It’s just a video of a talking black cone. It may infuse a sense of eeriness into you, maybe some gloom, then you move on. But it haunted me. Soon it dawned on me that this YouTube video in a way encapsulates in 2 minutes & 12 seconds everything that’s wrong about Saudi Arabia, that in its cruel minimalism may be captured the rawest essence of death, if one were to experience it while still living.
It’s a woman grieving about her detained husband, and about being beaten and dragged with her children when she went to the palace of a Ministry of Interior top official to plead for his release. You don’t see any of her facial expressions, nor a single spot of her body for that matter, yet allegedly there’s a person in there. You don’t know this person’s name, or the name of her husband. You don’t know her age, her color, her creed, her shape; even her gender is technically in doubt. “It” is a literal nobody. Even if it is eventually proven that there’s a real woman speaking that stark voice, you could question her honesty: what’s her proof? Or the justice of her grievance: does she have a guilty husband? For as far as a journalist is concerned, I reckon, all you see is a talking black cone.
But, you can’t help but discern there’s a human soul somewhere in there, one whose agony is suddenly breathing heavily in the room with you. There is a human being devoid of all but sentience, human in its weakest, most humiliated state, begging for mercy from a few powerful men, loveless, penniless, powerless, without a will, without even a self.
I suspect you may fathom that without needing to understand what that “voice” is saying in Arabic, or who “it” is.
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