Soumyabrata Choudhury’s Thoughts of Gaza, Far From Gaza is a slim yet forceful reckoning with Israel’s ongoing violence in Gaza and the incomprehensible intimacy of the graphic images spreading across social media—what he refers to as the “instantaneous repetition” of “misery in real time”. Challenging readers not to look away, Choudhury’s book implicates us all in the failure of bearing witness even, or especially, as livestreamed genocide collapses geographic distance. “[W]herever we are during the Israel-Palestine-Hamas situation that has gripped us since 7 October, 2023,” he writes, “none of us are far from Gaza: Gaza is where we are, phone in hand…”

Taking its title from Far From Vietnam—the 1967 collage-style documentary made by a collective of filmmakers including Jean-Luc Goddard, Agnes Vardar and Chris Marker—Choudhury considers urgent, timeless and impossible questions of documentation in and of crisis. The book is textured and interdisciplinary, at once philosophical, historical and accessible, giving voice to the onslaught of information that has ravaged public discourse rather than nourished it.

Despite a long teaching career as Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, India, Choudhury is adamant that Thoughts of Gaza is written from the perspective of a self-proclaimed “non-specialist”. As he writes in the preface: “It has hardly any qualification backing it up in terms of depth of research or tools of discipline. In fact, the only real reason to write such a book is that too few of those who have a right to write something like it based on requisite ‘qualifications’ are doing so.”

• Tags: India, Issue 40, Liesl Schwabe, Soumyabrata Choudhury