Loading ...Earth to Nakba
Being a Palestinian means being always in the midst of a conversation no one else can hear.
You stand in line for coffee, shuffle onto buses, climb stairs, careful not to trip despite the discordant drumming of your two disparate hearts. New York beneath your feet, but inside you it’s not so simple. You find it hard to breathe, your lungs burn with air too thin and tasting of tear gas. You stifle a cough and see—you’re the only one here suffocating.
The name of your planet is Nakba, your country is Diaspora. You’re not alone on this planet, but its citizens are far-flung. Your soul is a tangle of two clocks, freedom and futility, hope and horror. You’re the only one on your block that heard gunshots this morning. “Khan Younis is burning,” said the dawn when you woke, “Jerusalem weeps.” Your neighbors sleep through these reports. Alone, you hum a dirge into your morning tea—a pinch of sage today—and you lace your shoes. On the sidewalks you smile and converse and breathe with the half of you that’s Here. And headlines, like bullets, pierce you by the hour.
When the blood runs too high, when the Nakba crosses like a rogue comet against the sun, others gather round and glance sidelong in horror. Unnatural, they say, awed, afraid. An aberration. Some shake their head over those hot-blooded Arabs, murmur a new word they’ve learned—“Ice-Iss.” Men in suits speak of “restoring calm”—this makes clear they’ve never been to our planet, where violence takes forms both loud and silent.
In times like this, our pain runs over, evil as an oil spill, permeating walls between the chosen and unchosen. The ranks of the stricken grow. In Israel today, shaking thumbs dial loved ones’ numbers, hearts flinging against ringing ribcages, Hebrew prayers lifted desperately against a closing darkness. In the streets, flesh is slashed and bones are cracked, and we learn again the mathematics of tragedy: it multiplies with vicious velocity. A tapestry of grief gathers darkly above tossing crowds.
It is only in times like this—the moment of eclipse, the instant of unmasking—that you finds yourself standing, fully, Earth-side. Permission is granted to be Palestinian, today—the two clocks are intertwined, you are “on the map.” On days like this, people would understand if you screamed—or perhaps they want to scream at you. For a moment, the conversation is wider than your own skull, and people ask for explanation. Why?
Your scream dies in your throat. The answer to that question is the silent poison you swallow every day, but how to explain to your visitors just how much they’ve missed? Please refer to chapters one through sixty-seven.
The greatest grief for you is the cycle of silence between the punctures. Of course, not everyone must live between planets like you do. They awake to a different dawn, their gravity is not yours. But it is the sheer surprise that comes mingled with their horror that tells you how far is the gap between them and you. Perhaps that is why they can only read smoke signals, and never answer your well-penned letters. The flames rise; for a moment all are mesmerized, gazing through you at the blood-and-gold blaze.
At the end of the spectacle, the crowds will depart. You’ll turn and find the earth blackened by heat, and on the horizon, the swaying figures of your “enemies.” They stagger in silence, stooping, like you, to search the ashes.
Source: mondoweiss.net