No Order to this Order
“In conversations on fossil fuels or the mitigation work program, my mind could not grasp how any of this could be implemented … How could they claim they care about any of our lives, our futures, and the present if they could not say no to indiscriminate killing?” (Photo courtesy of Hania Imran).
20-year-old climate activist, Hania Imran, reflects through a poem, about her disillusionment while attending COP28 during the bombardment of Gaza at the end of 2023.
As I scanned my card to enter the COP28 venue, there was a sudden barrage of chatter, of black and white suits, of people speeding from one conference hall to another. Held in Dubai, UAE, this was my second time attending the Conference of The Parties. The biggest annual climate change conference already had an aura of disappointment. The 28th time this has been held — trying to solve, mitigate, and adapt to a global crisis that becomes more global and more catastrophic each year. But occupying my mind were the estimated 15,000 Palestinians who had been killed at that time.
These are how the two weeks went by.
I would remember to wear my keffiyeh and sit through meeting after meeting imagining the father who held his children's body parts in two plastic bags. In conversations on fossil fuels or the mitigation work program, my mind could not grasp how any of this could be implemented. How can implementation occur when our leaders are living through a genocide in real-time and supporting it wholeheartedly? How could they claim they care about any of our lives, our futures, and the present if they could not say no to indiscriminate killing?
At COP, one of the main protests was held near the Israel and United States pavilion, most people you hugged had red eyes from crying.
As I sat through one panel to the next and listened in on negotiations, it felt as if the conference that had started as a way to solve arguably the biggest crisis that humanity had encountered, had lost all humanity itself. To survive, I tried shutting my emotions off. I did not want to bawl my eyes out for the camera lens of a biased media.
The same media refused to acknowledge the scale and truth of the injustice that was occurring. Instead, I found solace in the Mosque, where I could shed silent tears and pray to Allah to help the Palestinian people. To help all of us.
“Fellow activists who spoke truth to power, who broke the United Nations rule of not saying a country’s name during a protest, or who disappointed their government by asking too many questions, would get de-badged, or kicked out of the conference. In these people, I found hope.”
The conference hall was detached from the reality of those living on the frontlines of the climate crisis. A lot of the workers in Dubai hail from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. They are treated as modern-day slaves, and the workers there all looked like my brown friends and family members. While music played at the end of the day in the conference hall, this world was a utopia. It all came crashing down when a person talked to the taxi drivers, the hotel workers, the sweepers and cleaners.
This world was a fragile order, one that was unraveling slowly but surely in front of my eyes. Being oblivious to it requires hard work.
“People cried, people clapped, a final protest was held. Where exactly our collective humanities had succeeded that day is still not clear to me.“ (Credit: Pamela EA).
Fellow activists who spoke truth to power, who broke the United Nations rule of not saying a country’s name during a protest, or who disappointed their government by asking too many questions, would get de-badged, or kicked out of the conference. In these people, I found hope. In them, the revolution was churning.
On December 14th, as I left the conference hall, the death toll stood at 18,000 Palestinians. The gavel declared the conference a success as a “transition away from fossil fuels” was included in the final text. Each time I heard the gavel come down, I heard of a bomb dropping on Gaza’s innocents. People cried, people clapped, a final protest was held. Where exactly our collective humanities had succeeded that day is still not clear to me.
There is no order to this order,
No gavel that sounds like bombs that drop in Falesteen, like the one at the Conference of Parties
No workers like the brown ones that look like my father,
No workers like the ones that speak my language and I speak in their colonizers tongue, to
depict a crisis into words
To depict a crisis into words for the shiny boots of dictators,
Who stamp all around me, walk all over me, my anger, my helplessness, pushed back by their
security,
Like they might see me in the reflection of their spit,
Like they might see my people in the dirt they leave behind as they speed away,
On the shiny floors for the workers to clean,
To clean this life away
There is no end to the grief I share with the silence of catastrophe,
And catastrophe only becomes one with me in the Catastrophe of the Parties
In the de-badged, threatened souls of the brave, is where I find revolution in the form of floods
One that will not displace the people
Revolution that will displace their millions in dollars
In the dry throat from chanting, I have chanted my life away,
As they bring down the gavel, they sell my life away,
As I wipe my tears, and the bombs drop not so far away,
As I say a prayer, a prayer more binding than whatever text they make,
I am free, free from their world of disgrace
Ceasefire, but they do not know that fire cannot be put out by text on paper thrown in,
The fire will rage louder every passing day,
White supremacy, phaseout, unabated, imperialism, militarism, colonization, these words I have
learned in the depths of my despair,
These words I have learned to breathe through for clean air,
Say, what have you lost that I haven’t lost today?
As they bring down the gavel, they smile for pictures in history books
As the cameras click click away, they smile, they sell my life away
Read more
