Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Rifqa wasn’t asking a favor; it was a deafening command for American awareness and accountability.

You cannot unsee once you have seen. I thought I was a radical poet before, but Palestine uprooted any sense of who I thought I was. I became more me, more true, more fearless. I saw the audacity of evil and how it can be rationalized.

The state of Israel and the justification for its existence are a crimes against all of humanity.

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.

Birth lasts longer than death. In Palestine death is sudden, instant, constant, happens in between breaths.

I fluctuated between hatred and adoration, stacking and hoarding Darwish’s reasons to live sometimesbelieving them, sometimes dipping my bread in indulgence, knowing a child is breadless, in Khan Yunis, dipped in a roof’s rubble …

If hearing about a world other than yours makes you uncomfortable, drink the sea, cut off your ears, blow another bubble to bubble your bubble and the pretense. Blow up another town of bodies in the name of fear.

This is why we dance: Because screaming isn’t free. Please tell me: Why is anger–even anger–a luxury to me?

My grandmother—Rifqa— was chased away from the city, leaving behind the vine of roses in the front yard. Sometimewhen youth was more than just yearning, She left poetry. What I writeis an almost. I writean attempt.

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

Years passed and the vines of the roses werevines of grapes, vines of barbed wires, ripping open the veins of this city.

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

People who give excuses for executions fear the rifle more than they fear the reason. I put her in tulle—girl to their gaze, angel to their accusations. Otherwise nail file becomes the villain, despite context.

Was it because our cemeteries need cemeteries and our tombstones need homes?

Here, we know two suns: earth’s friend and white phosphorus. Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it. What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?

Are you American? she would ask some of the visitors, before letting them know that the United States is largely to blame for our homelessness and statelessness. She would say the same to people from England. We don’t want your sympathy, we want your action, she would say. Her punch lines intact.

I am heartbroken that she died without having seen a free Palestine, though I promise her that the grandchildren have not forgotten. This fight is a revolution until victory. Rifqa embodied that until her very last breath.

I learned that poetry is planting a bomb in a garden—a masquerade. Language is not free.

The world can grieve Israeli loss without qualifiers, despite the disparities in the death toll. In contrast, we must qualify our dead with reminders of their nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilites. A Palestinian man cannot just die.