Greed, cruelty, consumption: the world is changed yet its worst persists

In the pre-dawn hour, as the dark becomes less sure of itself, I get up to go to the hospital. It’s cold, and I have to fast before this surgery, so I take my Lexapro pill with a sip of water right away. I was diagnosed with cholesteatoma before the pandemic locked the world in its grip, and went on to the public waiting list. The ENT specialist told me it was a routine surgery, a cutting away of abnormal growth behind the ear canal; decades ago, people died from this, their own skin growing into their brains. There was some risk of deafness, or damage to a nerve that could paralyse half of my face, but he had never slipped yet.

I’m the kind of man who assumes such odds exist to spite me, so I was not reassured. My fiance, Hannah, drove us to St Vincent’s at 6am, and the roads were busy, maybe because the restrictions were set to ease the next day and people couldn’t wait, or maybe because capitalism is a death cult that will brook no surcease, people gotta eat or work to pay the landlords, and we passed the time by shaking our heads at everyone’s foolishness as a way of ignoring our own.

The hospital itself was a confusing place. If ever I was to get the disease, it would be here, I thought. Signs sent us to level four, the reception where screenings were to take place for all visitors, except that the entire floor was empty. It was not yet 6.30am but the unlit carpeted halls, with large Covid-19 warnings plastered everywhere, and staggered barriers for queuing, was nonetheless eerie. It turns out we’d come up into the wrong building, which was closed, and had to hurry over to the public hospital entrance. A woman sitting at a table in the foyer entrance asked if we had any flu-like symptoms. No? She waved us through with a little flick of her wrist. It seemed woefully inadequate – I’d seen more rigorous screening at the Apple store in Broadway. Later Hannah would tell me there had been equipment that took our temperatures as we walked by, that security had been monitoring it, and perhaps I missed it.

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Part of me doubts that any of it matters, and I had said as much the other day as we paced around the block to get our daily exercise. The restrictions, or processes put in place (to call them restriction is to invite resentment), were as much symbolic as practical, it was largely performance because, even now, as we did our best to follow them, we could be breathing in or walking through the infected droplets that someone else, equally doing their best to physically distance themselves, had left behind on their walk. We want to feel like we can control our own destinies, and so we pretend that what we do ultimately matters. As a Muslim raised by high school dropouts in western Sydney, I often heard this particular kind of fatalism: “If Allah wants you to go, you’re gone, there’s nothing you can do about it,” to which I would say, “OK, so go play in traffic right now. If it’s not your day, it’s not your day,” and yet now, I found myself on the other side of it, giving in to the awesome omniscience of God. It was easier that way, and absolved me of any responsibility.

The pandemic, invisibly everywhere, had soaked such hopelessness into my bones. Which is why I’d been affronted by the screening. The acting was subpar, the role of the process almost subliminal in an age of intrusive security measures that were as equally and vehemently based on my body. I wanted to be comforted, and received nothing.

Eventually we found the right admission area. I filled out some forms, answered questions in triplicate posed by nervous students and a tired nurse. I was measured and weighed. I am 6ft 1, over 100 kilos. I’ve been a big guy for years but I had put on weight since my last weighing only months back, and it seemed silly to care about that, but I did. To be your heaviest at death’s door makes a kind of poetic sense, but vanity gives zero fucks about poetry – and yes, I was thinking about this relatively routine surgery as a death, because I am Arab and given to full on dramatics at the slightest opportunity, but also because to go under full general anaesthetic is to register a profound rupture in experience. It is not the same as sleep. Even sleeping, the body knows enough to dream, it shifts and moves, it is a restless elsewhere. There is awareness, however quietened, estranged.

Once you are under, there is nothing. Your ribbon of memory vanishes. You wake in a different place; you can stitch the two moments, pre-injection and post-op, with the word “surgery” but the word will sink, and only blackness will remain. I was coaxed into consciousness by a nurse. She said the operation went for four hours. I faded in and out of my fuzzy body. I was given a large plastic jug to piss in, and I let out the pent-up urgency. The body, then, had its own recording of life I was not privy to, and I was reassured and disturbed by that, the knowledge that whatever composes my “I” is immaterial.

I was wheeled into a recovery ward, my head swathed in bandages. I took a selfie as soon as I was physically capable of it, and was suitably impressed with my own damage. A Palestinian friend texted to tell me I looked like a Beirut war victim. Beirut, which has not been in a war for many years – except with itself – is forever associated with it, and I was reminded my body too carried this catalogue of bloody images. I watched through a haze as social media reacted to the photo, wondering if the closer you are to the catalogue of images society pins to your body, the more comfort it inspires, the more relatable you become. Cynicism suggests that no one likes me more than when I am hurting in a recognisable, tangible way, but I have to leave room as well for sincerity and compassion. I watched as an old man had to be ushered into his nearby bed by a trio of nurses, and I listened as they pleaded for his cooperation at every meal time, for every test, pill or injection; I was awed over and over by their resolute care. This is the best of us, I thought, and felt such a stinging, familiar shame that we do not provide it for all – and worse, that we actively harm the disadvantaged and dispossessed. What could we become if we insisted on this reverence for life always, and were not partitioned by the politics of birth, of borders and class?

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Hannah interrupted my reverie with her arrival. She was jolted by the turban of bandages but tried to cover it. “Your head is hectic,” she said. Only months ago, we’d gone to Inverell to help her father, who is recovering from multiple cancers and still on chemo, take care of some long languishing yard work and physical labour. We had spent our fair share of time last year in hospitals, by his side, and now here she was by mine, the strength and youth of yesterday erased. She helped me cut up my food and did not show what it must have cost her to be so present, and caring, and to have to go home alone at the end. The man opposite me looked to be around my age, a young wog with a leg injury. He had a steady stream of lads visiting him, mostly wogs and Lebs in trackies and TNs, and through the general lack of privacy, the fact that we were all ill together here, I learned that a building site had collapsed on top of him and some other tradies who were in different rooms, so their friends were doing the rounds, generally being rowdy, shooting the shit, trying to make them laugh, every inch of them alive and resistant to the hush of the sick. Their irreverence made me feel at home and lonely all at once for a life I had largely removed myself from in pursuit of an artform few people give a shit about.

I slept, I ate, I pissed in the familiar plastic jug, having lost virtually all control over the condition of my life. It was freeing in one way, and of course stifling in another: a microcosm of the broader situation in society. My bed was by the window at least, a slice of sky and city mine to behold at all hours. My aunt sent me a text asking if I would get prescribed Endone, and if she could have some – she was in such pain, her own knee surgery had been postponed. My Turkish uncle called to say a relative I never knew had died, he was in his 50s, and sent along a photo of the man with my father, who was also dead. They were waiting now for the death certificate, and for word on how many could attend the funeral. I took in what I could, I let go of what I couldn’t, and all the while the nurses, mostly brown south-east Asian men and women, tended to the bodies with their immaterial, essential hosts. I want to make of them and this work a sacredness, even knowing there is little romance in the gruelling hours, dealing with the stink and rot of failing flesh. I am grateful for it, regardless.

I’ve been home for several days. No plastic jugs any more, thank God, but otherwise little has changed. I mostly sleep, and I am lucky, so lucky, to be cared for by one I love, to have work in writing I can continue with from my bed, or the short walk to my desk. I have to take various pills throughout the day, which prevents me from observing Ramadan, the holy month made strange and strained by isolation, and my ear is a clouded knot of pain. There is talk, all the time, of restrictions easing, and not easing, of who deserves to die, of letting the old go, of the “economy” needing to start again, which is to say the rich need to get richer again (a phenomenon that actually never stopped), and a sense already of an acceptable level of sacrifice in order for this to occur. This is evil at its most banal and it shows no sign of abatement. Let the nurses and doctors suffer, let the labourers build and break, let them all grind their bodies to the mill, for somewhere a bank balance must grow.

The days have become months, and the world has changed far beyond the scope of this essay, with cities, states and countries opening and closing like anxious flowers attempting to halt the damage of recurring coronavirus outbreaks. One thing hit harder than anything else, both figuratively and literally: the Beirut blast, an allegedly accidental explosion of 2,750 tonnes of neglected ammonium nitrate that levelled the port, killing more than 200 people, injuring 5,000 and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. It rates as the third most powerful explosion in history, and it devastated my mother’s country, which was already struggling thanks to a corrupt and inept government, with food and power shortages the norm, to say little of the hyper-inflated currency and a population of more than a million refugees, all amid the pandemic.

Part of me wants to go back and erase the words I wrote the day after I left the hospital, the joking remark about my bandaged head, my wounded state instantly being compared to Beirut, or my comment about it being at war only with itself, but much as they sting, they have proven all too true. How else to explain a government that could leave thousands of tonnes of explosive material in a densely populated area, except as suicide? How else to explain the lack of aid to Lebanon to deal with its problems when its people were starving, and killing themselves in despair, as in the case of a 61-year-old man who shot himself outside a cafe, carrying the Lebanese flag, a copy of his clean criminal record, and a simple note: “I am not a heretic.”

Years ago, an act like this prompted the so-called Arab spring. In 2020 there are some protests from an exhausted local populace, and not much else. Meanwhile, the devastation of the warehouse blast has made worldwide news, and led to huge fundraising efforts. Once again it is reinforced that for Arabs to be seen in the west we must first be linked to a bomb or damage. I am so tired and hurt that I almost don’t care about this any more: see us and hear us however you want, only first, please, help my people survive.

The world has changed, and yet its worst features persist. We are still being asked to acknowledge this is an extraordinary situation which requires a total change of our behaviours to accommodate it and our survival, but only so long as we are able to change back, to a way of life that is not just riven with deep inequalities, but which experts have already determined is fatally flawed for human society. What is the normal to which we are being pushed to return? My normal is the precarious life of a working-class poet in a country that hates him, his culture, his communities. My normal is racist commentary on my work, death threats and hate trolls. My normal is my aunty’s broken body, my father-in-law’s cancer, my mother’s unstable rental situation. My normal is cousins locked in a carceral loop, accustomed only to poverty, punishment and police harassment. My normal is life on stolen land, where self-determined outcomes by First Nations communities are ignored and their deaths in custody continue. Death is a passive word here. My normal is the deep privilege of knowing whatever my family or I go through, our kin in Lebanon and Syria have it worse, and we have contributed to that. My normal and your normal is a relentless march to a ruined climate, the dismissal and undermining of scientists these past few decades, the lack of leadership and vision that dares to imagine a sustainable way forward.

The greed and cruelty, the endless consumption that marks the modern way of life threatens to overwhelm me constantly, but unlike the deep dark of anaesthesia, this is an unconvincing darkness, and we do not have to stay under it. I admit I have no great hope we will take hold of our destinies and use this chance to transform for the better; I think we’ll stay mired in an unnerving mixture of complacency and crisis, but as I mentioned, I take comfort in performance in the absence of control, and writing has always required my best.

• This essay will be part of the anthology Fire, Flood and Plague, edited by Sophie Cunningham and published by Penguin Random House in December