The Killing Discourses: Resisting the Erasure of Personhood in War

Every time America or Europe decide to interfere with the Eastern world or West Asia, narratives and images are dropped before the bombs. It is ideological warfare, which is mounted by painting entire civilisations inhuman, animals, terrorist etc. This is not accidental. As the French philosopher and political activist Michel Foucault argued, knowledge is never innocent, it is produced, shaped, and circulated in the service of power. Those who control what is said, what is studied, what is reported, determine how entire societies are seen and understood. The 'dangerous Muslim', the 'oppressed Arab woman', the 'fanatical Iranian' are not discoveries of knowledge. They are its manufactured products.

While Foucault shows us how the story is built, Gramsci tells us why it is needed at all. Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist leader who spent the last 11 years of his life in Mussolini’s prison. There he wrote and smuggled out his seminal work, the “Prison Notebooks”. He states that the class rule is maintained through the twin processes of dominance and hegemony. Dominance is mounted with army, police, and weapons. Hegemony is delicate, almost invisible. It must be managed with ideas, sensibilities, literature and culture.

Ruling power cannot sustain itself through force alone. It must make its dominance feel natural, inevitable, even just. This is hegemony. When school textbooks, news channels, dinner table conversations all repeat the same story, it becomes common sense. This explains why the bombs are never the beginning. The real war starts much earlier, in the language we are handed and the images we are taught to believe.

For decades, Western media has supplied the world with caricatures of ‘Arab’ or Muslim’ or ‘women in Iran’ as if diverse populations can be shoved into one tiny box. As an Indian, Muslim, woman with friends across the world, I find these portrayals chilling. What I have seen and experienced does not match this imagery.

During my education in England, I met many Iranians and quickly became friends with them. Most of them loved to laugh and joke. Two of them – Haroon and Bahram – were my colleagues in the library where we all worked part time. We served on the library counters, assisted the readers with finding books, and competed on guessing the reader’s nationality by their accent. They invited me home, fed me biryani and kofte.

Then also explained how kofta and kebab originated in Iran, but Indians added ginger, garlic, garam masala and made it tastier. They would tell me stories of Tehran and were sad that their homeland is becoming increasingly autocratic.

Another friend Kamran had a lot of fans due to his dashing good looks and a cosmopolitan personality. His father was Iranian and mother from Italy. They met at the university, got married and went back to live in Iran. He spoke Farsi, English, Italian and visited his grandmother in Italy regularly. He told me that he knew many such mixed families in Tehran where one partner had come from Europe.

Nasrin was in my PhD coursework class. While eating lunch one day she said, “Oh my husband…I just cannot live without him…” I cringed. All the passages from books like ‘not without my daughter’ with enslaved Iranian women began running through my brain. Oblivious, she continued, “He makes me laugh so much…really…” I was speechless. How easily I fell for the propaganda, I thought, staring at her radiant face. The same day her husband came to pick her up.

Charmed by his cheerful personality and laughing at his ready supply of jokes, I understood why she ‘cannot live without him’. Apart from humour, they also shared a solid partnership. When she planned for her PhD in the UK, he shifted along with their children so that the family could be together. I used to meet her on campus along with her two daughters- three of them chattering animatedly and giggling.

When the torpedoes reach Iran, they vanquish not just their religious leadership but also common folks. My friends are amongst them. Till now, they were being harassed by the government for their cultural political views. Now they are being bombed by foreign nations that have come to ‘save them’.

To the ignorant minds, Iranians and Arabs maybe the same. But they are distinct. God is Khuda in Farsi and Allah in Arabic. Their ethnicity, history, language, even religious practices of Shiah and Sunni are different from each other.

My Palestinian classmate Sawsan was my pathway to the dazzling world of Arab women. When they invited me to their parties, I was not sure what to expect. They wore Hijab and came across as restrained though dignified. To my delight, in these all-women gatherings, they chatted loudly, told bawdy jokes and tried to teach me belly dancing. One of them cajoled me to into visiting a beauty parlour, for shaping my eyebrows, for the first time ever. She held my hand while I yelped and fed me kababs afterwards. I was a staunch feminist who believed this to be an ‘unnecessary torture’. Yet the discovery of female companionship and care in that cold foreign land was like a warm comforting blanket.

Sawsan was a remarkable character. She was a civil officer in Jordan, and her mother was a high-ranking bureaucrat working directly with the Queen. She was very beautiful and knew her effect on men. She used her beauty and charm as a weapon in a most benign manner. She had managed to obtain a special pass from the Mayor of Mecca and travelled to pray at the Kaba. Alone, without a male escort. However, behind this powerful public persona, there were deep scars of loss of a homeland and the fear of violence.

Once she received the news that her cousin had died in a car crash. She locked herself in her room for three days and prayed. When I heard that she had not stepped out of her room and only ate what her flatmates kept at her room door, I went to check on her. She told me that as a Palestine child she is taught to not rely on anyone. Your family can die anytime but you must continue.

I remembered Franz Fanon, a French psychiatrist and political philosopher, who explored the dehumanising effects of colonisation in Algeria: how it seeps into the psyche of the colonised persons and communities, how de-colonisation also is a violent process like colonialism.

What Sawsan said then comes back to me now when Palestine is facing total extermination. The battle is not only physical with weapons but also mental with discourses. Because every bomb is defenced by a story told beforehand, and every story that erases reality, makes destruction feel acceptable.

Across the world, citizens are feeling helpless against tyrants who are pushing them into senseless wars. These are not military dictators, but political leaders voted into power through elections. The concept of democracy has reached an impasse. By remembering my friends by name, humour and love, I am resisting the final violence of war – the erasure of personhood. When you put people into a box they lose their personality, their uniqueness. They become just a number, which is what the warmongers want. On this background, memory is not nostalgia. To remember is political defiance. Stories of friendships are the only hope to keep our collective humanity alive.

Sameena Dalwai is a law professor. Her forthcoming book is titled, Love Jihad: a feminist retelling (Penguin, 2026).

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