Wrong Place, Wrong Time
When history is rewritten, who decides what is remembered?
At some point or another, we were all told that everything in life happens for a reason. It’s the phrase we cling to when nothing seems to make sense, and for many of us, a truth that ends up being reinforced in the calm spaces between trials. For those of us who were raised religious, we are told that this is the will of God, from which nothing can escape. Our lives are predetermined, and the divine decree unfolds in a way we may not always understand.
This belief brings along with it a deep, unshakable comfort. It anchors us when the world feels uncertain. Everything we experience fits perfectly into a larger plan, a necessary piece of a perfect, intricate design. Perhaps, we are not the architects of our fate, instead, we are guided by a wisdom that sees the whole picture, while we can only catch glimpses.
There are moments when life feels like a betrayal of this belief.
Cruelty so sharp, injustice so vast– some things carry such weight that I can feel them pressing down on me as I try to reconcile it with divine will. Such brutal wrongs feel so out of place, so wrong, as if somehow we’ve stumbled into a story we were never supposed to witness– similar to the unease of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For some people, "wrong place, wrong time" is a verdict, enforced not by the divine, but by the deliberate machinations of cruel men. Time conspires against them, for it is not just the present that is denied, but history itself is rewritten, erasing their past, their memory, their very presence.
Pro-Palestine protest at Front and Bay Street in Toronto. (Vyusti Shroff // The Underground)
There is brutal irony, to be born in a land that cradles your entire lineage, only to be told that your existence is an inconvenience. That your home, your family, and your history, is an obstacle to someone else's vision of the world. It is evident to me now that men are capable of tearing apart the natural order, and violating so grotesquely, the covenant between humans and the earth.
And so, Palestinians are made to wander. Not by choice, but by necessity. Displaced across refugee camps, in exile, in the spaces between a foreign ideology that screams “you do not belong here!”. But where, then? Where do they belong, if not in the land where their ancestors tilled the earth, where their children are born under skies heavy with the weight of centuries?
I want to believe that there is a divine plan, that this suffering, too, is part of a larger fight for freedom. And yet, as I witness the rubble of homes that once held livelihoods, I can't help but wonder how this could have ever been part of the plan.
Perhaps it is not a question of wrong place, wrong time. Perhaps it is the way our species has constructed the world itself that is wrong. In a world where borders and fences dictate the worth of a life, where history bends to the will of the powerful, and they can shamelessly try to erase truths they deem inconvenient. A world where a race of people are subjected to the highest form of inter-generational suffering, not for any wrongdoings of their own.
Inspired art by: Hannah Arabella Gabling // The Underground
This is the bitter truth: injustice doesn’t always answer to divine will. Sometimes, it thrives because men take their God given free will to choose themselves and it is men, driven by greed and power, who decide that certain elements of God’s creation do not belong.
But the land remembers. The trees, the stones, the soil, they remember. They remember the names of those who once roamed, the hands that planted the olive groves, the footprints that dug indents into the earth long before stone walls and barbed wire redrew the lines. In that memory, there is a resistance. A refusal to be forgotten. A testament to the fact that even when the world is wrong, they are still exactly where they are meant to be.
No matter what happens, the land knows better; it whispers, “you are home”.
