I knew they would.
There are subjects one can approach
intellectually, from a comfortable distance, and there are
others that touch wounds so deep that the mere suggestion of
dialogue feels like a provocation.
For many people, the
Kiily-Tokurt belong
firmly to the second category.
Set aside, for a moment, the crude
historical facts as she has reported them:
millions of human abductees, the
trafficking of human beings as a workforce, the trade in
live human flesh, and commercial agreements with some of
the darkest organizations operating on and around our
planet...
Set aside the cold machinery of
exploitation, the agreements, the transactions, the
facilities, the suffering.
Set all of that aside, not to forget it,
not to diminish it, and certainly not to forgive it blindly,
but because something else emerged from these conversations
that deserves examination.
Something I had not entirely anticipated.
Some people wondered why I would sit down with Jezya at all.
Why give a voice to someone representing
a civilization that had participated in such things?
Why listen?
Why exchange ideas?
Why laugh, even, at certain moments?
Why allow curiosity to enter a space
where anger might seem more appropriate?
Because listening is not absolution.
Understanding is not forgiveness. And dialogue does not erase
accountability.
In fact, I came away from these encounters
believing precisely the opposite:
that genuine accountability may be
impossible until we are willing to look directly at the
consciousness that produced the actions we condemn.
It is easy to call something evil and turn
away. Sometimes that judgment is entirely justified.
But once we turn away, our understanding
stops at the label.
We know what happened, perhaps.
We know who suffered.
We know whom to blame.
But we still do not necessarily understand
how it became possible. That question matters.
Because atrocities are rarely born in the minds of people who
wake up one morning deciding that they are monsters.
They emerge from systems of thought.
From values.
From hierarchies.
From definitions of superiority and
inferiority.
From the gradual normalization of what
should never have been normalized.
And that was what fascinated me about Jezya.
She did not arrive carrying the moral
vocabulary of humanity. She carried her own.
Throughout our conversations, Jezya forced me
to confront something uncomfortable: morality can look
extraordinarily different when seen through the architecture of
another culture.
This does not mean that every morality is
equally acceptable. It means that if we wish to understand
another civilization, we must first understand the internal
logic by which it judges itself.
The Kiily-Tokurt did not necessarily perceive their
historical dealings with humans through the emotional and
ethical framework through which we perceive them.
Commerce, collective advancement,
biological hierarchy, strategic advantage and the expansion
of their civilization occupied places in their worldview
that were profoundly different from ours.
And yet, beneath those differences, I
discovered points of contact.
Children were one of them. This was perhaps
the contradiction that had fascinated me most from the
beginning.
How could a civilization fiercely protect
its own young while participating in the trafficking of the
young of another species?
How could tenderness exist on one side of
that equation and complete objectification on the other?
That contradiction became a doorway. Because
once you recognize something precious in yourself, sooner or
later someone may ask whether the same thing is precious in
another.
And then the mirror appears....
This is where my conversations with Jezya changed something in
me.
They made me realize that, no matter how
determined we are to move forward, moving forward cannot simply
mean leaving everything behind.
We often speak about,
a new era, a liberated Earth, disclosure,
contact, sovereignty and humanity finally taking its place
among other civilizations.
But what do we carry with us into that
future?
Unexamined wounds do not disappear because
the calendar changes. Neither does guilt. Neither does inherited
hatred. Neither does collective trauma.
If we bury the past in the name of progress,
we do not transcend it. We merely build the future on top of it.
Eventually, the foundations crack.
Healing therefore requires something far more difficult than
forgetting. It requires us to revisit the past without becoming
imprisoned by it. It requires accountability without vengeance.
Memory without obsession. Discernment without hatred. And,
perhaps most difficult of all, the willingness to hear the other
side without surrendering our own.
Jezya made me realize that the only way to heal every fractal of
the past is to place a mirror before it. But that particular
mirror I am speaking about is a strange one.
When we look into it, we do not initially see
ourselves.
We see the other side.
We see the enemy.
We see their reasoning, their history,
their justifications, their blind spots and contradictions.
We see the mechanisms by which they
managed to consider acceptable what we consider horrifying.
And if we remain before that mirror long
enough, something unexpected happens.
Our own reflection begins to appear
behind theirs...
Human history is hardly innocent.
We too have enslaved.
We too have conquered.
We too have classified other human beings as inferior.
We too have separated children from their families,
exploited populations for labor, transformed living beings
into commodities and constructed sophisticated moral
arguments to justify actions that later generations would
regard with horror.
Behold. This does not diminish what was done
to us.
It makes the lesson larger.
The mirror is not there to tell the victim
and the perpetrator that they are the same. They are not.
It is there to reveal the mechanisms by
which consciousness loses sight of the sacredness of another
being.
And those mechanisms are worth
understanding wherever they appear.
Something changed over the course of my
conversations with Jezya.
Not suddenly. Not dramatically. There was no
theatrical moment of repentance, nor did I expect one. Instead,
there were small shifts.
Questions. Pauses. Moments when certainty
encountered something it had not previously needed to
consider...
And perhaps that is how real change often
begins:
not with a declaration, but with a
disturbance in an old certainty.
I was studying her culture.
However, gradually, I realized that she was
studying mine. What began as an encounter between
representatives of two very different histories became something
more intimate:
two beings attempting, however
imperfectly, to understand how the other saw existence.
We did not erase the past.
We placed it between us.
We looked at it.
And we spoke.
That distinction is important. Because
reconciliation without truth is merely avoidance dressed in
beautiful language.
Forgiveness demanded before accountability is
another form of violence. Peace constructed upon silence remains
fragile.
But when two sides can look at what happened without
turning away, when the harmed can speak and the other can remain
present to hear it, something genuinely new becomes possible.
Not the erasure of history.
The transformation of our relationship to
it...
Perhaps this is ultimately why these
conversations stirred so much.
They challenged a comfortable boundary.
Enemy.
Friend.
Victim.
Perpetrator.
Good.
Evil...
These distinctions can be necessary.
Sometimes they are essential.
But they are not always the end of the story.
What happens after the war?
What happens when the weapons are lowered
and civilizations that once exploited one another must exist
in the same greater community?
What happens when yesterday's enemy sits
across a table from you and speaks?
Someone has to ask the first question.
Someone has to listen to the answer. And someone has to be
courageous enough to say:
What you did was wrong. Now tell me why you believed it wasn't.
That question does not weaken accountability.
It completes it...
Perhaps the greatest victory over an enemy is
not destroying them. Perhaps it is reaching the point where the
consciousness that created the conflict can no longer reproduce
it.
That requires truth.
It requires memory.
It requires boundaries.
And sometimes, it requires a conversation
we would rather not have.
Jezya became, for me, that mirror.
And when I looked into it, I discovered that
understanding the other side was not a betrayal of those who
suffered.
It was another way of making sure the past
would not become the future...!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB50wEtXFNs
With Love, always
Sumaa
