“The Only Democracy in the Middle East”

Please leave your house immediately. 

Do not call it a home. 

This is our home not yours. 

Security demands it. 

Always, always, security. 

Our security. 

Take nothing, ask nothing. 

Stand over there, against the rubble, where 

you belong. All young men, come with us. 

You may not see your families again. 

No saying goodbye or hugging. 

We have suffered too much 

thanks to everyone 

but you are the only ones we can touch. 

Don’t give us any trouble.

-from Transfer (American Poets Continuum) by Naomi Shihab Nye

Lament

Tired of defending them like they were my own,
Tired of grieving them as if they were my kin;
I too am tired of seeing their bloodied faces on my screen.
They're not mine. I thought they were humanity's,
But there is no such thing. They're noone's.
Alone they passed through that gate,
Alone they moved beyond...
Beyond this world, beyond its ugliness,
And beyond ours.
May we never be forgiven; we unworthy of clemency.
May their wretched ghosts haunt us, we who watched on.
May their truncated lives curse ours; we deserve no better,
We who live on, as if they never happened.

It Goes...

Song (Re)Cycle 2014: Of Hope II

And so it goes…

Wayward it goes,
Forward it goes,
It goes…

Stumbling it goes,
Hurtling it goes,
It all goes…

And we remain,
Seated in our skins
Picking the remains of the sea from our teeth
Sipping the horizon like it never changes

And humming.

(Originally posted on May 6, 2005; re-posted on July 24, 2006)

Verso Books

Following suit of Verso Books, in response to what's happening in Gaza, I am offering my friends free downloads of e-books I got from Verso, as long as you promise to buy from Verso at some point something equivalent to the download's value to support this great publisher: http://wel.ly/verso

The e-books offered are the following:

The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein
Controversial indictment of those who exploit the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own gain

Reflections on Anti-Semitism by Alain Badiou, Eric Hazan, et al.
Dissecting how facile accusations of "anti-Semitism" are used to stifle dissent.

Hollow Land by Eyal Weizman
Acclaimed exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel Edited by Audrea Lim
Ebook now available for download for free.

Breathe

Song (Re)Cycle 2014: Of Hope I

Take a deep breath.

Hold it
Until you can feel its green lime
Bite at the edges of your being.

Now release it
So far that you cannot tell
It was ever yours.

Repeat,
As required.

(Originally posted on May 8, 2005; re-posted on July 24, 2006)

SONG (re)CYCLE

Here we go again...

Since I haven't been able to write much poetry since this whole nightmare started, I have been mostly translating/posting other people's words: old songs, e-mails, other bloggers' posts... Which made me think of recycling some of my older poetry, much of which was written after the death of my grandmother and around the beginning of the Iraq War, and which uncannily expresses much of the emotion I am choking on these days. Maybe it's because Iraq was a more distant subject for me than Lebanon/Palestine that I was able to voice it then... For the longest time afterwards I hated those poems; I thought they were too angry, too raw, too... But after reading them again today, I felt they voice this cry stuck in my throat quite satisfactorily. So, I have decided to post them again; some unedited, some quite revised...

(Posted originally on Monday, July 24, 2006)

Mahmoud Darwish: "On This Earth" محمود درويش: "على هذه الأرض

على هذه الأرض

:علَى هَذِهِ الأَرْض مَا يَسْتَحِقُّ الحَياةْ
تَرَدُّدُ إبريلَ
رَائِحَةُ الخُبْزِ فِي الفجْر
آراءُ امْرأَةٍ فِي الرِّجالِ
كِتَابَاتُ أَسْخِيْلِيوس
أوَّلُ الحُبِّ
عشبٌ عَلَى حجرٍ
أُمَّهاتٌ تَقِفْنَ عَلَى خَيْطِ نايٍ
وخوفُ الغُزَاةِ مِنَ الذِّكْرياتْ

:علَى هَذِهِ الأَرْض مَا يَسْتَحِقُّ الحَياةْ
نِهَايَةُ أَيلُولَ
سَيِّدَةٌ تترُكُ الأَرْبَعِينَ بِكَامِلِ مشْمِشِهَا
 ساعَةُ الشَّمْسِ فِي السَّجْنِ
غَيْمٌ يُقَلِّدُ سِرْباً مِنَ الكَائِنَاتِ
هُتَافَاتُ شَعْبٍ لِمَنْ يَصْعَدُونَ إلى حَتْفِهِمْ بَاسِمينَ
وَخَوْفُ الطُّغَاةِ مِنَ الأُغْنِيَاتْ

:علَى هَذِهِ الأَرْض مَا يَسْتَحِقُّ الحَياةْ
عَلَى هَذِهِ الأرضِ سَيَّدَةُ الأُرْضِ
أُمُّ البِدَايَاتِ أُمَّ النِّهَايَاتِ
كَانَتْ تُسَمَّى فِلِسْطِين
صَارَتْ تُسَمَّى فلسْطِين
 سَيِّدَتي: أَستحِقُّ، لأنَّكِ سيِّدَتِي، أَسْتَحِقُّ الحَيَاةْ

محمود درويش--

”.على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة”

.مقطع  شهير من هذه القصيدة  لمحمود درويش منقوشة على أحد أسوار مخيم البقعة في الأردن

“On this earth there is that which deserves life.” 

The famous opening line of this poem by Mahmoud Darwish 

written on the wall of a Palestinian refugee camp in Baqa’a, Jordan.

On This Earth

"On this earth there is that which deserves life:
the recurrence of April,
the smell of bread at dawn,
the opinion of a woman in men,
the writings of Aeschylus,
the beginning of love,
moss on a stone,
mothers standing on a flute’s string,
and the invaders’ fear of memories.

On this earth there is that which deserves life:
the end of September,
a woman leaving forty in all her prime,
the hour of sun at prison,
clouds mimicking a flock of beings,
a people cheering those who ascend to their fate smiling,
and the tyrants’ fear of songs

On this earth there is that which deserves life:
On this earth there is the lady of the land,
The mother of beginnings, the mother of endings.
It used to be called Palestine, it will be called Palestine.
My lady: I deserve, because you are my lady, I deserve life."

--Mahmoud Darwish
(Translated by Ashraf Osman)

'Tropical Lament'

"It rains so long and hard here, I'm remembering
All the rain of my childhood, the pearls
Of hail I'd hold in my hands
After a storm.

This rain isn't going to stop
Until it's made a moat around me,
A grave the shape of a ring.
______________________This rain
Is falling now wherever she is, who survives me;
It's soaking her clothes through to the skin,
Which used to be all fire.

When will it finally drown me?
Sometimes, remembering her hips, I feel afraid.
Sometimes I'm afraid she's gone—
That memory and music are all that's left of her.

But I'm tired of the rain's dark harmony.
I'm tired of everybody telling me:
Lift yourself up, never go down!
Don't we maybe lift ourselves, going down?

And the rain keeps singing on this coast without a sea."

—Joe Bolton

"The Name of Desire"

The Holiday Inn Vanderbilt, Nashville 

After the many-colored but mostly blue
Seasons of our two solitudes—the hours
Of longing and the flight from longing, the years
Spent remembering as if memory were true—
We stand together on a balcony
Above the city of losses, the city of lights
Bouncing back off a starless sky, the city
Where we'll try to save this night from the death of nights.
Ours has become a life in which the self
And the self's other begin to anticipate the chances
Taken in the name of desire. Desire:
That sweet song the body sings to itself,
Or under the best of circumstances
The song two bodies sing to each other.

--Joe Bolton

Mahmoud Darwish, "The Smell of Cities" محمود درويش, رائحة المدن

“المدن رائحة: عكا رائحة اليود البحري والبهارات. حيفا رائحة الصنوبر والشراشف المجعلكة. موسكو رائحة الفودكا على الثلج. القاهرة رائحة المانجو والزنجبيل. بيروت رائحة الشمس والبحر والدخان والليمون. باريس رائحة الخبز الطازج والأجبان ومشتقات الفتنة. دمشق رائحة الياسمين والفواكة المجففة. تونس رائحة مسك الليل والملح. الرباط رائحة الحناء والبخور والعسل. وكل مدينة لا تُعرفُ من رائحتها لا يُعوَّل على ذكراها. وللمنافي رائحة مشتركة هي رائحة الحنين إلى ما عداها... رائحة تتذكر رائحة أخرى. رائحة متقطعة الأنفاس، عاطفيّة تقودك كخارطة سياحية كثيرة الاستعمال إلى رائحة المكان الأول. الرائحة ذاكرةٌ وغروب شمس. والغروب هنا توبيخ الجمال للغريب.”

 'محمود درويش, 'في حضرة الغياب―

“Cities are scents: Acre is the scent of marine iodine and spices; Haifa, the scent of pine and rumpled sheets; Moscow, the scent of vodka on ice; Cairo, the scent of mango and ginger; Beirut, the scent of sun, sea, smoke, and lemon; Paris, the scent of fresh bread, cheese, and the derivatives of intrigue; Damascus, the scent of jasmine and dried fruits; Tunis, the scent of night musk and salt; and Rabat is the scent of henna, incense, and honey. And every city not known for its scent is not worth mentioning. And lands of exile have a common scent, which is that of longing for elsewhere… A scent remembering another, a scent of intermittent breaths, emotional, leading you like a tourist map that’s been used too often to lead to the scent of the first place. Scent is a memory and a sunset. And sunset, here, is beauty's rebuke to the foreigner."

―Mahmoud Darwish, “In the Presence of Absence” (translated by Ashraf Osman)

"In Spring (2)" by Joe Bolton

You do what you can
to be modern in a country
of fields stitched together
with barbed wire the hunters cut through
before it has a chance

to rust, fields
mapped off by gravel roads
that refuse to swerve,
that make paths for the sun to follow each day.
You do what you can.

But you are late
or early for stylishness,
and all the cities and affluence you will know
are delicate tendrils the white motion
of your slender hands
can raise from the thawed earth.

(By Joe Bolton from"Uncollected Poems" in The Last Nostalgia)

Self-Sabotage

 

Last year I interviewed an artist (Tania Bruguera) who'd played Russian roulette as an artwork—not once, but twice! No one I spoke to outside the art world seemed to get it, piling on incensed superlatives of outrage and accusations of insanity. Tania, very appropriately, called her performance “Self-Sabotage”. And recently, with what’s happening in Lebanon, I could think of no other work that sums up the situation there so succinctly and powerfully: the entire country is playing Russian roulette! Not once, not twice, not three or four or five times, but… But how do you even count this? By cars? By people? By days? And where do you even start? Every time I hear about another car bomb in Lebanon I feel like another gun went off at my temple. But it’s not my life that’s at stake here; it’s the lives of my loved ones. This time they’re safe, and the last time they were, too; and the time before that… But how many times can we all play this insane game of collective Russian roulette before we all lose together?

 

"Bombing in Beirut Kills Four: Blast Hits Southern Beirut District"

(Originally posted on January 21, 2014)

Another Day in Paradise

Another day of pretending it didn't happen: it's just news on the TV, only as real as "reality TV"… Another day of counting blessings: they're alive, it was close, but they're all okay; all those I care about made it through… Another day of moving forward: everyone's okay, move on, next; there's a project to work on, a symposium to organize, the things of the civilized world, the world where people voice their misapprehensions instead of bomb them… Another day behind the impregnable borders of this world, this safe grey world of rules: try as they may, desperate outsiders can only dent the peace of its gates by their insistence of dying against them every now and again…  Another day, another reminder of mortality, of distance, of the frailty of life, the futility of our endeavors, the silliness of our humanity…

Terror strikes again in Beirut southern suburbs, five dead

(Text originally posted on November 19, 2013)