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.

The freest people on earth are not controlled by hatred or fear but moved by love and truth.

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

As I write this, our family lawyer is attempting to persuade a settler judge to rule against settlements: a zebra at the mercy of a jury of hyenas.

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

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?

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.

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?

It’s the same killing everywhere. Seventy-some years later we haven’t lived a day.

Context: fruit knife to a firearm. He was in her throat. Fifteen-year-old girl denounced. Violence is not children taking on dragons.

nail file becomes the villain, despite context. Context: they want cats declawed, they want knocked doors unanswered, they want the other cheek.

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?

US soldier admits killing unarmed Afghans for sport: Jeremy Morlock, 23, tells US military court he was part of a “kill team” that faked combat situations to murder Afghan civilians. —Guardian, March 23, 2011

Tell them credulous, clueless audiences will strip them of rights without thought or prayer.

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.

I learned that success is mathematical and in the past tense.

Do I believe in violence? Well I don’t believe in violation.

G4S is a security contractor with a strong presence in the Israeli government. It helps run prisons, police training centers, checkpoints, settlements and military bases. Though it is contracted to provide equipment and services to Israeli prisons, G4S is deeply complicit in Israeli use of mass incarceration. Many of the 500–700 Palestinian children who are arrested, detained and prosecuted by “Israel” are held in G4S-equipped prisons.

I am but the institution, the prestige, the watermelon. Most of that poetry is theater over thunder. Most days I’m pulling pythons off my ribs.

Who took poets off park benches to put commercials for poets on park benches?

I can only describe this guilt with similes that would invalidate it. I no longer want to language, no longer want to tongue.

Adrenaline to apathy. Some days I hear them carving their cities under my skin, and hope I don’t collapse.

where revolution is TV volume lowered to make room for conversation.

A hundred years tightroping the distance between pride and self-respect.

Hope for me was a serendipitous outcome, always.

The settlers stole our chairs, and the cops sat on them. I called this collusion. My journalist friend didn’t believe me until a settler gestured to a cop to kick her out of the neighborhood. I gave her a cigarette in lieu of an “I told you so.”

Each day after school, my grandmother would welcome me at the door with jasmines wrapped in Kleenex. I grew up in her wisdom, and my poetry reflects that. She is the axis to my actions, the orchestrator of my cadence. She cameos in my poetry and praxis.

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.

Because the colonizers moved into half of the house, separated from my family only by drywall, our home’s 2009 confiscation was highly publicized. 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.

This practice of infantilization stems from the ahistorical depictions of Palestinians and Zionists in the media. 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.

Humanization, more often than not, does the exact opposite of what it alleges. I no longer feel the responsibility to give humans eyes for humanity.