A Map of Absence Page 17
but no sign of a face
the only impression
a fading scream
I never understood pain
until a seven-year-old girl
clutched my hand
stared up at me
with soft brown eyes
waiting for answers
I didn’t have any
I had muted breath
and dry pens in my back pocket
that couldn’t fill pages
of understanding or resolution
in her other hand
she held a key
to her grandmother’s house
but I couldn’t unlock the cell
that caged her older brothers
they said:
we slingshot dreams
so the other side
will feel our father’s presence!
a craftsman
built homes in areas
where no one was building
when he fell
silence
a .50 calibre bullet
tore through his neck
shredding his vocal cords
too close to the wall
his hammer
must have been a weapon
he must have been a weapon
encroaching on settlement hills
and demographics
so his daughter
studies mathematics
seven explosions
times
eight bodies
equals
four congressional resolutions
seven Apache helicopters
times
eight Palestinian villages
equals
silence and a second Nakba
our birthrate
minus
their birthrate
equals
one sea and 400 villages re-erected
one state
plus
two peoples
… and she can’t stop crying
never knew revolution
or the proper equation
tears at the paper
with her fingertips
searching for answers
but only has teachers
looks up to the sky
to see Stars of David
demolishing squalor
with Hellfire missiles
she thinks back
words and memories
of his last hug
before he turned and fell
now she pumps
dirty water from wells
while settlements
divide and conquer
and her father’s killer
sits beachfront
with European vernacular
this is our land!, she said
she’s seven years old
this is our land!
she doesn’t need history books
or a schoolroom teacher
she has these walls
this sky
her refugee camp
she doesn’t know the proper equation
but she sees my dry pens
no longer waiting for my answers
just holding her grandmother’s key
searching
for ink
TOUFIC HADDAD
Jiddo
seventy-nine years ago
my father’s father
smiled
it was a boy
and he was the first
and as these things go
you smile
and thank god
give fenugreek sweets
to the mother
to strengthen
her blood
there,
across the street
he sat
a young father
‘Toufic Khalil Haddad’
hung on his door
perhaps
I imagined him
cadastral maps
and compass
measuring
distances
between
here
and eternity
across the street
he looked out
to the cemetery …
who knows what people think when
they look to cemeteries?
perhaps
during lunch
he’d walk through
find some shade
in the scent of the dry pine needles
to think
plan
how
he would build
on the plot
in Ard al-Hamra
how
the Mutran school fees
would be paid
how
he could avoid knowing then
what we all know now
* * *
spring sun
in Jerusalem
is exquisite
deceivingly
exquisite
and I close my eyes
and sigh
shake my head
* * *
when my father
finally told me
about the day
that spring day
when the car pulled up,
and the suitcases were put in
I understood
what he was doing
I understood
about the graveyard
and the breath
you breathe
when
things you should have known
are finally known
* * *
every life
has a story
or so they say
and I
never knew
yours
jiddo
it was there
buried
in a shallow grave
with no flowers
that horrible
anonymous way
precious
things
crush
and disappear
I would like to believe
there is a transcript
where
everything
is written
and everything returns
and all wounds sewn shut
heal
even if they scar
because small things matter
but I am
too old
for stories
and history,
too long
for
exception
there are only
graves
graves you must find
graves you must mind
ATEF ABU SAIF
Excerpt from The Drone Eats with Me
The worst thing is when you realise you no longer understand what’s going on. Through the night, the tanks, drones, F16s, and warships haven’t let up for a single minute. The explosions are constant, always sounding like they’re just next door. Sometimes you’re convinced that they’re in your every room, that you’ve finally been hit. Then you realise, another miss: My mobile has run out of battery so I’m unable to listen to the news. Instead I lie in the dark and guess what’s going on, make up my own analysis.
In time, you start to distinguish between the different types of attack. By far, the easiest distinction you learn to make is between an air attack, a tank attack and an attack from the sea. The shells coming in from the sea are the largest in size, and the boom they make is much deeper than anything else you hear. It’s an all-engulfing, all-encompassing kind of sound; you feel like the ground itself is being swallowed up. Tank rockets, by comparison, give off a much hollower sound. Their explosions leave more of an echo in the air but you don’t feel it so much from beneath. In contrast, a rocket dropped from an F16 produces an unmistakable, brilliant white light as well as a long reverberation. A bomb from an F16 makes the whole street dance a little for a good thirty seconds or so. You feel you might have to jump out of the window any minute to esca
pe the building’s collapse. Different from all these, though, is the rocket from a drone. This rocket seems to have more personality – it projects a sharp yellow light into the sky. A few seconds before a drone strike, this bright light spreads over the sky as if the rocket is telling us: ‘It’s dinner time, time to feast.’
These are just impressions, of course. But impressions are what enable you to process the strange array of details you’re given. None of the attributes I am assigning to these rockets may be true. In reality, I might be exaggerating the differences or imagining them completely. But when you sit each night in your living room, waiting for death to knock at your door or send you a text message, telling you ‘death’s coming in sixty seconds’, when you look for your future and see only the unknown, when you are unable to answer the one question your kids need an answer to (‘when is it going to end, Dad?’), when you struggle to summon the strength you need each day, just to get through that day … in these situations, which are, of course, all the same situation, what else can you do but form ‘impressions.’
Tonight, we spend the whole night, until 5 a.m., surrounded by this orchestra of explosions, trying to make sense of it. At 5.30 a.m., my father-in-law comes in from the mosque and shares the news he’s picked up from the people attending the dawn prayer. Five members of the Abu Aytah family were killed while sleeping, just two hours ago. They had sought safety on the ground floor of their building, thinking that the physics of an F16 rocket would abide by their logic. With no warning, the rocket converted them into fragments. Elsewhere, tanks are now approaching Jabalia, our district, from the east, a region known as Ezbet Abed Rabbo.
The war has divided the Strip into portions, separate courses if you like, and the Lord of War is eating them one course at a time, savouring each one. When the war started three weeks ago, back when it was just air strikes, Shuja’iyya became the first course, with more than 120 killed and some 700 injured (a number that changes daily, of course, as more bodies are uncovered, more survivors pulled out of the rubble). After that, the Lord of War decided he fancied a different piece of the Gaza-cake, and moved towards Beit Hanoun. The same sort of massacre took place there, the same sort of mass exodus, only with different human ingredients. Then, three days ago, the focus shifted to Khuza’a, near Khan Younis. Thousands were displaced. Yesterday some fifty people were killed in Khuza’a alone.
Last night, the tanks approached Ezbet Abed Rabbo, which is just one kilometre from where we’re staying. Tank shells fell around us all day long. Most of the people have already left their homes over there. In the 2008–2009 war, a famous massacre was committed in Ezbet Abed Rabbo that has since been acknowledged in the UN’s Goldstone Report. Everything was destroyed. Not a single house survived the destruction. Corpses remained under the rubble for a week.
The night before last, an F16 rocket struck two streets behind us. War teaches you how to adapt to its logic but it doesn’t share its biggest secret, of course: how to survive it. For instance, whenever there’s a war on you have to leave your windows half open so the pressure from the blasts does not blow them out. To be even safer, you should cover every pane of the window with adhesive tape so that, when it does break, the shards don’t fly indoors or fall on people in the street below. It goes without saying you should never sleep anywhere near a window. The best place to sleep, people say, is near the stairs, preferably under them – that part of a building is structurally strongest. The shell that fell two nights ago landed 150 metres away. The first thing you do in the seconds afterwards, once you’ve checked on your loved ones, is inspect the damage. Usually it’s just windows and doors. This shell, it turned out, landed smack in the middle of the Jabalia cemetery. The dead do not fight wars, by and large, they’re too busy being dead, but on this occasion they were forced to participate in the suffering of the living. The next morning, dirty, grey bones lay scattered about the broken gravestones. At the moment of impact, these old corpses must have flown upwards into the air. I think about this moment. I wonder what might have happened to the spirits of these corpses in that split second of flight, what they must have made of the living occupants of Gaza, sitting patiently in their living rooms, praying for survival.
GHAYATH ALMADHOUN
Schizophrenia
I think of Palestine, the country that invented God, thus causing the bloodshed of millions of souls in the name of God. This is the country of milk and honey, where there is neither milk nor honey. This is the holy land, because of which we have waged holy wars; and we were dealt holy defeats; we were expelled by a holy expulsion, and we lived in holy refugee camps, and we died a holy death. I think of it, and then the voice of the sheikh who every time I asked, repeated one verse from the Qur’an, ‘O believers, do not ask about things which if you knew about, would trouble you.’ I still ask: ‘Which is more distant from the earth? The planet of Jupiter? Or the two state-solution? Which is nearer to my soul? A solider from my country? Or a poet from my enemy? Which is the worst thing that Alfred Nobel did? The dynamite or the Nobel Prize?’
Translated by Atef Alshaer
How I Became …
Her grief fell from the balcony and broke into pieces, so she needed a new grief. When I went with her to the market the prices were unreal, so I advised her to buy a used grief. We found one in excellent condition although it was a bit big. As the vendor told us, it belonged to a young poet who had killed himself the previous summer. She liked this grief so we decided to take it. We argued with the vendor over the price and he said he’d give us an angst dating from the sixties as a free gift if we bought the grief. We agreed, and I was happy with this unexpected angst. She sensed this and said, ‘It’s yours.’ I took it and put it in my bag and we went off. In the evening I remembered it and took it out of the bag and examined it closely. It was high quality and in excellent condition despite half a century of use. The vendor must have been unaware of its value otherwise he wouldn’t have given it to us in exchange for buying a young poet’s low-quality grief. The thing that pleased me most about it was that it was existentialist angst, meticulously crafted and containing details of extraordinary subtlety and beauty. It must have belonged to an intellectual with encyclopaedic knowledge or a former prisoner. I began to use it and insomnia became my constant companion. I became an enthusiastic supporter of peace negotiations and stopped visiting relatives. There were increasing numbers of memoirs in my bookshelves and I no longer voiced my opinion, except on rare occasions. Human beings became more precious to me than nations and I began to feel a general ennui, but what I noticed most was that I had become a poet.
Massacre
Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired. ‘They cross the bridge at daybreak fleet of foot’ and die with no phone coverage. I see them through night-vision goggles and follow the heat of their bodies in the darkness; there they are, fleeing from it even as they run towards it, surrendering to this huge massage. Massacre is their true mother, while genocide is no more than a classical poem written by intellectual pensioned-off generals. Genocide isn’t appropriate for my friends, as it’s an organised collective action and organised collective actions remind them of the Left that let them down.
Massacre wakes up early, bathes my friends in cold water and blood, washes their underclothes and makes them bread and tea, then teaches them a little about the hunt. Massacre is more compassionate to my friends than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Massacre opened the door to them when other doors were closed, and called them by their names when news reports were looking for numbers. Massacre is the only one to grant them asylum regardless of their backgrounds; their economic circumstances don’t bother Massacre, nor does Massacre care whether they are intellectuals or poets, Massacre looks at things from a neutral angle; Massacre has the same dead features as them, the same names as their widowed wives, passes
like them through the countryside and the suburbs and appears suddenly like them in breaking news. Massacre resembles my friends, but always arrives before them in faraway villages and children’s schools.
Massacre is a dead metaphor that comes out of the television and eats my friends without a single pinch of salt.
Both translated by Catherine Cobham
ASHRAF FAYADH
Being a Refugee
Being a Refugee means standing at the end of the line
to get a fraction of a country.
standing is something your grandfather did, without knowing the reason.
and the fraction is you.
Country: a card you put in your wallet with your money.
Money: pieces of paper with pictures of leaders.
Pictures: they stand in for you until your return.
Return: a mythical creature that appears in your grandfather’s stories.
Here ended the first lesson.
The lesson is conveyed to you so that you can learn the second lesson, which is
‘what do you signify?’
Translated by Mona Kareem and Jonathan Wright
The Last of the Line of Refugee Descendants
You give the world indigestion, and other problems, too.
Do not force the ground to vomit,
And stay close to it, very close.
A fracture that can’t be set,
A fraction that can’t be resolved
Or added to the other numbers,
You cause some confusion in global statistics.
We are actors without getting paid. Our role is to stand as naked as when our mothers gave birth to us, as when the Earth gave birth to us, as the news bulletins gave birth to us, and the multi-page reports, and the villages that border on settlements, and the keys my grandfather carries. My poor grandfather, he did not know that the locks had changed. My grandfather, may the doors that open with digital cards curse you and may the sewage water that runs past your grave curse you. May the sky curse you, and not rain. Never mind, your bones can’t grow from under the soil, so the soil is the reason we don’t grow again.
Granddad, I’ll stand for you on the Day of Judgment, because my private parts are no strangers to the Camera.
Do they allow filming on the Day of Judgment?
* * *
Granddad, I stand naked every day without any judgement, without anyone needing to be any last trumpet, because I have been sent on in advance. I am Hell’s experiment on planet Earth.