if silence is some sort of virtue to be proud of.

⁎ ⁎ ⁎

The day I saw the daffodils for the first time this year, the day that for a few moments looked as normal as it gets, was the day I saw a young man, an active duty member of the US Air Force, performing a self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. His name was Aaron Bushnell and he was only 25. I decided to witness, to see and to hear, and I will never forget his last words. Engulfed in flames, Aaron screamed Free Palestine! until his body wasn't capable of producing words anymore. Right now, what little the genocide-complicit media is reporting revolves around him being mentally ill. The social media quickly joined in to proclaim he was not normal — according to the made-up, self-serving colonialist norm of normalcy that sanctions genocide, land theft and a complete disregard for life. This allegedly mentally ill young man was of a completely sound mind according to his family, his friends spoke of his commitment to help the homeless and better the world, he prepared a will before his death in which he left his cat to his neighbour and his savings to a Palestinian children's relief fund. These are not the actions of a person that is not normal. To set yourself on fire, with full understanding of what you're committing to, in order to bring awareness to a cause is the most drastic form of response to a world that is not normal. As the famous quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti says, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society; what is monstrous is the dehumanising idea that mental dis-ease necessarily implies that a person has lost their agency and rationality. It is yet another tactic of the system designed to silence you — the people who tailored the norm will tell you something is wrong with you if you diverge from being but a tiny stitch in their needlework. Nothing is wrong with you. You have a normal reaction to a sick society.

Before Nhất Chi Mai performed self-immolation in Saigon, Vietnam in 1967, she wrote: “Offering my body as a torch / May it bring light to the ignorant”. When Chilean worker Eduardo Miño Pérez set himself on fire in front of the presidential palace in 2001, as an ultimate protest against government’s mistreatment of hundreds of people who suffered from asbestosis, he concluded his letter with the words: “My soul, which overflows with humanity, no longer supports such injustice.” African American activist Huey P Newton said: “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death.”

A US soldier, an insider at the very heart of the empire, committing such an ultimate sacrifice is an unprecedented act of damage to the very core of American and Israeli imperialism. That imperialism showed his ugly face once again in what was probably the most quintessentially American thing we have ever witnessed — while Aaron was on the ground, on fire, already unable to shout or scream, they surrounded him with pointed guns. The people who want you to believe that Aaron was mentally ill have known nothing but colonial selfishness in their life, yet they have the audacity to lecture you on selflessness. These are the people who tell you that selflessly dying for a cause is illness, while collective punishment and ethnic cleansing are normal.

Aaron Bushnell didn’t set himself on fire because he was mentally ill, but because he was moral and completely outraged with the immorality of the system. Not because he wasn't normal, but because, in his own words, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal”. His last words were those of a perfectly sane man, easily saner than most people I've encountered in my lifetime. May his sacrifice be remembered, together with the sacrifice of the unnamed woman who self-immolated at the Israeli embassy in Atlanta in December, the sacrifice of Rachel Corrie who was bulldozed to death protecting the Palestinians with her body, and all others who decided to stand up in the belly of the beast where they were born and raised. They rejected silence. May they be honoured by dismantling all systems of oppression and choosing love as our normal.

Aaron Bushnell's last words. Shared from Palestinian Youth Movement.

I choose to witness.

I choose to listen.

I choose to learn in discomfort.

I choose to speak up.

I choose to use my platform.

I choose not to bow to colonial comfort.

I choose love and liberation as the default.

I choose commitment to humanity.

I choose allegiance to life.

I don't know if my actions will be fruitful and I can't predict the future — but choosing community above myself means I'm committing to keep trying and keep going. I will not accept silence. I will not be coerced into silence by people who openly gloat about not caring for other people. I will not give up my soul in order to bring some blood-soaked money into my small business. Business opportunities are many, but you have only one soul.

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” Angela Davis