In Arabic, the root of the verb, to witness, is sh-h-d. Roots are important in Arabic. They are present, that is, known and recognizable, not obscure etymologies but immediate and close, giving life directly to all the words that bud and branch from them. From the three-letter root verb, you make the subject and the object, but also adjectives, adverbs and a whole host of other, more complex verbs, subjects and objects related to the first. Even these words—subject, verb, object—are more directly related in Arabic. Translated literally, the subject is the doer, the verb is the doing, the object the one it is done to. In English, a writer writes a book; a letter. In Arabic, al-katib yaktubu kitab; maktoob. All from the root k-t-b, to write. From “to witness,” we get shahed, the one who witnesses; mashhad, the spectacle or the scene, but also shaheed, martyr; istishhad, to be martyred, to die for a cause. var _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____ = function(name) {return (self._wb_wombat && self._wb_wombat.local_init && self._wb_wombat.local_init(name)) || self[name]; }; if (!self.__WB_pmw) { self.__WB_pmw = function(obj) { this.__WB_source = obj; return this; } } { let window = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("window"); let self = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("self"); let document = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("document"); let location = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("location"); let top = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("top"); let parent = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("parent"); let frames = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("frames"); let opener = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("opener"); let arguments; {pubg.queue.push(function(){pubg.displayAds()}) }} 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. As if to die for a cause in Arabic is to bear witness to something until it annihilates the self.

You cross carrying what you can carry, you cross bearing your witness, you cross knowing that you are damageable, that you are mortal and finite, but that language is memory, and memory lives on.

There is a violence in undoing someone’s words and reconstituting them in a vocabulary foreign to them, a vocabulary of your own choosing. There is a violence, too, in the way you are—for long moments—annihilated by the other; undone in return. Neither the translator nor the text emerges from the act unscathed.

We climb the hill together, a key buried in my mother’s pocket, that never once left my mother’s pocket, flying the last half kilometer over jagged rocks and dried clumps of earth that were once orchards and fields. I see my mother pull out the key, ready to open the door, only to find a pile of rubble where our house once was. My clothes my journal my needlework our photos shards of our treasured blue cups ground into the dirt. Everything everything gone.

I have buried seven husbands, three fiancés, fifteen sons and a two-week old daughter I finally agreed to have at 42 for my husband’s sake, to bring life back to his tongue after we laid our two grown, handsome sons to rest, one after the other, and grief took all his words away. Our daughter did not die because of a bullet or mortar shell or carbomb, like my father, sister, brother, cousin, mother, neighbor, pharmacist, teacher. She died because the siege had cut off not only our food and electricity, but also our medicine and medical supplies. There were no child-size incubators to be found in our city. My husband rushed her slowly asphyxiating body from one hospital to another until he finally found one in the next town over. He left her with the nurses there and came home at dawn, exhausted but joyful in his relief. In the afternoon he went back to bring her home, and was led away from the small pediatric ward and down to the morgue, where her perfect blue body lay among countless others they had not yet found place enough to bury. Her name was Fatma.

To begin with, classification schemes are now understood as necessary to both survival and intelligence, and that human beings may be hardwired to make categorical distinctions. As one scholar explains, “If our species were ‘programmed’ to refrain from drawing inferences or taking action until we had complete, situation-specific data about each person or object we encountered, we would have died out long ago

“Othering” is a broadly inclusive term, but sharp enough to point toward a deeper set of dynamics, suggesting something fundamental or essential about the nature of group-based exclusion.

“Othering” is a term that not only encompasses the many expressions of prejudice on the basis of group identities, but we argue that it provides a clarifying frame that reveals a set of common processes and conditions that propagate group-based inequality and marginality.

Recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels also prompted soul-searching among publics in Western Europe, regarding the lack of cultural and geographic integration of ethnic and racial immigrant groups (many of whom hail from former European colonies) and the persistence of discrimination

Group-based identities are central to each of these conflicts, but in ways that elude simplistic explanations. It is not just religion or ethnicity alone that explains each conflict but often the overlay of multiple identities with specific cultural, geographic, and political histories and grievances that may be rekindled under certain conditions.