Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Where am I from a necessary hostility? From fangs grown? From fingers orchestrating the room? Where am I from Bethlehem?

Bush sits beside me on the train. Iraq veteran cites his fear of fireworks. They think they’re the only ones with PTSD.We’re literate in peeling off our own skin to sleep. We live like walking debris, swallow snakes, swallow whole pharmacies, wrap our spines around the fingers of bank tellers, while Bush is at a Joanne’s picking the perfect blue.

Teta remembers what she has to: rifles in rice bags, bellies split open, women mistaking pillows for offspring, men sirening the street performing ardor, women whose gods no longer respond, men emasculated by refugee status. She does not remember my name; unkindness is much more memorablethan blood She remembers seven decades later what martyred her homeland the first time.

A microcosm of settler colonialism, I’ve been telling the media, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, a hell, whatever you want to call it! This is the second month of the blockade. The media won’t call it illegal. Zionist philanthropy carves out its home in my spine. American settlers find their way into the front yard, and their billionaires take us to court. Their laws are daggers. Their laws are hungry. Armed colonizers peacock around my street with impunity.

The settlers walk in, no questions. Barricades for them are hypothetical. I told an American reporter this is apartheid, but she’s not entirely convinced. I look at the cuts she sustained, jumping over my neighbor’s fence.

Jana was standing in her house, on May 19, when a Zionist shot her in the back. She is sixteen soon. Her spine will recover, I hope. It is those who are spineless who cannot buy themselves a spine.

We laugh as much as we can before the teargas. There’s a circus in their brutality.

The settlers stole our chairs, and the cops sat on them.

The youth remind me with firework spectacle: decolonization is not an abstract theory. See: The soldier with a stone in his fascist face. The colonizer car in flames. Surveillance cameras smashed. “Checkpoints” emptied out of their gatekeepers. I stand in awe of the hail.

As a child, I witnessed my grandmother, eighty-something at the time, as a freedom fighter, herself an ambulance, treating teargassed protesters with yogurt and onions. In 2009, I saw her rally her body against heavily armed and American-accented settlers and police in our yard, as they claimed our land as theirs by divine decree. As if God were a real estate agent.

The house became an international hub to which solidarity activists and curious liberals alike made pilgrimages. But my grandmother refused to be a humanitarian case for gazing eyes. She was not a clueless woman. She was always ready with her talking points and historical facts. 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.

The atrocities she witnessed blanketed her subconscious, so much so that, amid her memory’s decay, her stories of the Nakba were still highly detailed, her comments hurled at TV news coherent and complex.

Some people cannot exist in the past tense. For a hundred years, she walked a tightrope between pride and self-respect. My grandmother taught me everything I know about dignity. She taught me how to launch my sentences like missiles, how to be resilient. Even in the face of displacement, monetary punishment, tens of trials, and threats of imprisonment, she persisted.

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

Jerusalem was a perpetual reminder of the Zionist occupation’s actuality and terror, and my grandmother represented a time in which it didn’t exist. And she clung onto that time.

I may have been sixteen or seventeen when I started writing this book, eleven or twelve when I began writing grammatically incorrect, typo-ridden poems. Poetry was an itch to contextualize, to inform, to hinge severed limbs onto the people to whom they once belonged, to allow those people nuance.

At first, I made two mistakes. The first was that I trained myself to use “unbiased” words. What I’d refer to in Arabic as an “entity” would become a “state.” Striving for a vocabulary void of accusation, I replaced “arrogate” with “confiscate,” “dispossess” with “evict,” and “lie” with “allege.” 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.

Ironically, the regime with one of the world’s most lethal armies does not require humanization. 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. For him to be mourned, he must be in a wheelchair or developmentally delayed, a medical professional, or noticeably elderly at the very least. Even then, there are questions about the validity of his victimhood.

I no longer feel the responsibility to give humans eyes for humanity.

My political convictions crystalized when I began peacocking my people’s claim to dignity instead of burrowing within it.