Global Dialogues

In an attempt to think about, if not the nature of cruelty, then its aftermath—our attempts to comprehend, endure, and resist it—I would like to consider a picture taken by the Palestinian photographer Jehad Alshrafi. It was published in The Guardian on June 20, 2025 with the caption, “A Palestinian woman mourns over the body of her child killed in an Israeli military strike on Gaza, at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.” 

It is a scene of the aftermath of the death of a child. The mother is distraught. She has lost all ability to hold herself inwards, and her ability to hold herself in words. Everything is extended out in the hope of help. Her hands reach out, her voice reaches out, and her open mouth is screaming, but also her mouth is caught in an anguished state of recalling all the sweet utterances, all the remembered conversations and exchanges she once had with her deceased child, as well as all the future conversations, as though at this moment, she is both lamenting all that is lost and all that will be lost. She is pregnant with that future absence.

Beside her, attempting to restrain her, but also attempting to restrain himself, is, we assume, her other child, the surviving son. His face is a battleground. He is both terribly young and already an old man. The normal linear progression of the years has cracked open, and he must now live at once as a boy and man, at once alive and dead. His eyes are swollen from tears, but also from days of wandering, nights with no sleep. He has become an engine, constantly motoring away to keep grief and helplessness at bay. Yet grief and helplessness are all around him. And what we are seeing here is yet another blow to his armor. But what is heartbreaking and one of the things that is remarkable about this photograph, is the still-intact pride of this boy. He has no option but to be a man and knows—has come to know it too soon—that to be a man is to try to hold things together, to bring the extremities closer, to find balance in an unbalanced world, to be both cognizant of despair and committed to hope. 

With one hand, he is holding his mother—holding her and holding on to her—hoping to quiet her demons, to keep her steady, to keep her, as it were, to himself and for himself, the self he had been and wishes he could retrieve, when he was simply a boy, and she was the mother of that boy. Now he is the man looking after his mother. In the other hand, he is holding a phone and seems to be saying: Yes, we have finally found him. And yes, our worst fears have been confirmed. 

In the mother's right hand, she wears a ring. It’s the only piece of jewelry we can see. Given the position of the ring, the middle finger, it may well belong to someone else, perhaps to her husband, the father of the dead boy and the father of the living one, and perhaps that man was also lost, and therefore part of what she and her son are suffering from here, beside all the pain and injustice, is the secret thought that their loved ones are now reunited without them, that the capital of their life is now in the hereafter. 

The mother’s hands are doing the opposite of her son's. Her son's hands are holding the phone and holding her. They are hands that want to turn back time, to retrieve what was lost. But her hands have let go of that possibility. She has surrendered her ability to hold anything from oblivion. The boy wishes so much it wasn’t so. He has been in that state of mind for days and days. His skin is much darker than his mother’s, sun browned from wandering and searching for his brother, searching for food, searching for shelter, searching for what might be possible in this situation. 

They are outdoors and the ground is sand and rubble. Both mother and son are on their knees. From this arrangement, we assume that the dead body is on the ground in front of them, out of view. In front of them also, with their backs to us, are two men—one young, one middle-aged—trying to calm and reassure them, to console them. There's another man that stands to one side. His fist is half clenched in a gesture of tormented helplessness. It is, in other words, our hand too. Then there are two other hands, boyish hands, one on each side of the frame: one holding on to a pipe, but remaining open, in an image of inquisitive reluctance; and the other hand is clinching on to the saddle of a bicycle. That bicycle seems important. Perhaps it is the bicycle of the dead boy. Or maybe it is the bicycle of his older brother, who now will never again be able to take his younger sibling racing down the road.

Hisham Matar, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, explores themes of exile, identity, and belonging.