With each day the weight seemed to shift beneath me.
The weight of the decision to go: to approach the border with the full knowledge that the consequences would never be mine to control. This weight was the kind that sits behind the ribcage, low and slow. The weight of being seen, of being misread, of not knowing what would be asked of us at the checkpoint. When your body is read before you open your mouth, your presence alone is treated as a provocation.
The weight rested in the loaded M16, gripped tightly in the hands of a soldier trained precisely for these moments. Trained to stop anyone and everyone who dared to reach the land they refuse to call by its name.
Palestine.
We moved toward the border. Barbed wire curled like thorns along fences. Sniper towers cast long shadows in the mid-afternoon sun. The wind tugged at the endless rows of white and blue flags, illegally lining the hills surrounding Jericho.
We felt the weight of eyes upon us: watched and assessed. The eyes of soldiers in uniform, alert and unblinking. The cold black pupils of surveillance cameras that perched overhead, embedded into concrete, blinking red into the dark. They reminded us that here, every movement is monitored. No thought is entirely private.
As the days and weeks passed, the tension settled elsewhere, in the object I kept closest to my body. My camera, wrapped tightly in cloth, pressed deep into my bag. I rarely brought it out. It burned in my hands. It wasn’t fear that held me back, exactly, but an unnerving sense of rupture. That to lift the lens, to frame another’s grief or exhaustion, would be a kind of violence: a taking.
The camera is a tool of truth, we’re told. But in Gaza, that truth gets you killed. As of August 2025, 270 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been martyred documenting what the world already knows, even if some choose to ignore it.[1]
So I turned to something smaller: The notebook.
Not always a literal one — though sometimes it was, curled and weather-soft in my pocket — a quieter kind of archive. A voice note saved, silent and unseen. A scrap of newspaper folded into my back pocket. A bus ticket slipped between pages. These became a quiet counter to the image — a way of witnessing that did not expose the person standing next to me. In a place where attention could endanger, these fragments felt safer still.
The notebook became a companion. It held what the camera could not: ambiguity, intimacy, hesitation. It demanded nothing of those I sat beside. It did not extract. It allowed for what was partial, unfinished or unresolved. When words felt too risky, I’d listen to the soft subtext found in the scrape of a chair or the pause of breath held in anticipation.
With each passing day, the weight on our chests would rise with the roar of warplanes overhead, their bellies heavy with soldiers — or worse — headed for Lebanon or Gaza. The fear would spike, then dissolve into a momentary relief: we were safe. And then, just as quickly, it would shift again, into a sick, leaden grief that settled in our limbs. What does it mean to be spared, while others are not? Some afternoons I’d perch on the balcony with my notebook and a cup of black coffee and draw. Drawing from memory, not for precision, but to stay close to something fleeting. A shoulder turning away. A bag of pita growing stale on a car hood. A decaying apartment building waiting for care that would never come.
What I kept in those notebooks wasn’t evidence. Not in the way that institutions might recognise. There were no coordinates, no timestamps and no clear subject lines. Just impressions: a dust smear on the corner of a page, the echo of a voice recorded in whispers, the outline of a building I visited years ago that no longer stands. These fragments resisted order. They didn’t ask to be read; they asked to be felt.
The theorist Diana Taylor speaks of embodied memory, not found in the pages of a text, but carried through gesture, sound and breath. She draws a clear line between the archival memory — the collection of fixed, institutionalised records — and the repertoire, which lives in the body, passed through performance, orality, movement and gestures, which can be re-performed across time.[2] My notebook, I believe, inhabits the space between the two: it is neither fully archival nor entirely a repertoire, but a threshold space where memory begins to form. A place where memory passes through the hand before it can be categorised, where the act of writing becomes a performative act itself, not just capturing a moment, but becoming part of the body’s ongoing memory. In this quiet, private space, the notebook re-performs memory in a way that resists erasure, offering presence to what is often left absent in archives. It stands where the camera fails — quiet and embodied — holding what words and images could not fully capture.
And what of those fragments we cannot name? The American writer Saidiya Hartman writes about ‘critical fabulation’ — the need to resist the temptation to close the archival absences left by violence, not with facts, but with care, imagination and ethical proximity.[3] I did not attempt to complete the picture; allowing the gaps to remain. A friend’s voice trailing off mid-sentence, distracted by the haunting sounds above. A line I drew and later rubbed out. A grocery store receipt, pressed flat between pages. These, too, are ways of remembering.
To witness, sometimes, is not to clarify, but to accompany.
There are moments I chose never to write down. Sounds I chose not to record. Images that live only in the blur of memory, shifting slightly each time I return to them. Sometimes I wonder if I can trust them at all. Without a photograph or a written page, does the moment still exist as it was? Or has it already softened, warped, changed shape?
But maybe this, too, is part of witnessing. Not the certainty of truth, but the ethical act of holding space for its complexity. I think of the weight again: not just the heaviness of violence but the weight of the responsibility. To tell, to listen, to remember with care. I’m called back to academic Diana Taylor’s words, and the Quechua expression Yuyachkani — ‘I am thinking, I am remembering, I am your thought’ — all conveyed through a single phrase.[4] A reminder that remembering is not a passive act. It is something we carry with us, that lives in the body, re-performed and shared again and again.
My notebook was never complete. It was a collection of traces: some smudged, some absent, some too quiet to be legible. And yet, they are what I return to. Perhaps memory, when held attentively, is a form of witnessing in itself. Perhaps what matters is not whether it is exact, but whether the weight is carried with care.
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1. Marium Ali and Hanna Duggal, ‘Here are the names of the journalists Israel killed in Gaza,’ Al Jazeera, 26 August 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/11/here-are-the-names-of-the-journalists-israel-killed-in-gaza (accessed 27 September 2025).
2. Diana Taylor, 'Acts of Transfer,' in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003, pp. 19–22.
3. Saidiya Hartman, 'Venus in Two Acts,' Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 1–14. 4.
4. Diana Taylor, 'Staging Traumatic Memory: Yuyachkani,' in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003, pp. 190–211.