In this op-ed NYU professor, poet, and essayist Hala Alyan writes about her experience as a Palestinian-American, the danger of false narratives, and the importance of empathy when considering people’s lived-stories.
In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger introduced the concept of “cognitive dissonance” to the field of social psychology. It refers to the discomfort of holding “two conflicting thoughts in your mind at the same time.” We often seek ways to relieve this discomfort. This might mean engaging in rationalization, dismissing incompatible information, or selectively exposing ourselves to certain stories, television outlets, and the like; or confronting the contradiction more directly, through changing our behavior to match our beliefs, or sitting with new information.
The recent death toll in Gaza has reached 18,000, including at least 7,700 children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. All must be mourned: the adults, the infants, the animals, the universities, the parks, homes, places of worship. The stories are horrific and unrelenting: According to Chicago Tribune reporting, people have been bombed in “safe zones” they’d been ordered to evacuate to; infants were dying because of lack of medical equipment; fathers have gathered their children in body bags; and there has been a collapse of an entire healthcare system. As the bombardment has resumed — despite a UN General Assembly vote overwhelmingly in favor of an immediate ceasefire, countering the recent US veto — what lies ahead is its own brand of horror. Every morning I wake to a despair as gut-punching as it is automatic.
At the heart of this despair is helplessness, and at the heart of that, an even simpler desire: to urge people to witness a new narrative — that counters the dehumanization of Palestinians, that shows them as worthy of equality, self-determination, and freedom from occupation, besiegement, and collective punishment: rights that all people deserve.
Narratives help inform us about who is to be trusted, who is to be feared, who is against us. Narratives help us cohere. They permit us to make sense of chaos, to create logic in the face of an otherwise untethered world. They help us uphold dehumanization; they help us dismantle it.
My narrative of Palestine was built in diaspora. It was built on the idea of a place that we belonged to, a place that belonged to us, regardless of whether we ever stepped foot there. It was built on the narratives of patience, of endurance, narratives of a people abandoned by other people. It was built on the understanding that it was a charged identity, one that I sometimes had to mask or discuss carefully, one that could invoke anger by its very name. Perhaps because of this, I understood from a young age a related narrative: how I carried myself in the world wouldn’t just reflect on me, it would reflect on this tattered, mighty identity.
This of course isn’t unique to Palestinian-ness; it is true of many marginalized groups: the way I spoke at interviews, on dates, in meetings, mattered and mattered significantly. Every stranger was a potential ally or contrarian. Every stranger might be someone who, someday, somehow, might bear witness, and might not look away. My very self—my ambitions, my values, my talents, my pleasantness or stridency—was a potential campaign or obstacle for empathy, for helping seed a new narrative.
Narratives help us understand our place in the world. They help us decide what we will stand for, what we will stand against. But when we are exposed to indoctrination or propaganda, our perception of the world, our understanding of order and fairness and retribution, is curated for us as something static and predetermined. It ceases to function as a vibrant, dynamic phenomenon changing shape and tenor as it interacts with other people, stories, and perspectives.
The most effective cultural indoctrinations start early, both in terms of what people are exposed to and what they are shielded from. Those who begin in childhood are particularly resistant to change. This is why discourse and legislation around classroom freedom and curriculum-building, including Critical Race Theory, is so important: to get a sense of how a culture feels about other people, about who is valued and who is erased, take a look at their elementary school books.
Throughout my youth, I was often exposed to narratives that equated Zionism with Judaism. For me, this became enormously confusing. From childhood, I understood the government that displaced my grandparents, my father, to be a terrifying, militarized entity, a powerful, unrelenting thing. It was to be feared.
Meanwhile, I intuitively understood the harrowing narrative of the Jewish struggle. I wept over novels and films, and wrote essays about the lone survivors of entire family lines. I understood Jewish resilience to be a thing of softness and endurance, filled with music and art and philosophy that withstood, which made me ask better questions of myself, of liberation, of the world.
It took years to understand the mismatch between these narratives, to see how they’d been mobilized by certain groups, to searchingly consider the history that led to the Balfour Declaration, to 1948 (when the state of Israel was founded), to understand the role of colonial powers, to see how the Jewish struggle was woven into Zionism inextricably for some, and not at all for others.
It was art, frankly, that helped me untangle these stories.
The concept of power is inextricable from stories we’re told. This has been true throughout history. Narrative distortions have been at times structural and by design. The more powerful a narrative, the higher the stakes of its preservation, and the more consequences there can be to questioning or speaking against it. It is worth paying attention to who can tell which stories: who is entitled to which language? Who is allowed to levy criticism, with which vocabulary?
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram, as with so many things, can be either a tool or weapon. They can bloom misinformation, embed nasty algorithms, and engage in censorship, but they also provide something historical moments of oppression didn’t or couldn’t: exposure to firsthand accounts—that is to say, narratives—of human, emotional, social costs, whether or not they make it into mainstream coverage. Today, anyone with a free social media account can access Gazan journalists, and photographers are providing round-the-clock footage on the ground. There are young Gazan journalists who have nearly as many Instagram followers as CNN.
Since communities that have been dehumanized are often not considered legitimate sources of information—including on their own suffering—allies have a crucial role in shifting narratives and pointing out collective cognitive dissonances. Take note of who might be telling you to leave history alone. Often, the quickest way to cut through misinformation is to ask what you are being asked not to look at. This usually involves “peeking behind the curtain” through direct interaction with the “other.” Allies are often well-positioned to do this work, as they can model the work of disentangling from an inherited narrative.
Over the past fifty days, I’ve witnessed allies speak on this moment: Jewish solidarity groups, academic groups, celebrities risking their job prospects, social standing, and security. This has included direct action, protests, civil disobedience, but also the equally essential labor of sharing information, which helps unknot pervasive narratives and create new social discourse. In the last decade, I’ve experienced a mounting, visceral sense of solidarity among allies—namely the sharing of histories and firsthand accounts, to show the interconnectedness of various liberation movements.
In the urgency of moments like this, indeed, art is not a replacement for policy. Poems will not save us. Poems will not save Gaza. I say that as a poet. They will not stop what needs stopping, or single-handedly bring about action, policy change, Palestinian self-determination, rights, and dignity.
It is also true that poetry—and art and music and film—are offshoots of bearing witness: they fortify us, sustain us, especially in times of erasure. They help us rehearse empathy, and build the necessary muscle memory to call upon it regularly. They can also remind us what we’re doing and why, becoming useful as compasses, rest stops, places to sharpen our ideas and counter dissonance, to clarify our thinking, and our hearts, and to rest in community. They are where we unlearn stories, where we cut our tongues on new ones.
Dialectically: a story isn’t enough, and one cannot triumph in any social justice struggle without examining the stories that have been turned into gospel. This is true for any project of imperialism, occupation, or persecution: narratives get us into them. Narratives will get us out.
