“Watching the world from a space station” is the translated biography description from the Arabic language to English on Bisan Owda’s Instagram account @wizard_bisan1. Bisan Owda, a 25-year-old youth activist and filmmaker created her Instagram account in 2018, followed by her YouTube channel “Wizard Bisan” created in 2021.
With only 1.67K followers on YouTube, Bisan in her video titled “” which means “From and To Gaza” states that “the stories told in this episode show how Gaza was open to the world. Now we do not have an airport or railway, but we have stories to tell” (Bisan Owda 7:55-8:17). Bisan illustrates the ways the blockade imposed in 2007 restricted, controlled and limited the entrance and exit of Gaza. Bisan Owda emphasizes that despite the limitation of mobility, the people continue to live through storytelling.
“Hikawatia” meaning storyteller in English, is the name of the project that Bisan Owda was working on as she produced and documented stories about the places within Palestine and Gaza entangling historical facts and oral stories that have shaped the culture in Gaza. On August 26th, 2022, Bisan created an Instagram post for @caravanroya channel titled “Churches in Gaza…” and in this video, Bisan provides the historical depth of Christianity within Gaza beginning with The Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyries which was established between 402AD-407AD. In this video, Bisan illustrates not only the deep history of Gaza but also the interrelations of Christianity’s architecture within an Islamic dominated population.
On October 19th 2023, The Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius was bombed by Israeli air strikes which killed many and injured even more Gazans that were taking refuge to flee the conflict in the Northern Gaza border. Since October 7th, 2023, Bisan Owda found herself among the hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Gaza trying to survive. Bisan begins her videos with “I’m still alive,” which has become a collective expression that echoes through all the social media accounts varying from the press, content creators and everyday civilians in Gaza today. Bisan Owda like the thousands of displaced Gazans found herself seeking refuge between hospitals, UN schools and city structures that are meant to be secure but have instead become targets to exterminate civilians by a large scale.
Examining how selfies are used by activists to connect, Bisan Owda does exactly that: “Within a networked culture, people can communicate through images as well as text. Activism … can leverage this capacity to also bring personalities and faces into their message, which become a part of civic engagement” (Eler). Through storytelling, Bisan Owda’s content used to engage the world with information about Gaza, women’s rights, father figures and a multitude of social systems and institutions that surround her world. Due to recent political forces Bisan Owda’s content urgently shifted from educating to survival and a plea to end the bombardments of Israel on civilians. She currently flees from one part of Gaza to another trying to document her survival and showcase herself witnessing firsthand the atrocities being committed by the continuous Israeli bombardments in Gaza. As one of the few English speaking Gazans who has access to electricity and internet connection because she obtained an Egyptian sim card, her Instagram account now has one million followers.
On October 10th, 2023, Bisan shared devastating news of the destruction of her office by the Israeli’s air strike. She had worked as a free-lancer and it took her and her team two years to create a space for her work. Like many other people in Gaza, her dreams have been destroyed and her only hope is to get out alive.
On October 31, 2023, Bisan uploaded a video on Instagram exclaiming: “A massacre happened just an hour ago in Jabalia. In Jabalia, more than 400 people between injuries and people have been murdered. Ambulance crews and civilians trying to take them from under the rubble, from under the fire, to take them to [the] hospital. This is insane, people have been killed every single minute. Do you hear this? The bombing is continuous, like around us! People are being killed right now. These are crowded places, there’s no safe places, and there is no way to escape this! Ceasefire Now!” (Refugee Camp Bombed By Israeli Airstrikes). As one of the few English speaking voices coming out of Gaza today, Bisan urges and pleads for a cease fire as she screams for her voice to be heard, as a human being. Speaking out in only English compared to her previous videos, in which she speaks in both English and Arabic, the intended audience for her recent videos is to the western audience and governments who have been funding and justifying the killings by Israel during this genocide as the media outlets repeat the phrase of “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Bisan Owda’s recent content breaks and conflicts with the narratives of the Israeli government and reveals the atrocious massacre that is being committed to her and 2.3 million Gazans citizens today.
In addition to the genocide, Bisan Owda fights another war online as her Instagram account is censored, shadow banned in additions to the restriction of internet access and electricity to upload the captured videos she has of her survival. Bisan Owda expereinces the genocide and witnesses the atrocities firsthand she attempts to save her Instagram account from being deleted by showing as little as she can of the atrocities but enough for the viewers to feel the panic in her voice, surroundings and all around her. Her content in the past three weeks are of her speaking into the camera to tell the world of what is happening, with little visual exposure to the real atrocities she is witnessing.
In the latest Reel on her Instagram account uploaded on November 3, 2023, Bisan Owda expresses shock at the airstrike that hit the entrance of Al-Shifa hospital where she was standing only two minutes earlier: “This could have been me!” Bisan shares expressing fear of such close proximity to the bombs.
In The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, Venkat studies the urgency of reading refugee narratives and questions: “To what end? How can works of literature hold national superpowers accountable for their failure? What are the ways in which the idea of unsettlement as territorial and emotional displacement, as physical and virtual disruption of life, could be mobilized as a practice of reading?” (Venkat 34). These questions intended for the audience to think about what it would take for changes to be made and how one can make the changes when they experience or go through horrific events as victims of superpowers. Literary works are meant for the audience to question “What could I do?” in the midst of a crisis. As Bisan Owda is currently experiencing the genocide in Gaza: the very purpose of those narratives in literature are there to make us act, react and be active in resisting the atrocities when they happen in front of our eyes as we should be able to recognize the patterns from the literature we have read through our studies.
Sources:
Eler, Alicia. Ch. 7 “Selfie Gazing.” The Selfie Generation: How Our Self-Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture. Skyhorse Publishing, 2017.
Owda, Bisan. Refugee Camp Bombed By Israeli Airstrikes. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CzEsCLONqFK/
Owda, Bisan. Wizard Bisan. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5dBvUJKWnY&t=357s
Venkat Mani. “Theorizing Unsettlement: Refugee Narratives as Literary Ration Cards.” The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives. Ed. Evyn Le Espritu Gandhi, Vinh Nguyen. 2023, pp. 26-38.
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