Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Our delegation bore witness and asked what more could be done. “Go back home and tell the world what you’ve seen here.” Rifqa wasn’t asking a favor; it was a deafening command for American awareness and accountability. Our charge was to tell their story, to amplify their voices, and to be present with the people. No one could have prepared me for what I saw with my own eyes and felt with my own heart. 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. Palestinians are not the only people to suffer at the hands of settler colonialism and Western white terrorism. Yet we cannot afford to stay quiet about what is taking place there. The state of Israel and the justification for its existence are a crimes against all of humanity. The state is the worst of the human spirit manifested into a fully functioning government.

Still, liberation is not a media strategy.

Unsettling the colonial project of lies, Mohammed is a truth teller. He wields his arsenal: a living room of poems seats us in the home of what remains, what cannot be photographed or tweeted but is in the spirit of enduring strength, the will to fight, to create, and, most importantly, to love.

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.

Poetry sees us for who we truly are, and what is in that reflection must be faced. Poetry is a home for the dispossessed; it is our belonging. Rifqa is my grandmother, and she is your grandmother, too. We are the grandchildren of her fight, her fierce and enduring love—her poetry.

A poem is a life, and a life is a poem that calls us inward. What a poem becomes in our innermost spaces is a land that cannot be owned, though it can be cared for, tended to, and loved. It is a relationship that shifts and changes with the seasons, a howl that knows us by name and need.

We are more than what was done to us; we are who we’ve become in spite of it all. Who do we choose to be, and what will we do about it?

Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we’ve always been. Mohammed El-Kurd’s poetry is a home returned to us. His poems call us home.

My mother has always said: “The most tragic of disasters are those that cause laughter.”

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

If you ask me where I’m from it’s not a one-word answer. Be prepared seated, sober, geared up. 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: We have wounded feet but the rhythm remains, no matter the adjectives on my shoulders. This is why we dance: Because screaming isn’t free. Please tell me: Why is anger–even anger–a luxury to me?

Birth begins to halve you. You are a cliché in the wind: lipstick on a mirror, shrouds in leopard print bricks thrown, rung. Your tongue genders as it needs in barbershops and bureaucracy— thick voice from a vending machine softens at the ring of a phone.

Body—a storm in waiting rooms frowning, spitting, sitting in a whirlpool, waiting on rhythm to resurge on surgeries to affirm on gavels to blow in favor of your truth.

A chain is corseting the tree’s waist and hers, flesh in flesh, olive skin on olive skin, fingersbranchesintersections rootedness jars their storms, wraps them in her unbreakable word we will not leave.

In Jerusalem, every footstep is a grave. This was only love: her skeleton is that of the tree’s, roots stitched into land into identity. Separation is like unmaking love ungluing names to places undoing God.

A soldier as old as a leaf born yesterday pulls a trigger on a woman older than his heritage.

I’m tired of making amends with soon-to-be strangers. Tired of being my mother’s favorite stranger.

Hookah out of honeyed apples, smoke where once was sex. In my lonely I spend time shoving ghosts off of balconies. I go to war in a book.

I talked to God but God never wore my shoes. Sing me a song of home break a dish or twothrow a stone or two because the screams make me nostalgic: I almost don’t fear the sirens.

Arrogant with height. One nose away from clouds. I have my grandmother’s and in the knot, tangled a homesickness for people generous with nose. My grandmother’s is beautiful; mine is one nose away from beauty, oneaway from Anglo-Saxon. I have my grandmother’s and my grandmother had pride favored functionality she was never a nose away from anything but jasmines.

Ramadanvillages retired singing, rifles sang instead, announcingdeclaring an anticipated empire on the ruins of another. Seven decades later they harvestorgans of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.

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. She left behindclothesfoldedready to be worn again; her suitcases did not declare departure.

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 was born before a closed house that I called mine but have never been in. After nine years of fines paychecks and playchecks it was openedfor them not us. The colonizersyouthfuldifferently clothed rifles smacking against their hipsterrorist nation celebrated stolen propertycallous. I cried—not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it.

“No matter how deep it drowns, the truth always washes ashore.”

What do you do when your destiny is predetermined? Life in this hospital laughs at us. Long is the wait. Wild is the wind.6 I ask if there’s a wedding going on. The nurse complained of the clouds. If I were a stupid flower, I’d wither under the rain. They asked her, What’s wrong with the flower? not What’s wrong with the rain?

It is the same killing; they do it in whispers. Fifty years later, I worry about my little brother. He is six-foot-fear. Eighteen-year-old soldiers with rifles rivaling their torsos shoot to kill. It’s the same killing everywhere. Seventy-some years later we haven’t lived a day.

Violence is not children taking on dragons. For me, it has always been apologies. Running to catastrophe with context, commissioning compassion, turning heroes into humans. This is a refuted revolution. 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.

People who give excuses for executions fear the rifle more than they fear the reason.

On July 16, 2014, four boys—aged between nine and fourteen— were killed by Israeli naval fire while playing soccer on a beach in Gaza City. Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza that you brought us to the beach to die? Was it because rubbling us in our houses, like our cousins, like our futures, like our gods, would be a bore? Was it because our cemeteries need cemeteries and our tombstones need homes? Was it because our fathers needed more grief? We were limbs in the wind, our joy breaking against the shore.

No Moses in siege. Waves stitched together, embroidered, weaved un-walkable, indivisible, passage—implausible, on most days we weep in advance.

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?

War machines are coin-operated arcade games, and your penny sprays and juvenile plays are just as greedy as a bulldozer’s mouth chewing life into debris for me to dish-wash and make poetry of.

War machines are American-made, and they are never thirsty / rivers in their throats. American water is brown and dirtied and children famished, cracked, caged in cages, / in uneducated education. Surf their boats in drought. Their knuckles stiff, cold is this verse.

The rockets, like rain, tell her to push. Her thighs spread, pushing out a purple sky, rubbled and silent. She weeps, cries her inability to mourn another. She imagines the umbilical cord, a noose.

I’m from the land of Christ cross-wearing woman. I’m from a land torn and abused by the company you work for. I spat out storms coaxing her into war, but what war could she wage when the only wage we know is minimal? What war could she wage when choice left the equation—when voice was robbed from our throats? From her throat, a cough evades conversation.

“How far is Palestine?” She asks. It’s a fifteen-hour plane ride away, a dozen unresolved UN resolutions away, a few history lessons away, a hundred and some military checkpoints away, too much G4S-provided asphyxiation.

Told to find the glass in the sand, hunger dreams of spat out generosity and cement defanged

I have memorized the patterns of breaths in which your voice invaded my throat, gloated that you are leaving me. Atlanta put me in a taxi. Transit became home. This time, in Palestine, there were no pomegranates in trees but suitcases situated by storm, and I have fled a different kind of heartache than that my mother had pickled and jarred and served for me.

I don’t hope for much more than what my grandmother hoped for.

A cluttered bedroom isn’t poetic it’s melodrama.

I am but my love for my land, by the way, I have chosen you, my homeland, in love and in obedience in secret and in public.

In truth I’m ashamed of my dreams. There are those who dream of seeing the ocean, Palestinian men who saw grave before gravel, the coffin before the coast. Newspaper blank commissions: “The Psychological Effects of Occupation.” I have never once felt free anywhere: not with the Jordanian passport; not in Santa Monica, the American T...

The comedy, though, is in the language. The things they deafen and defeat. They renamed the streets, the tombs. Hell, whole cemeteries. You want to tell them how our feet take on to the streets? You want to tell them what land means to us? They couldn’t run in my rhetoric. Run as in rule, as in campaign, as in sprint. I have gathered my bricks, a synonym for teaching. Why do you speak of the massacre at the party? You want to give out mirrors like they’re brochures?

have mailed you fire last week, did you receive my flames? They will imagine a rifle on my tongue and fix themselves fetuses in the corner, cover their ears in fear of the firecrackers and horses and rockets I’ve stuffed in my bag. They will heave their proclamation, heed my “perspective” of current affairs, I’ll hold my word to one of the men’s heads. and he’ll tremble as I press against his temple and say, Say it. Say it. Say my name without spitting.

Suheir Hammad told megrief the teacher. I saidgrief the thief. It taught me wishing myself a monkey picking lice off my brother’s head instead ofthis heretuxedos and talk.

Grief the teacher and shame the compass. I am often moved not moving. I’d rather snatch the apple out my own throatI want to snatch the apple out my own throat. I want my voice voiceless. Place gems in my sockets and I’ll pretend I can see. English calls sentimentality tacky, seldom allows sirens a breath, and I insist on this oxygen.

Never has there been a battle that ended: You wake up a word in somebody’s throat. Eight months later, a stuck elevator. The math chews on.