Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

The soldier, blonde and sunburnt, asks her for her permit. My permit: these wrinkles older than your country’s existence.

I am but all that performance. Who took poets off park benches to put commercials for poets on park benches?

At a certain point, I’ll grab a brick. At a certain point, I wrote it in the email. They brought divinity to the crime scene to avoid justice. Justice should eat something.

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.

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.

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

Above all, although this book isn’t an attempt to free Palestine, its central thesis is that Palestine, in its historical entirety, must be liberated by any means necessary.