Isn’t this what burial rites are about? We send our lost loved ones, who are part of ourselves, to an afterlife, with or without accessories, but always with words, prayers that launch their departure into our memories. And so it is with the part of ourselves we bury in our books: memories of self that, when we revisit in the marginalia we leave behind in the printed page, we encounter as a version of our afterlife.
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Israel and the United States erase even Palestinian ghosts from existence.
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I am terrified to think that the steady snail-pace of pro-Palestinians solidarity in the US has not recognized how largely it has leaned on the near absolute condition of Palestinian suffering.
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What matters more? The number of Palestinian dead or the number of Palestinians who will endure a life worse than death after the Israeli desire for carnage is sated.
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How did Israel get here? How different was the beginning? It is time you ask this question without blaming the Palestinians. Look inward, deeply, kindly, in true mirrors, and win back your heart.
…to think, to give up thinking, to look for the key, to wonder, to do nothing, to regret the passing of time, to find a solution.
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to be ecstatic about the garden’s beauty, to observe the quality of light, to distinguish the roses from the hyacinths.
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To yearn for spectacular suns.
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To catch a glimpse of one’s childhood.
To transform matter into spirit. To cross the threshold.
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To face the iridescent inner chaos.
To lose the limit between the self and its environment.
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To not forget, ever. To swear by the mountain and its height that nothing will ever be forgotten.
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To get out of the house, of the self.
To feel impatient in front of nothingness.
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To hammer one’s anguish into oneself. To bring about a bird’s world in one’s imagination.
Garden, I chose you,
you are the time
I want to lose.
He who dies here does not die by chance. Rather he who lives, lives by chance, because not one span of earth has been spared the rockets and not one spot where you can take a step has been saved from an explosion. But I don’t want to die under the rubble. I want to die in the open street.
The perfect victim shrinks the scope of humanity for Palestinians. It means always being non-violent. It means only crying and no screaming. When talking about scope I mean the whole spectrum of emotion.
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There is a burden put on Palestinian children to show the humanity of all the people of Palestine.
I scatter you before me line by line with a mastery I possessed only in beginnings.
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How can letters take on so many words? How can words have enough space to embrace the world?
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Later you will learn how to arrange stars in the closet of memory.
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We, who walk upon this night , driven out of place and myth.
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Today, today is all of time.
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Prison is density. No one spends a night there without training his throat on what resembles singing, for that is the way one is allowed to tame solitude and preserve the dignity of pain.
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…as long as the beginning remains alive in us.
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But you are used to solving it with cunning as you tell reality: You are only a figment, and tell imagination: You are the only reality I can depend on.
I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.
To see the violence can be to unlearn how it is not seen.
Our exhaustion with something is how we know so much about it - trying experiences as a revelation of structure.
A killjoy truth is also what is hard to know, what we might resist knowing because of what we sense we wold have to give up.
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Or if we don’t see it, see what we need to see, we commit ourselves to learning, solidarity requires giving attention to what demands it, the violence of colonial occupation.
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We see the violence of how people turn away from the violence, turn away from those who suffer the consequences. We will not turn away. Solidarity also means being willing to keep opening that door, to the hardest most painful truths, the violent colonial histories kept present.
My most earnest advice amid these difficult times is this: Don't try to lock your grief out of the house. Eventually, it will beat down your door and overpower you. Or worse, the parts of you that are soft enough to grieve will grow hard. When we forget how to grieve, we forget how to love. Invite your grief in from the cold, make it a cup of hot tea, share space with it, understand it, and understand yourself. Love the parts of you that are soft enough to grieve. Rage against the deadening of that softness. Sometimes, tears are a defense of our humanity.