etched: Between Chalk Suns and the Camera Lens

Act I: Witness

Dr. Ezzideen Sheehan¹

“They gave out a hundred shekels today.
Imagine that: twenty-five dollars is handed out like bones thrown to starving dogs.

I saw it.
I saw them—the doctors, the nurses, the radiologists, people who once stood tall, who once wore their suffering with quiet pride, who worked through the entire war without pay, through the blood and the smoke and the endless nights—lining up, heads bowed, hands outstretched like beggars in the street.

And it was filmed².
Of course, it was filmed.
What use is charity without humiliation?
What use is a crumb without the spectacle of groveling?

I watched, and a sickness took hold of me, a loathing so deep it crawled under my skin and sat there, rotting.

I called a friend, a nurse. “How could you allow yourselves to be filmed like that?” I demanded.

He answered without anger, without shame even—that is what broke me—he said, “You didn’t see the rest. You didn’t see the ones who didn’t get anything. They chased him. They begged.”

God, they begged.

I sat there, my throat closing, the phone heavy in my hand. Three months without salaries. Endless nights under bombs. And now, now they chase a stranger with a camera for the dignity of a few coins.

Dignity? No, not even that. The last rags of human pride, torn away in the dust.

Picture it: a physician, a man who once commanded life and death, reduced to running after a man he does not know, for a handout he does not deserve to need.

This is what is left of us. This is what remains.

Gaza is the only place where war has humiliated everyone—doctors, nurses, children, and mothers all dragged down into the same pit.

We are not only defeated. We are made grotesque, monstrous, pitiful even to ourselves.

Those in far-off places, with full bellies and clean hands, they talk of peace, they talk of aid, they talk and they talk while here, here, the soul itself is being crushed into the earth.

I want to tear my skin off.
I want to howl.
I want to gouge out the eyes of those who watch and do nothing.
But instead, I sit here, alone in the dark, writing words no one will read, feeling everything rot inside me.

We are not men anymore.
We are something else.
Something that crawls, that begs, that forgets what it once meant to walk upright.”

---

Interlude: On the Currency of Suffering

Aid, we are told, is kindness.
But in the machinery of empire, it becomes a spectacle—
a performance designed not to heal, but to humble.

What we witnessed in Gaza—doctors filmed as they line up for pennies, hands outstretched under the camera’s eye—is not relief. It is ritualized degradation. And it is far from new.

Aid under settler-colonialism is rarely about meeting need. It is about asserting control. It tells the world: We are good. We are giving. It tells the recipients: You are weak. You are dependent. You are lucky we noticed.

This is performative aid—assistance entangled with coercion, framed by the gaze of the benefactor, contingent on compliance and silence. To receive it, one must behave. One must look the part. One must let their suffering be seen—but only in the way power permits. Not raw. Not angry. Not demanding. Just grateful.

Under this model, help is never just help.
It is a transaction.
The price is dignity.

And the world consumes these images—of Gaza’s physicians begging, of Black mothers at food banks, of refugees clutching packages dropped from drones—without shame. Because in a world shaped by empire, the suffering of others becomes the evidence of our own virtue.

There is no justice in that. Only hierarchy dressed up as compassion.

---

Act II: My Body Was the Receipt

When I left [him], I carried nothing but five small bodies clinging to me and a silence so loud it rang in my bones.

No furniture.
No photos.
No past worth salvaging.

Only the clothes on our backs, and the bruises stitched into memory.

He found new ways to reach us even after we were gone.
Not hands holding down this time. Not broken doors or splintered promises.
This time, he weaponized absence.

Child support dangled like a knife over our heads—
Sign these papers. Surrender. Bow.
I refused.

For a while, my pride kept the walls standing.
For a while, my pride tasted sweeter than hunger.

But pride does not keep children warm when the electricity is shut off.
Pride does not pay rent when eviction notices bloom on the door like death warrants.
Pride does not fill the hollowness growing inside five tiny bellies at night.

[his] Family had always said the Mormon Church was a refuge, a place for the faithful and the fallen alike. I wasn’t Mormon, but I'd heard the stories—how they helped, how they loved. I clung to that myth like a drowning woman clings to driftwood.

When I sat across from the bishop, my heart hammering in my chest, shame curling around my ribs, he spoke with the softness of a practiced shepherd. He said they would help.

The bishop smiled with the warmth of someone who thinks he’s merciful.
He said the Relief Society President would help.
He said it like a blessing, like a gift.
I clutched the hope like a cracked cup, leaking but still mine.

She chose a park for our meeting.
Chalk suns grinned from the sidewalk.
Stick-figure families marched across the concrete, their bright crayon arms outstretched toward impossible skies.

I stood there, clutching my shame with both hands, drowning in the bright roar of children’s laughter.
And she peeled the skin from me with her words.

"You should be ashamed for pressuring him," she said, her voice sugared and sharp as glass.
"We don't help people like you."
"You should be grateful."
"You should be grateful."

Grateful for crumbs.
Grateful for judgment disguised as generosity.
Grateful for a loaf of bread served on a plate of humiliation.

She handed me charity like a ledger, each item weighed against my worthlessness.
And then she asked:

"Tell me why you deserve this."

There, between a chalk-drawn sun and a house that would never shelter me,
I died a little.

I did not argue.
I did not plead.
I did not list the nights I bled behind locked bathroom doors, or the mornings I taught my children to laugh louder than their father's rage.

I nodded.
I swallowed the rot.
I bartered the last scraps of my dignity for a sack of groceries and the permission to survive.

And when I walked away,
I left something behind on that sunlit sidewalk—
a shadow, a stain, a thread of myself too small and too broken to carry forward.

---

Interlude: Narrative Violence and the Price of “Help”

There is a violence that does not bruise the skin but fractures the soul.
It does not swing fists.
It swings stories.

Narrative violence is the theft of your survival—the reshaping of your agony into someone else’s proof of kindness.
It is when those in power offer “help” but demand that you perform your need the right way: silent, grateful, small.

It is the camera lens zooming in on doctors clutching bills in Gaza, erasing the months they spent stitching bloodied bodies in darkened hospitals.
It is the bishop’s office with its polished wood desk, the way he looked at me as if my desperation might stain his carpet.
It is the woman in the park, her manicured hands passing judgment between the pastel suns drawn in chalk.

Flash:
I remember standing there, head bowed, listening to her talk about gratitude.
In the distance, my children shrieked with laughter, chasing each other through fountains of dust.
They didn’t know yet that survival would have a cost.
They didn’t know yet that hunger makes liars of us all—forces you to smile, to nod, to pretend you are thankful for being made small.

Narrative violence does not just demand your suffering.
It demands that you apologize for it.
It demands that you frame it properly, so the audience—the givers, the powerful—can see themselves reflected as merciful.

Performative aid is never about the one in need.
It is about those who need to be seen helping.

Flash:
I can still feel the chalk dust under my shoes.
I can still hear her voice asking, “Why do you deserve this?”
And I remember realizing, in a way words could not fully contain, that survival had become a transaction.
My body, my story, my shame—currency to be exchanged for crumbs.

This is what colonialism perfected:
Turn the conquered into grateful props.
Turn survival into debt.

And when the story is finished—when the donor’s hands are patted clean—the survivor is left with nothing but the echo, the rotted shame of having survived on someone else’s terms.

---

Act III: Parallel Shadows

There is a cruelty that crosses oceans.
A violence that speaks a universal language, no matter how different the ruins look.

When I read Dr. Ezzideen’s words—their rawness, their quiet surrender to a shame he did not earn—I felt the old ache rise in my chest again, the way a healed wound still hums under cold rain.

There, in Gaza, physicians ran for coins, filmed like circus animals.
Here, in America, a mother stood on a sidewalk and traded her pride for bread.

Different continents.
Different devastations.
The same architecture of humiliation.

Because power does not just starve bodies.
It starves dignity.

It engineers scarcity and then demands you beg for what was stolen from you.
It hoards abundance and then disguises charity as grace.

In Gaza, they chase the man with the camera because survival is no longer a right—it is a competition.
A scramble.
A ritual of public degradation.

In America, I was made to stand trial for my existence in the shadow of a chalk-drawn sun.
I was made to justify why my children deserved to eat.

Flash:
The park blurs in my memory now.
A smudge of color, a smear of laughter, a woman’s voice dripping with condescension.

Flash:
The hospital corridors in Gaza blur too, in the videos I’ve seen—bodies crumpled on the ground, white coats turned gray with dust and despair, the silent dignity of those who kept working, even as the ceiling cracked above their heads.

When survival becomes a spectacle,
When suffering becomes someone else’s trophy,
When the only relief offered is humiliation carved into your skin—

That is not aid.
That is conquest by other means.

Performative aid does not lift the fallen.
It demands they crawl.
It demands they thank the boot for stepping lighter today.

And it leaves a rot inside you that no clean water, no sack of flour, no handful of shekels can ever wash away.

I do not equate my experience with Gaza’s siege.
But I recognize the shape of the wound.
I recognize the mechanics of humiliation.

I know what it is to be told your worth is conditional.
I know what it is to be offered a lifeline with a noose tied to the end of it.

And I know that in every nation brutalized by empire—whether by bombs, or blockades, or bureaucracies pretending to be salvation—
there are chalk suns drawn by children who still believe the world is kind.

And there are those of us standing in the dust, swallowing our pride, praying they never have to learn otherwise.

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Finale: We Were Never the Beggars

They made us crawl.
They filmed it.
They wrote reports about it.
They congratulated themselves on it.

But listen to me now:

We were never the beggars.

Not the physicians who stitched shattered bodies by candlelight while the sky rained fire.
Not the mothers who stood in parks with pride leaking out of them like blood.
Not the children whose chalk suns outshined the cruelty around them.

The beggars are the ones who need our suffering to prove their worth.
The beggars are the ones who gorge themselves on stolen plenty and call it generosity.
The beggars are the ones who demand gratitude for bandaging the wounds they helped inflict.

We—
we were only ever trying to live.

The world demands that Gaza perform its pain to be deemed worthy of survival.
The world demanded I perform my need, to be handed a scrap of mercy too small to feed five growing children.

But we are not here to satisfy their appetite for redemption.

We are here because we refuse to die quietly.
We are here because no camera, no bishop, no empire, no airstrike has yet invented a weapon strong enough to erase the hunger for life that beats inside us.

And even when we were made to crawl—
even when we bowed our heads to survive—
there was a part of us, silent and burning, that never touched the ground.

They think they filmed our humiliation.
But what they really filmed was our refusal to vanish.

We remain.

In Gaza.
In parks littered with chalk drawings.
In the hollow places power thought it could gut and salt.

We remain.

And no coin, no loaf of bread, no pity-scripted charity will ever be enough to purchase our silence again.

1. Support Dr Ezzideen Shehab https://chuffed.org/project/128550-dr-ezzideen-shehab

2. The video: HERE