Mortui Vivos Docent: ‘Today, My Body was a TV’d Massacre’

Rafeef Ziadah, a poet of Palestinian origin living in London, wrote the poem ‘Today, My Body was a TV’d Massacre’ as a response to a veiled accusation of hate directed at her by a journalist. In many ways, this poem is a visual and auditory manifesto of the suffering experienced in Palestine and especially Gaza. This study attempts to explore the symbolic meanings of the imagery elements that the poem displays in such a rich style, extending to allegorical subtextual fields. As a result of this attempt, the pieces that were redefined with the unity of imagery and symbolism were brought together as if completing a puzzle, and an attempt was made to determine the Gestalt narrative of the poem. In the final analysis, Rafeef Ziadah’s symbolic imagery demonstrates that the pieces together express a larger narrative than their individual meaning and portray a picture of how the massacre in Gaza has turned into a genocide of a silenced kind. The poet also diagnoses the world's indifferent silence towards this situation as a 'trauma spectacle' which can be roughly defined as being content with witnessing the suffering