Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

We are made up by those we love, and it is by our relationships with people that we are transformed.

Solidarity is a feeling and a doing. It is a series of choices we make with one another. It can only be felt. It cannot be contrived or manipulated. Solidarity is not just about our shared pain or struggle but also, most importantly, about our shared joy, visions, and dreams. It is an energetic force and a resounding love.

We are more than what was done to us; we are who we’ve become in spite of it all.

Home in my memory is a green, worn-out couch and my grandmother in every poem: every jasmine picked off the backlash, every backlash picked off the tear gas, and tear gas healed with yogurt and onions, with resilience, with women chanting, drumming on pots and pans with goddamns and hasbiyallahs.

Separation is like unmaking love ungluing names to places undoing God.

Here, every footstep is a grave, every grandmother is a Jerusalem.

I see you standing like the cedars, standing at the height of my memory, in the green of the moon. I see you coming like the wind, coming. The door falls beneath the wind and rain. —Mahmoud Darwish

Seven decades later they harvestorgans of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.5 The people of Haifa left. Some fled after news some stayed, gave coffee to massacre. Somewalked a straight line into the sea back to their city refused to be martyred

Rifqa left Haifato go to Haifa to go to Haifa. Rifqa walked solid. “We’ll return once things cool down,” and she believed, wore her key until her keyher neckher memory became the same color.

Invaderscame back once again, claimed the land withfists and fireexcusesbeliefs of the chosen and the promised as if God is a real-estate agent.

I cried—not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it.

Do not reconcile even if they gift you gold. If I were to gouge out your eyes and place gems in their place would you still see? —Amal Dunqul

TV said her brother was a martyr, but martyrs go with intent. He went bullet to the head. From fist to flounder. Context is hand in his pocket. Toy guns.

My permit: these wrinkles older than your country’s existence. My smile is a sun.

But my grandmother refused to be a humanitarian case for gazing eyes.

In truth, I am not ready to eulogize her. Even in writing this, I find myself having trouble with tenses. Some people cannot exist in the past tense.

I know her roots are entangled underneath my every step.

Years ago, following a friend’s advice, I laid out dozens of printed poems on the floor to look for a common theme. And there she was—my grandmother Rifqa—in almost every poem.

This phenomenon is common among writers writing about Palestine, writers who worship the mythology of objectivity instead of satirizing it. There’s this naïve belief that Palestinians will acquire credibility only once they’ve amassed respectability. I did this to appear rational and unhostile. The truth, however, is very hostile.

In my revisions of this book, I tried, as much as I could, to make sure that the women mentioned are active participants in its rhetoric and have a say in the poem, that they aren’t just trembling in their victimhood like sticks in the wind, that they aren’t mere vehicles for extracting empathy.