Between Facts and Fiction: Trying to be a Storyteller amidst Genocide

But they are scared that the one who loves might have a voice –
بس بيخافوا اللي بيحبّ يطلعله صوت
– Bu Kolthoum, 2018

This essay expands on my previous auto-ethnography, “Trying to be a storyteller in times of war and devastation in Syria” (Atz, 2023), written before the fall of the ASSad regime – yes, this is an intentional, subversive typo: my own refusal to sanitise pain, before the full-blown genocide in Gaza and what increasingly feels like the prelude to World War III, whether real or performative. As the world fractures in real time, histories are rewritten, voices silenced, and language itself becomes contested terrain, do words still mean something? Can we tell stories that resist the stereotypes, like hero, victim, and monster? How do we speak amidst systemic violence, manufactured consent, and cut through global indifference? I have many questions.

Through reflections on fiction, citizen journalism, empathy, and representation, I argue that storytelling – done with care and imagination – preserves the complexity of being human. It helps us survive, bear witness, and dream. It complicates dominant narratives and imagines futures beyond pain and structural racism, inviting hope and empathy. As Lauren Berlant writes, “style is a way of talking about what happens when the trauma kills someone but doesn’t kill you” (2022:155). Style can become a way of reclaiming the self in the face of violence, bringing more truth than words can carry at times.

To begin, I want to invoke an idea developed by Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Godard that helps make sense of the current collision between fact and fiction, as the world starts to resemble a modern witch-hunt of anyone who dares have an opinion that challenges the mainstream narrative.

According to Jacques Rancière, the legendary film maker Jean-Luc Godard once quipped that whereas the genre of Israel was the epic (fantasy, legend, and myth), the genre of the Palestinians was the documentary (facts, law, and metrics) […]: on the one hand, from the creative point of view, Israel can tell its story in the unchallenged register of myth whereas Palestinian stories must be told in the epistemic register of facts and statistics; on the other hand, from the point of view of the spectator, the Israeli story is meant to be swallowed whole, uncritically, and without hesitation like a pill meant to make you hallucinate, whereas the Palestinian story is meant to be checked, verified, and – if the spectator be so inclined – reacted to with compassion and pity.
[…]
This lop-sided distribution of genre is partly responsible for the dissonance one inevitably observes in media today: on the one hand, some push the mythical narrative even in the face of the most brutal facts; and on the other hand, those who report on the facts, who bear witness at every turn, and who even risk their lives and social standing for the truth. It is no wonder, then, that media consumption today, more than ever, leaves us with a feeling of vertigo. Our heads spin while we leap from one genre to the next, attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable.
[…]
What I mean is that these genres assume that the creators and spectators are complicit in the tale’s success from the beginning. One basks in the glory of an epic because they already believe that the people they are telling/hearing about are truly worthy of epical appraisal. In just the same way, one sits down to watch a documentary, to learn about the downtrodden other, because they have already accepted that there is something to learn here, that there is someone in need of attention and of help. (Hariri, 2024)

I’ve spent my life trying, and failing, to reconcile what I was told with what I felt. Straddling dual identities, Syrian and Swiss, I’m acutely aware of the hypocrisies that structure global hierarchies – where bias is no longer hidden but branded. I remember arguing with a friend who insisted there’s such a thing as an “objective point of view” – as if all other realities should be measured against a single, dominant lens. Yet what I read in Arabic tells a different story than what I read in French or English. The friction between these perspectives isn’t just about language – it’s about lived reality (Hariri, 2025). How do we make sense of experiences we’re still inside of? When collective trauma unfolds, time distorts; we live in a loop of simultaneity and delay, and time collapses on itself.

Before I started acting, I went to film school in Switzerland. I remember being scolded by a teacher for calling ASSad a dictator instead of a president. I was in my early twenties, anxious, defiant, and adamant about calling a cat a cat. While others around me moved through life as if nothing was happening, I was going mad in silence, already feeling like a proxy version of World War III was unfolding. There was something fundamentally dissonant about being physically safe while those I loved were not. As Karaki (in Aubery, 2024) suggests, there is violence in how life’s value is calculated, by passport or bloodline. I realised that if an explosion took us all, my Swiss passport would ensure I became a headline. I would be the story. And I had done nothing to deserve it. That broke my heart more times than I can tell.

I’m both too close and too far. When asking for funding for a documentary on generational trauma in Lebanon, where I’ve lived, I was told I was “too emotional” and lacked “critical distance.” As though emotions disqualify me, and art could be merely theoretical. Meanwhile, western funders, who may not speak Arabic, feel entitled to shape the story. Why shouldn’t I be angry? Lebanon is barely bigger than French-speaking Switzerland. When reports say Israel is “bombing the South,” they’re bombing someone’s family. In a country that small, there’s nowhere to run. I believe that if Vevey were bombed, Geneva would rise. Maybe that’s the film I should write.

The trouble with life […] is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending. (Amis in Jackson, 2013:40)

It is absurd and painful to safely observe people recording their own destruction. I say that from my experience with Syria, but also from watching Gaza, all of Palestine, Lebanon… As Baldwin observed, “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster” (1955:138). And so I watch. Like many others, I spent years immersed in citizen journalism – the urgent, horizontal, often dangerous documentation of historical events by the people directly experiencing them. Mounzer suggests that the Arabic root sh-h-d ties together witnessing and self-sacrifice: “as if the act of bearing witness, followed to the end of one of its branches, snaps under the weight of what is seen, and you fall to your death” (2016).

The internet gives us direct access to voices that haven’t been mediated through institutions. In Syria, these fragments of images – raw and full of defiant life – helped shape a new kind of protest culture, becoming a form of collective life-making (Boex in Della Ratta, 2018:137). As personal stories offer complexity against authoritarian simplicity, the image-makers become primary targets. They complicate the mainstream image. Yet the required anonymity of Syrian images made them easy to overlook. Without context, some lost their human texture. Worse still, many Syrian creators had their footage repurposed, sometimes without consent or credit. A double erasure, first of voice, then of agency. In a world where narrative power is still held in the Global North, that erasure stings.

The violence isn’t just in the images, but in their repetition. Footage meant to humanise can quickly turn into spectacle, flattening suffering into consumable emotion. As Hariri notes, 

Vision is insidious in just this way, because while it floods us with unique impressions of individual persons and things, it simultaneously betrays the latter’s uniqueness and individuality, casting irreplaceable particulars into rigid moulds and patterns. This ossified sight risks dehumanizing the people caught on camera, making of them merely passive bodies, vehicles of Israeli aggression and little else besides. (2024)

In this way, repetition dulls empathy, especially when it comes to non-white bodies, reducing people to nameless victims – Hariri suggests a mindful practise of writing on each video we see, as a way to counter erasure.

Dehumanisation doesn’t only emerge through footage – it’s also carried through the stories we tell. Narrative, too, is never neutral. As Edward Said reminds us, stories can serve power: legitimising war, justifying surveillance, and shaping who is seen as a threat (in Hariri, 2025). Hariri extends this logic to fiction, observing that “when you tell the world Arabs are dangerous – even subtly – you teach people to trust the drone, the checkpoint, the visa rejection” (2025).

When activist Greta Thunberg landed in Paris in June 2025, after joining the Freedom Flotilla aboard the Madleen in an effort to break the siege in Gaza, she was met with press scrutiny:

- How did the Israelis treat you? We saw them giving sandwiches?
- They probably have posted lots of PR stunts, they did an illegal act by kidnapping us in international waters but that’s not the real story here. The real story is the genocide in Gaza and systematic starvation.
- Why do you think so many countries, governments around the world are just ignoring what’s happening in Gaza?
- Because of racism, that’s the simple answer I would say. Racism, and basically, desperately trying to defend a destructive, deadly system that systematically puts short-term economic profit and to maximise geopolitical power over the well-being of humans and the planet’s. And right now, it’s very, very difficult to morally defend that, but still they are desperately trying.

Thunberg’s intervention recentred Gaza – not herself. She deliberately stepped into the spotlight, aware that her presence would draw global media attention – not only because she is well-known, but also because she is white and blond. As we’ve seen with Ukraine (Bayoumi, 2022), racialised empathy remains the norm.

Empathy, as Karaki notes, is never neutral; it is shaped by proximity, group identity, and systemic bias (in Aubery, 2024). The more we identify with someone, the easier it is to care – but this familiarity can come at a cost. It can narrow the scope of our concern, making it harder to see the humanity in others. In the wake of the 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Zayn Alarbi offered a quiet correction to such detachment: “It’s not 30,000 deaths. It’s 30,000 lives. 30,000 I love yous” (2023). Each life is a universe.

Thiago Ávila, another flotilla member, warns against the danger of icon-making, as focusing on a single hero can obscure the collective: the many risks, the unseen labour, the names that never trend (2025). This caution echoes something I noticed at drama school, when we were introduced to the “hero’s journey” – that familiar storytelling arc where a protagonist sets out, faces trials, and returns transformed, bearing lessons or gifts. It’s compelling, but also deeply rooted in the assumption of choice and agency. Watching my family survive war, I found that model insufficient to reflect on our circumstances. They didn’t choose to leave, to fight, to endure. War wasn’t a call to adventure. It was violence imposed on them.

I became political at seventeen. A seasoned activist told me I was now a “good person” – I hate this dichotomy because very few people would qualify themselves as bad. I had not changed; my circumstances had. It never felt like a choice. I thought about this again as I watched footage of Parisian protests celebrating the release of Rima Hassan, another member of the Madleen flotilla whose constant smile deeply touched me. The chants of her name were powerful – but also dissonant. I found myself asking: What about the names of those killed? Will they be forgotten? Will they ever be seen as protagonists in our collective memory – not victims, but complex humans with agency, with courage that doesn’t need romanticising?

I want more imperfect “heroes” that work for the collective and recenter others. More defiant “victims,” as they find a way to survive the unbearable – even Karaki cautions that the role of the victim can feel morally comfortable (2024). I want more human “monsters” – whether these “monsters” were born of a racist idea of non-white bodies (Hariri, 2025), or by circumstances, humans finding themselves in impossible situations. “Monsters” that allow us to go beyond good and bad, towards the actual colours life requires of us nowadays, because

reality is such a complex beast that in order to begin to hold it, comprehend it, we need something larger than realist fiction. Enter speculative fiction, with its aliens and magic and warp drives, set against the backdrop of the universe itself. At its bedrock, despite the strangeness of the setting, we recognize familiar things: love, rage, struggle, wonder – our selves, disguised, but there. After all, the Mahabharata, for all the marvelous story-telling, is also the battle that rages within each one of us. (Singh, 2021)

Even as a child, I dreamed of being an actress. But I remember looking at myself in the mirror in utter horror, thinking I looked like a gorilla. Hairy, with a monobrow, features I perceived as too “rough” to fit the Eurocentric standards around me. Compared to the blond Polish girl in my class – small nose, thin hair – I felt monstrous. Now I know it was internalised racism, and if anything, I’m pretty white-passing. Yet this shows the power of representation. Black actress Viola Davis expressed her experience studying acting:

- At Juilliard, what was the objective of their training? Were they shaping you into a good actress? Or a perfect white actress?
- Definitely a perfect white actress.
- And what does that look like?
- Well it looks like it’s technical training in order to deal with the classics, in order to deal with the Strindbergs and the O’Neills and the Chekhovs and the Shakespeare. I totally understand that. But what it denies is the human being behind all of that. I feel that, as a Black actress, I’m always being tasked to show that I have range by doing white work. Listen, I could do the best I can with Tennessee Williams but he writes for fragile white women. Beautiful work, but it’s, it’s not me. And then when I leave Juilliard, guess what? Most of what I will be asked to do are Black characters which people will not feel that I am Black enough. Every single day when I wake up and put my feet on the floor, my job is to not betray myself. Juilliard was an out-of-body experience because, once again, I did not think that I could use me. Me needed to be left at the front door – even though me was what got me in there. You know, I’m worthy. Who knew?
(in Fragoso, 2025)

After someone said I looked too punk to be Syrian, I grew out my hair, hoping this would help me get work. It didn’t. It just erased the queerness in me. I looked more “castable,” but I felt less seen. And it somehow stopped me from meeting people that matched my energy, people who understand that culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is embedded in systems of power, including funding and production ecosystems. The industry is built on myths of meritocracy: work hard, and one day you’ll make it, you’ll be the exception. Bend, blend in.

This myth has kept me in line while the system was wringing me dry. But there is “something about being heartbroken that lets us finally begin to see each other” (Bhattacharyya, 2023:49).

I’ve always been drawn to what doesn’t quite fit. As a kid, I gravitated toward broken toys – the ones with missing limbs, tangled hair, or loose wheels. They seemed more interesting, as if they carried stories no one else noticed. Over time, my fascination with imperfection deepened – not out of pity, but because it feels more honest than polished, flawless representations. The unruly, the scarred, the unfinished: there’s something raw and alive in their incompleteness. As a filmmaker, I find myself drained by the relentless perfection I see on screen – gleaming teeth, massive spotless apartments, new clothes daily. Not only is it unachievable, I don’t even envy it. I mistrust it. And I can’t help but wonder, when will we be allowed to show up as we are, not as commodified products for capitalism?

Sometimes I think flaws might be the one thing that separates humans from AI: how beautifully imperfect we are. Our hesitations, our strange frictions and inconsistencies. Solnit expresses the disappointment in “encountering an object that is static, that will never die because it never lived” (2022:79). Bhattacharyya reflects, 

depressed heartbreak is rarely disruptive or demanding or loudly eccentric. Depressed heartbreak is like taking a step into death while looking like you have remembered how to behave. I think this tells us something about the half-deadness this world [under late capitalism] demands of us. Learning to go through the motions and not hope too much. (2023:71)

This, sadly, resonates with the times we are living in and encourages disobedience, amplifying censored voices. From Gaza, Abu Akleen writes:

My poetry is nothing but stylised pain. When I finish writing a poem and it seems perfectly crafted, I look at it with tears welling in my eyes and heart. Oh God, how beautiful it is. And how ashamed I am that pain looks so beautiful. (2025:13)

Reading real testimonies from Gaza was the hardest thing I’ve ever been asked to do as an actor. I couldn’t reassure myself afterwards, remind myself it is fiction – because it isn’t. After every show, I could not stop crying. The person whose words I carried with me had died. They died within the story, and they died in the real world. Maybe I should be inconsolable. Maybe this is where the theory ends: these stories aren’t fiction, they are real, and they are happening right now. And real loss doesn’t sit easily. “Perhaps sadness is the most important step. The thing that makes it possible for us to see each other and the world and what has been and is being done to us all” (Bhattacharyya, 2023:8). Or as I suggested in my previous essay, “it only hurts because we love” (Atz, 2023).

To formulate our experiences – to make sense of them, aloud – is itself a refusal. A refusal to be reduced into tragedy. To be spoken over. Yet I wonder: can language truly carry this pain? Are words ever enough?

A barrel will no longer ever be a barrel again; shrapnel will always explode from it. The word mustard will forevermore carry a whiff of gas, rashing your skin, smarting your eyes. When you say Sabra, or Shatila, you are not referring to a place, but to a heap of dead bodies shot indiscriminately and tossed aside like worn rags. When you say the word catastrophe, no one need ever ask which one it is you mean. It is towns, cities in their entirety become past tense. These are things that can only ever be reproduced, retold, re-imagined, but never, never laid to rest or resolved. There is no end to the story, only the story. (Mounzer, 2016)

On days I feel helpless, I go to demonstrations. As a refusal to let the world change me, shrink me into hopelessness. Because if Mery is right – that we risk becoming sociopathic by going against our ethics (in Pley, 2024) – then staying silent would mean the system has succeeded in severing me from my humanity. “Because, if you accept that what is happening in Gaza is in some way necessary, that it is unavoidable, that nothing can be done, then you must accept the eternal return of other Gazas for as long as this planet will sustain our species” (Hariri, 2024).

Then I remind myself of Syria’s recent liberation after 54 years under dictatorship. My brain still struggles to comprehend it; it feels surreal, almost like a poorly written story, too unbelievable to accept. I had stopped imagining that this could ever be possible. The dictatorship had managed to shrink my creative muscles. Yet if this is possible, what else might be? Imagination allows us to wonder, heartbreak allows us to dare dream another reality, no matter how ridiculous. And while, in times of crisis, fiction can feel like a luxury (Chaudhuri, 2024:31), it also leaves room for transformation, play, and a kind of liberating madness. It allows us to rewrite our destiny. 

Imagination – that faculty that expands the human mind to the size of the universe, that makes empathy possible (you have to have some imagination to put yourself in another’s shoes) – also allows us to dream. Science fiction and fantasy posit other paths, alternative futures, different social arrangements as well as technologies, other ways that we could be. Before we do, we must dream. (Singh, 2021)

This imaginative space is where the unspeakable finds its expression.

The memory of my father’s quiet hum connects me to feelings of loss I cannot articulate in words, and it provokes in me a simultaneously overwhelming and unspeakable response. It is this exquisitely articulate modality of quiet – a sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance. (Campt, 2017:4)

In the current times, what if integrity lies in expressing where you’re standing, and what you see and experience from there? To reimagine it, in past and future? If, as Orwell suggests, all art is propaganda (Orwell in Solnit, 2022:154), then maybe there is a form of truth to be found in the in-between, in fragments of truth, utterances, in what can’t be said but is somehow evoked. 

It’s disorienting, emotional, and politically charged. It requires effort, as it forces us to peer through the cracks of dominant narratives, to feel the contradictions that uphold today’s global order. Consider Trump, who was told by his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. He shrugged it off and said he didn’t care – he believed they were close (Megerian and Klepper, 2025). And that belief, untethered from fact, justified policy. This is where we are standing: entire systems act on gut feeling, while fact-based narratives are sidelined. Fictionalised reasoning becomes normalised, and we watch Palestinians get air-dropped aid while being shot at when retrieving it – our minds struggling to process that this isn’t one more dystopian TV show, but the news.

When Abu-Lughod’s father returned to Palestine, he wrote:

I do not feel bitterness at all. I feel, rather, that the Israeli presence is a challenge to us. And it is impossible to meet that challenge with bitterness… My coming here, a big part of it, was in order to change this reality. Because I cannot fight far away from the field of struggle. (2011:134)

I remember Rima Hassan and Thiago Àvila, their constant smiles. I remember Mohammed el-Kurd arguing that being irreverent is a powerful weapon against dehumanisation (2024). Now that Syria’s free, the knowledge that nightmares can end doesn’t erase the pain, but it changes how I hold it, as “every dream of a new world requires us to understand we have been broken by the old” (Bhattacharyya, 2023:27). There is space for cautious hope, for personal agency and dreams. Fiction, if it resists collapsing into myth, can carry us forward. It can reimagine futures and pasts, and allow us to breathe in impossible times. If storytelling is standing where you are and refusing to be erased, in any tense – then maybe there is no final act. Only the story, and our ridiculous breaths in between. The bodies carrying them, both individually and collectively.

If I must die 
you must live 
to tell my story 
[…]
if I must die
let it bring hope 
let it be a tale 
(Alareer, 2023)