Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

“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. Crossing back and forth like that, that’s talent, she says.

I live by people for whom ceilings are luxuries, for whom park benches have teeth at night, pointing upwards and into sleep’s flesh, and for whom jail cells are mandatory motels for when the city decides to dust its pillows.

and I have fled a different kind of heartache than that my mother had pickled and jarred and served for me.

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 Tel Aviv; not in New York, the American Tel Aviv; not in Tel Aviv, the American Tel Aviv.

They spit as they say my name. They acknowledge they’re on occupied land. Irony just sits there.

Will the caterpillar escape the genre?

If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. —Malcolm X

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.

Place gems in my sockets and I’ll pretend I can see.

The past few years I’ve treated airports like funeral homes— dragging my dead horses onboard new citiesnew drones. I wish I were a landlord to the tenants in my head. Wish I could pimp my painand harden. Grief the teacherand I never learn.

There are prophets in psych wards, plowing the ground. A crucifixion in asterisks. To wait by a phone is to be killed.

Somewhere in this poem Edward Said throws a rock. What’s a resumé to a tank?

What will my kids learn from a world ignorant of them?

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

I sat there in my adolescence, watching the sky turn bruised. Next time I’m in Palestine my grandmother’s name will be on stone.

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.

Why cradle a century-old woman whose punch lines are still intact?

Hope for me was a serendipitous outcome, always.

I assign imagination to memory: molotovs in Fendi bags, pamphlets in python shoes, silk scarves masquerading rampage, a grandson fascinated by both rebellions.

She does not remember my name; unkindness is much more memorablethan blood She remembers seven decades later what martyred her homeland the first time. Political conviction sticks. Chants chandeliering her subconscious Habibi? Why are you in America? School. God bless you. Mohammed who? Why America? Be careful! Tell them, “America is the reason.” Tell them, “Drink the sea.” Let them ride their tallest horses. Jerusalem is ours. The biggest punch line of all time.

The Nakba asserts Sheikh Jarrah is not an exception to the rule. 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.

They keep chanting for our death. Some of us sleep in our shoes, others sleep through the waged war.

She is the axis to my actions, the orchestrator of my cadence. She cameos in my poetry and praxis.

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.

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.

Some people cannot exist in the past tense.

I will only agree to leave Sheikh Jarrah to go back to my Haifa house that I was forced to flee in 1948, she famously said, demanding her right of return.

This, my first collection of poetry, Rifqa, I publish to honor and immortalize her. I know that Palestine will not let its icon of resilience die. Some people just do not die. I can already imagine her wrinkled face etched in the lines of stones in the Old City. I know her roots are entangled underneath my every step.

She demanded justice all her life, and much like James Baldwin, who could not live six decades more to see the “progress” he was constantly promised, “progress” has taken more than my grandmother’s time. We are yet to see the fruits of our decades-old patience. 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.

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.

The second mistake is what I will call “humanization”: I portrayed my people only in the ways that adhere to ethnocentric civility, robbing them of their agency. It is to “women and children” Palestinians to death—to infantilize Palestinians in hopes of determining that, indeed, they deserve liberation.

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.

The validity of my resistance is no longer an interesting topic. My mother once said in a (later censored) poem: Does a rooster seek permission to crow? My political convictions crystalized when I began peacocking my people’s claim to dignity instead of burrowing within it.

The human condition, arrested by a paralyzing sorrow or cold anger, remained the most interesting aspect of writing this book.

I refuse to wait in the wreck.