'Keep it Together': The Strange Grief of an Unexpected Career

9 November 2005

The suicide bombing was, honestly, a surprise.

I had spent much energy in the months preceding my first ever trip overseas, for a year of study in Jordan, trying to disabuse my family and friends of the notion that the vast expanse of the Middle East is an undifferentiated mass of violence and repression. The exquisite irony of trying to explain to people (most of whom could not find Jordan on a map) that I was statistically far more likely to be a victim of violence in the city I called home, Atlanta, than in Amman never ceased to frustrate me.

But it did become considerably less “exquisite” the day my dad called me while I was in a Starbucks in the Swefieh neighborhood of Amman. He told me that he saw a chyron on CNN mentioning a bombing and he wanted to check on me. It was the first I had heard of it. I decided to stop studying and head back to my host family’s house in Shmeisani.

In due time I would come to find out that there had, in fact, been three suicide bombings that evening targeting three different hotels, including a Days Inn that I passed every day on my commute to the University of Jordan. Fifty-seven people—not including the three bombers—were killed in total. Al-Qai’da in Iraq (AQI) claimed responsibility for the attack. A quirky coincidence of international date formats means that that fateful November day was, literally if not quite figuratively, Jordan’s 9/11.?

Three suicide bombers succeeded in their mission. But there was also was a fourth, would-be bomber.?

As an intermediate Arabic student at the time, I made it a point to be attentive to people’s names, which in Arabic are often words that exist as a regular part of people’s lexicon. Hence every new name doubled as an opportunity to expand my vocabulary. And so it is that I came to savor the unforgettable name of that would-be bomber; a name that, dark designs of its bearer notwithstanding, I found delightfully mellifluous.?

Sajida al-Rishawi. Sajida—one who prostrates, as in for prayer.

Sajida’s explosive vest failed to detonate at her target: a wedding party. Her alleged accomplice—her own husband—successfully detonated himself, killing 27 guests at what should have been the happiest moment of the hosts’ lives. She fled Amman and was captured a few days later in the city of Salt. Shortly thereafter, she appeared on state television, crestfallen, to “confess” to her crimes.

It was the first time I would be in an Arab capital struck by suicide attackers and see an alleged accomplice’s “confession” under duress aired on state television days later. It would not be the last.?

*? ? *? ? *

3 February 2015

Keep it together.

Six minutes and 19 seconds into the first-ever gameplay trailer for The Last of Us there’s a moment where the protagonist, Joel, throws a just-crafted molotov cocktail at an approaching human enemy.?

“FUCK!” the target shouts, just as the bottle breaks at his feet. He is quickly engulfed in flames and collapses, screaming, to the ground.

“Holy shit, Joel!” exclaims Ellie, your teenage companion throughout the game.

“Keep it together,” Joel mutters sternly in reply. He is teaching Ellie to move through their world of cruel violence in which survival itself is rendered pathological. Meanwhile, for much of the game, Ellie serves as an avatar for the feelings of those who are not—or, at least, shouldn’t be—inured to savagery.

I rewatched this gameplay video, released in 2012, at least a hundred times. I would go on to love The Last of Us deeply. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that I heard Joel’s admonition in my head the first time that I myself ever saw a man set ablaze.

On 24 December 2014, ISIS fighters in Syria, where I went to graduate school the first time and the country I’ve spent the most time in outside of the US, managed to shoot down a Jordanian warplane. It was a constituent element of the international coalition against ISIS formed and led by the United States. Its pilot, Mu’ath al-Kasasbeh, ejected… and was captured.

Keep it together.

After several days of rumors of negotiations between ISIS and the Jordanian government for a prisoner swap in late January 2015, there was Internet chatter of big news.

Keep it together.

I was at work that day, in my previous job as an Arabic-English translator and translation editor of Islamist militant media. Whispers coursed among my co-workers about what they had heard thanks to the jihadist corners of Twitter we were tasked with monitoring: that there would be no prisoner swap; that al-Kasasbeh had been killed; that the method of dispatch was nothing so passé as the gunshot executions and knife beheadings to which many of us had grown accustomed; and that video of it would be made public shortly.

Keep it together.

I volunteered to assist in transcribing (in those days ISIS helpfully had their own multilingual subtitling operation) and summarizing the video, a 22-minute documentary published by ISIS’s flagship video production house, Al-Furqan Media Establishment. Its climax included the sight of al-Kasasbeh in a cage, his orange prison uniform damp with some sort of fluid. Kindling lay in a long trail between a stoic ISIS fighter, standing amid the ruins of buildings destroyed by warplanes, to the inside of al-Kasasbeh’s cartoonish cage. The fighter held a torch that he then lowered to the kindling as a dozen other fighters arrayed in a row looked on from the sidelines.

Holy shit!—keep it together. Keep it together. Keep it together.

I still love The Last of Us. Yet I started to learn that day that, in real life, it actually takes an agonizingly long time for someone who is burning alive to die, even if they are doused in accelerants. I would also start to learn that there is a seemingly standard, ghastly behavioral arc that occurs when someone finds themselves on fire. It typically begins with a primal panic paired with an attempt, as frantic as it is futile, to smother the flames. It descends into a melancholy shock. And it ends with a sort of haunting resignation, whereby the last flickers of life in the eyes of the dying betray a cognizance that, yes, their body is now an ashen, smoldering husk. Indeed, it is a curious marvel that the eyes—small, aqueous orbs that they are—manage to endure as recognizable organs despite the heat evaporating all other liquids in the body.

I “started” to learn these things that day because I would see this execution method more than once before my tenure at that job was over.

The truth is that I cried at work almost every single shift for three years in a row. Regardless, on most days—but certainly not all—I still think I would have made Joel proud.

*? ? *? ? *

“You know, you seem pretty normal for someone who’s watched thousands of brutal murders.”

These words were spoken to me by a friend some years ago. I don’t remember what prompted them—I’m sure they were relevant to whatever conversation we were having at the time—but I recall that he said them with a tone of bemused wonder.

And maybe he was right. Perhaps I do seem pretty normal in a way that is contrary to people's expectations once they acquire an inkling of what my career as a translator and translation editor entailed. I’m an extrovert. I try to approach everyone with a kind and open disposition. I have an amiable affect that, ironically, first arose as an adaptive mechanism during my formative years studying in the Middle East, where I needed to leverage every method possible to overcome the social cost that attends having as much melanin as I do in a region where social antipathy for people of evolutionarily recent African descent precedes the Columbian Exchange by centuries. In other words, I faked amiability long enough for it to become sublimated into my authentic self. I genuinely love and am interested in people, and hope that they find me interesting as well.

But at the risk of seeming self-indulgent, I have a grievance to air: I resent the degree to which I and my intellectual and professional concerns in the 2010s seemed interesting to people only insofar as they were connected to war and overt violence.

I likewise resent it when people think that my former job was to "translate execution videos." For the record: that has never been my job. To say so is the equivalent of claiming that a defense attorney’s job is to exculpate criminals; in other words, perhaps that incidentally and frequently comes with the territory, but it is an unduly loaded way to frame the vocational responsibilities and raison dêtre of the role. My job, rather, was to translate jihadist media production—it's just that no Westerner without a specific interest in the Middle East seemed to care about what that meant until American heads were being separated from their necks in August 2014 (and even fewer do now). Never mind the hundreds of beheadings before that. Never mind the great many political polemics I've translated, or the vituperative Twitter feuds of Syrian warlords, or jihadist pundits' intriguing analyses of America's regional goals and posture; things that are interesting in their own right, and should especially concern every American, citizens as we are of this astonishingly expansive empire which makes enemies that seek to harm us for reasons most are unaware of.?

Still, it remains true that I learned many important lessons courtesy of the intense, mediated violence that came to characterize the quotidian substance of my work.?

Some of those violent lessons were of no practical use but incurred moral injury in the learning. Among such lessons: Every human body is nothing more than a spigot of endless blood waiting to be opened in the right place; knives and bullets, properly applied, can make grotesque little fountains of us all. Another such lesson: The only thing worse than watching a man murder a child is watching a child murder a man. Spare a thought for the children who live with memories of creating their own fountains.

Some violent lessons were practicable in salubrious ways. Among such lessons: Watching enough human throats be opened out of place can catalyze a deep and abiding aversion to all manner of slaughter, no matter the victim’s species; I am now a vegan. Still other violent lessons have practical potential, but only in a world in which things have gone profoundly, dreadfully wrong for me personally or for my country. Among such lessons: Crafting homemade bombs and improvised explosive devices is shockingly simple to do, but difficult to do well; aiming for the chest when trying to stab someone is a rookie mistake.

Some violent lessons were politically illuminating or resonant in poignant or unexpected ways. Among such lessons: That, to mobilize political-cum-armed action, the mere fact of an unjust killing is not nearly so important as the sense that a community’s collective dignity has been offended by the manner of the killing. I was first able to give voice to this feeling the night of New Year’s Eve, 2013, when I saw video of the body of Dr. Hussein al-Suleiman, tortured and executed by ISIS, and felt deep in my bones that rebel infighting would explode in northern Syria shortly thereafter (which it duly did). I felt this way not because a single man was unjustly killed—after all, to adapt the classic and comically callous aphorism, people get shot every day. Rather, it was because one didn’t need to be a forensic coroner to ascertain the horrific story of Dr. Suleiman’s last days as told by the marks on his corpse. It is a story that the mind resists considering too deeply and rages upon doing so.

Another political, violent lesson reinforced: The managed savagery of an aspiring state often provokes acts of studied brutality by established ones. The day after the video of Mu’ath Al-Kasasbeh’s execution by fire was made public, Jordanian authorities conspicuously discarded due process and executed the two prisoners for whom ISIS had purportedly been negotiating a swap. I encountered little comment from international observers about this naked act of state vengeance. Meanwhile, I was transported to a long-ago night in a faraway Starbucks when I saw the name of one of the prisoners who met the hangman’s noose that morning.

Sajida al-Rishawi.

*? ? *? ? *

27 September 2021

“When are you around so I can buy you a celebration drink?”

It was the eve of the release of New World, the first game I’ve ever shipped, and a former classmate from my game design master’s program wanted to commemorate the occasion with me. We met the next night, some 20 hours after the game’s first servers opened.?

It was only in the six weeks or so before that day that I had begun to struggle, in earnest, with the dissonance between my previous career, my previous life, and my current one. It started with the Taliban blitzkrieg across Afghanistan culminating with the fall of Kabul. While certainly tragic on its face, the relentless cavalcade of headlines, as well as the knowledge that the whole of the US government would be keen on receiving information published in Arabic by the Taliban along with the wider Arabophone jihadist reaction to events, engendered a nostalgia for my old work that I did not know would be possible.?

My internal struggle reasserted itself later that month with a moment wherein, when reviewing game content for age-appropriateness—specifically, content depicting the death of a character via a bladed weapon—I remarked in an email that the depiction was mild enough to meet our desired maturity rating, which, ironically, meant that I personally found it jarringly at odds with my aesthetic sensibilities. “Real people bleed a LOT more than that,” I noted, a menagerie of half-forgotten fountains in my mind’s eye. It didn’t take me long after sending that email to realize that I probably sounded like a fucking psycho.?

But pretty normal for someone who’s watched thousands of brutal murders, I guess.

My primary professional responsibility these days is to inform game developers and publishing stakeholders about the geopolitical, legal, and sociocultural risks of game content. I serve as a point of due diligence to forestall them somnambulating into foreseeable political backlash, legal exposure, and reputational risk. Oftentimes I fear that I am received as not merely a games business bureaucrat—which, by any fair definition, I certainly am—but a bureaucrat of the worst sort: disconnected from reality, a know-nothing, and, by virtue of some of the risks I am tasked with identifying, a tribune of weaponized fragility in this era of craven corporate wokeness.

I do not have imposter syndrome; I know that I am eminently well-qualified for what I do. But I wish there was a way to make the hard-earned knowledge of my previous life known and meaningful to the people I work with now, in all—or even just some!—of its dimensions. That they could know that, when I review content pertaining to children, the macabre fact that I have seen more whole dead children than I can count, and innumerable, messy fractions of children besides, is never far from my mind. That I would volunteer to watch and describe a man being set on fire if it meant protecting my colleagues from the same burden. That some of the most professionally challenging experiences I’ve ever had were when I worked with Iraqi refugees as a lowly UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) intern in Syria, before that country became engulfed in its own civil war and all of my erstwhile Syrian colleagues became refugees themselves. That a decade of translating jihadist media thereafter taught me to listen carefully and relay messages faithfully irrespective of how forcefully I disagree. That on days when I struggled to connect and have empathy with relentless innovators in the domain of conscientiously suicidal military operations, I returned to the emotional landscapes opened in my heart by the climactic battles of the Mass Effect video game series.? That years spent watching hard men with guns remake the world sharpened my inveterate disdain for shrill and self-righteous softness. That my years of study in the Middle East prior to that enriched and challenged my life in ways immeasurable. That game design became a craft by which I gave creative expression to this part of myself.?

Which leads me to the flip side; while I do not have imposter syndrome, I believe I am suffering from something akin to a vicarious survivor’s guilt. I have trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that not only was one of the most formative years of my life spent in a place that is now the site of the most brutal conflict of the 21st century thus far, not only was a majority of the substance of my working life after that concerned with that place’s national disintegration, not only does my mind sometimes wonder how many of my Syrian acquaintances found a premature resting place in the Aegean Sea… but all this and its meaning at any scale, from the truly earth-moving and world-history-defining ramifications to family tragedies and individual sorrows, are almost assuredly unknown to most of the people I work with now. I think of the people I personally know who were thrown into the Assad regime’s dungeons for peaceful protest, who risked starvation, torture, rape, and summary execution for having the temerity to demand freedom. For some time I felt connected to them and to the meaning of it all so long as my work felt connected to events in the region.?

And now I… work in video games. Where’s the meaning there?

At times like these I return to a 2014 essay by Molly Crabapple: We Must Risk Delight After a Summer Full of Monsters. “Life contains everything,” she writes. “Tear gas in Ferguson. Books read on the grass. [James] Foley's murder. Dancing in New Orleans, till sunrise blots the stars. We're meat—fragile and finite. But joy is survival.” The need for joy, and the search for it, is what defines us all. Those who set forth to cross deserts and seas and those who hazard death or worse to raise their voices in protest may, respectively, have safety and freedom as their primary goals. But those are merely the first stops, the material and political conditions necessary to experience the levity that makes life worth the living. Otherwise… what’s the point? Those of us who are privileged with the material conditions necessary for human thriving owe our solidarity, care, attention, and respect to those who labor at the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy, but let us not repudiate the delights of its peak.?

Before the night of New World’s release, I’m not sure I could have written the previous sentence in earnest. But sometimes celebratory drinks have a way of clarifying things in ways one may not expect. True to his word, my friend bought me a congratulatory drink at my favorite dive bar steps away from my home. And true to the norms of drinking etiquette, I insisted that at least one of the rounds be on me. When I approached the bar, I noticed that, among the TV screens playing sports, one looked out of place. Instead of a scene showing a real-world location and human beings, it appeared to show computer-generated imagery. It looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The bartender approached to take my order.?

“Hey, what game is that playing right there?” I asked.

“That? That’s League of Legends.”

“Oh word? They show that on ESPN now? Crazy! Do you play?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” he said. “I used to be really serious about it. Not so much anymore, but I still like to watch. How about you?”

“Nah, I don’t play. In fact, I’ve never played a MOBA of any kind. But I do like games. In fact, that’s the reason I’m here–I just started working in the game industry this year, and my friend and I are getting drinks to celebrate the release of the first game I’ve ever been in the credits for!” It was the first time that I had ever spoken of releasing a game to a total stranger, enthusiasm surging in my voice.

“What?! That’s awesome. What game?”

“New World!” I exclaimed.

“NO WAY! I swear my friends and I were just talking about that game! We’ve seen a bit on Twitch and were thinking of playing together.”

“NO WAY!” I responded in kind. “Well, there’s no more thinking about it–you’ve got to now that you’ve met someone who contributed to it!”

“For sure!” he replied, matching my ebullience.

We chatted for a few more minutes before I returned to my friend, whiskey in hand.?

In the past, most mentions of my work met one of three reactions: confusion, curiosity, or concern. And while the bartender’s name, sadly, has not proved as indelible in my memory as Sajida al-Rishawi’s—try as I might I cannot remember it and I haven’t seen him on any of my subsequent visits—I will remember that moment with him for the rest of my days. For it was the first time that anyone ever greeted news of my work with earnest excitement. What a privilege to have played a small part in the creation of something that may bring him and others joy in manifold and unknowable ways.?

I work in video games now. And for that I’m grateful.