Language Has Failed Us.

An Israeli Occupation Soldier, hand on gun, screams at a Palestinian father and his child. The man is risking a beating and arrest to come near the construction site, and many such as him have already been killed by soldiers along the Wall's construction route. And yet the entire village has come out with him, the elderly and the young, along with a handfull of courageous and progressive Israelis and Americans, to tell the Israelis to stop. It has happening every week since 2004, one of the more remarkable non-violent resistance projects in the world, and yet it remains virtually unmentioned in the American media.

In the background, center, one the Israeli army's omnipresent Sniper Towers overlooks the village and its lands. At right, the insect-like claw of an American-made Caterpillar bulldozer strips the land, ripping an enormous gash along the path of the wall. The child is visibly terrified, and she has every right to be. Israeli Occupation Soldiers have murdered over 700 Palestinian children in the last 1,500 days, and have shot and hospitalized another 13,000 children.

The Palestinians are protesting the illegal confiscation of their land and the construction of a massive prison wall to enclose the village of Imnizel, near Hebron. Nearly 60% of the West Bank is being seized for the exclusive use of Jewish Settlers, for the construction of roads that only Jews can drive on and cities that only Jews can live in. To make sure the land's rightful owners don't cause any distress to the delicate sensibilities of the Jewish extremists who are stealing it, millions of Palestinians are being walled up in hundreds of diconnected prison districts.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Nayef Haslamoun, Imnizel, Occupied West Bank, July 6, 2005
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

....

LANGUAGE HAS FAILED ME
by Suheir Hammad


I am told to believe nothing I read
Then everything I read
I am given my own face to be wary of
I am told to fear colors as alerts
I am told over and over
Iraq is not Palestine
Kabul is not New York

The photos
Women Raped
Posed as girls gone wild
This is entertainment This is staged This is
recorded
Men Chained
Do words such as humiliation and torture
Truly fit the immensity of these acts?
What happens to those who survive?
What happens to those responsible?

Haiti is not Chechnya
Chiapas is not East L.A.
Iraq is not Palestine
Over and over I am told

I am given a vantage point and a lens and instructed
Do not move Do not look up Do not look down

I am falling

2.

No connections here
No illuminated parallels
Two different histories and two different peoples
Make no links
Do not confuse the issues

Only confuse the people

For 56 years Israel has legitimized
This type of behavior
Sanctioned violence in the name of a god
Who does not have enough love for us all
A god who chooses sides
A god who has favorites and chosen ones
A god who cuts deals and shuffles souls
The type of god who does not answer prayers
Who understands only one language
A god who does not worry his beautiful mind with
Such ugliness
I am told this is America’s god

The photos from Rafah Palestine
It is 1948 and 2004 in the same frame
Their eyes say to the camera
What will you do with this pain?
Where will you take it?
Can you take it from me?

This space between the lens and the subjects
Is concentrated with pleas for witness
With promises of cycles unbroken
With children’s bicycles under the rubble of once were
homes

Another level of exile is being constructed

And I am falling

Aaagghh, ya Phalesteen
What is it about us they hate so much?
This face? These eyes? This obstinate refusal to
die?
How much trauma can one nation endure with the world
staring?
Some mouths open in shock
Others silent and sneering
While women scream at a frequency the living cannot
hear
Again? Again ya Phalesteen?

3.

How fucked up is it that I have to choose between
ending
One occupation or another?
Partition my time and portion my information

I have to make Nice Play Fair and Polite
When I want to tear open my chest to void it of this
emptiness
This ache has eaten into my head and wears down my
dreams
My friends worry I am not eating enough
Am taking too much on Too much in
I find nowhere to rest this responsibility

If I say nothing I am complicit
If I say something I am isolated as extreme
As a theorist in conspiracy
As if war is ever a coincidence
As if genocide simply happens

This is about oil and land and water
This is about illusion and the taking on of airs
The poor once again the munitions in rich men’s
cannons

This is about light and dark
There is no black and white in humanity

I am told
Venezuela is not Cuba
Rwanda is not Kurdistan

I am not the woman kneeling
In front of soldiers and their cameras and their
weapons
I am not the child shot in the head by the Israeli
Defense Forces
I am not the starving AIDS inflicted mother
Praying I live longer than my children
So they will not be orphaned and sick and have to bury
me
I am not the child who watched
Her family chopped to death in Lebanon in Sudan in
Nicaragua
I am not the father who leaves his children so as not
to hear their
empty Bellies call out Baba, where is the bread?

I am the woman whose taxes outfitted this tragedy
The American the Authority does not speak for
The Arab the Arab leaders do not speak for
The woman whose shouts of Not in My Name
Were spit back at me as a slogan of the misguided at
best
I am the girl from Brooklyn told to mind her business
I am the poet in search of new words
And a new world Not Mars

4.

We use antiquated terms that cannot stretch enough to
touch this truth
We have not learned from the past enough to not repeat
it

I am told it has always been this way
War and Pillage
Rape is older than prostitution
And prostitution is the oldest politic
The way the world has always been
The pimps and those they pimp

The human race has always left
Those who fall behind

If I am to survive then
I learn from the present
From the future promised

We learn to live with madness
One cannot be healthy in a sick world
Only navigate illnesses Only medicate wounds
Pray you are not contagious
Try to hurt no one

My elders say dissent has always been watched
Radical ideas have always been recorded
But even those who have lived on the margins admit
Under breath It has never been this bad

Not everyone is suffering True
Most thirst
A few swim in pools that fake connection to seas
Most starve
I throw away meals I have no appetite for
You can shop from your couch and eat food fast
And never think about anything other than your credit
card debt
And the next hour’s purchases
Shop and stop asking questions
I have envied this stupor
Even knowing it is the least honorable suicide
Even knowing its apathy is another kind of murder

5.

Sometimes all you can do is inhale and exhale
Life a shallow version of its potential
Sometimes all you can do is search for life where you
are
In the city A flash of yellow on the basketball
court
The divine geometry in the pattern of a girl’s hijab

For a week I have been cleaning and knifing enough
Parsley for tabbouleh to feed hundreds
I pray over the green
That what I make will feed those in need of a meal

There is still love in us
The proof is that we are watching it die
There is still hope in us
Hope is there in my sisters’ eyes
There is still enough resistance in us
To create a world where there is no
Your people or my people
But our people
Our people who kill Our people who are killed

I somehow know love will save us
The proof is in the stories not broadcast
The poems not published
The truth between the lies
The stories whispered in the dusk of this day

I know somehow love will save us
Though I can’t find the passion or desire in my body
to make it
There is still a source for peace deeply embedded in
this chaos

I know love will save us
Though words fail to point out how

Amazingly I still pray
To a god I envision to be larger than any nation Any
religion

And I still hunt for language to gather into a poem
That I pray will feed those like me
In need of proof they are not alone

Suheir Hammad
www.suheirhammad.com


....
Here I build my home and here you have destroyed my home
And if this is not legal, what about yours, my cousin?

Ours is a house that was not approved by any of your laws
Our house you will never erase.

-- MC Tamer Nafar



A lot of people these days like to toss around phrases like "Say No To Terror" -- for many such people, saying this is an ironically succint way of expressing their wholehearted support for terrorism - OUR terrorism, at any rate. Please, they are saying, let our terrorism continue, but for gods sake don't make us look at it.

Most of the time, such declarations are intended as a show of strength and solidarity, an attempt to keep fear at bay.

I wonder how many Americans would recognize that this image from Occupied Palestine expresses precisely the same sentiment of defiance in the face of terror?

Say No to terror, indeed.



Please take a moment from your day to play this song loud enough that the neighbors can hear:
www.arna.info/Arna/dam-play.php