(TW: This is written in the light of the unfathomable strength, courage and resolve of the people of Palestine and an earnest prayer for this genocide, ethnic cleansing and colonial settlement to end soon.)
A façade. Enveloping, gradually insisting in the prevalence of a narcissistic idealism, one that feeds the fed and not the hungry. One that denies the deprived of any sort of self-apprehension, of a right to demand the truth. Truth itself is the arch-nemesis of hypocrisy for both exist in an irascible dynamic, one that blossoms and annihilates; what you might ask. Humanity knows well enough, however in meekness lies innocence for even the dead are but ashamed at the nakedness of their vice or virtue indeed whatever it might be: the plight remains in the nozzle of a gun, either aimed to shoot or to defend for even in the existence of a method to kill, the carcasses will accumulate and the blood will moisten.
“Blooms of tulips and violets…marigolds…uhh…lavender perhaps. What is even there to begin with?” “Hassan! The paper, I need it in five. CNN has already aired the news, we cannot afford to fall back anymore. Get on it, now!” chanted Mr. Davis as he does every fateful day. That is what he has been employed for after all; the manager of the Journalistic Department in Ramallah, Palestine; where was I then again? Yes, the variants of flowers that I had been left to rummage through which regarded a home in our garden, or as I write this, hopefully our garden. Qirat, my common law partner had grown up in hounds of verdancy, my late Aunt being a florist; it runs in the genealogical bloodlines in my best suspicion.
I could only so far squeamish beneath the dwindling supply of creative juices that remained reminiscent in my brain: there had been another airstrike in Gaza, the third consistent one in under three consecutive days. We all were floundering beneath bloodbaths and the earthen clay of our own homes solidifying under the crimson of our kith and kin. Maybe that would have been an ‘alarming’ headline for an article as Mr. Davis would comment but we weren’t supposed to weep over our own losses; somehow that highlights narcissism. Grief seems to be an exploitation in the international community. What community thus resides in the elopement of the rubble of their own shadowed tactics? We were just the sacrificial lambs being glorified in the light of their guillotine, a guillotine yet made with the wood of our own olive trees.
“Hassan! The article, now!” and that was my calling to hell before I could finally excuse my existence from the black hole that our reporting office seems to be, just drowning in tragedies successively and then traverse on an excursion to eastern Ramallah for the new house, or if we can even call it that anymore. Some beacon of optimism might spark from the woes and the erudite might relapse, but hope is also another slow poison, a plotted death. I felt rejuvenated, if that word doesn’t seem to be offensive inside an envelope of despondency for even a garden with only hibiscus and orchids seems to be boastful in all glory. We did want to boast, not the indestructible stranglehold of a certain faith as it perturbed, instead a monologous contentment in the scraps of human skin left behind and the protruding pellets inside our malleable flesh. All brains become malleable beneath the stab, au fait.
The rocks. Birds of a certain carrier, symbolic to the silenced messages, meanings, lives, dreams, hopes and ambitions. Once striking a silky human skin and the crimson unfolds, first as a sprout and then as a trail. One drop, two drops, three drops and then a river of colonialism sweeps by, for after the annihilations of our dwellings, the forced ethnic cleansing of a race to never breathe the air of the land that they legally possessed, the land that under the international law was theirs to reside in, the law that Israel hypocritically tends to uphold. What upholstery do you intend to glimmer in the flames of your own furnace, what humanity in the words of sagacity that you cannot even comprehend? Can you even answer such a question anymore.
The article was tucked away with caress in its birth of a draft and I could finally exit the void for a mere moment; for days were reduced to just moments, moments of a brief harness, and then of uncertified murdering, and then of a pinch of apartheid and obviously the glorification of ruthless effrontery. One breath of the golden hour and the human spirit might transgress in its clambering vows to transpire, ahead or behind, it wasn’t my call to give. “I am about to leave the compound, I’ll be there in fifteen. Also, chrysanthemums. They seem to have finally jabbed me.”
There was a restless fear, the concealed fear of residing in any sort of violence either a front or beneath or inside the wall, it all would otherwise halt at a communal line, a similitude of a still silence not of peace, but of no life left to supplicate. Melancholic it felt, like a void watering within itself, circumventing around and around as the dice topple over, counting just before the last thud. Whose will it be? Should any creature have had to think about it; for even a second that in the survival of a collective humanity somehow sides had to be repulsed.
Forget it. You’re not a Palestinian journalist, you’re not Hassan, you do not have a family, you aren’t a Muslim, people you know never existed, and friends never conversed: you do not exist in identity, but only in facts. You’re a historian, a storyteller without sentiment for death shouldn’t have to be relative. But it is. Even humans differ in the living and the dead thus you’re not worthy of any existence that seems to occupy unnecessary space. After all, you have to disappear in the shadows to narrate even the flicker of a sole light, the first or the last flash. Whoever it is for.
The ringing banged in my head for the millionth time as I fumbled across the car seat to capture the phone call. “Mr. Davis! The article is almost…”
“Hassan! Something’s boiling, something’s going to happen. Soon. Where are you?!”
“I am on my way home and…well everything seems fine to me. Are you sure you’re okay Sir?”
“You need to hurry. They’re…they’re wiping them. It’s all going, we need to…” The call blanked out to voicemail.
What did he mean? Did something happen while I left? Too many questions do spoil the rationale. Please God, let me reach back home. As I turned round the corner of a dilapidated street, the globular organs widened in perplexity and then deflated and deflected in anonymity. Zionists. The flags jeering and the glares that instantaneously transfixed upon my car. Dang it. The Palestinian license plate.
The blood had to pour, from one throne to another as the river flows ceaselessly, a tint of human flesh and a reminiscent scent of cadavers fills the nauseating atmosphere as the few stand and the land falls. I want to shatter, beneath the missiles and the air strikes, I’d rather just die. Death resonates with me, it seems more angelic than martyrdom for my faith wavers underneath the wrath of non-existence. What words can save any of us now? What stories are left for me to write? Stories of human misery, of ethnic and racial annihilation for the future to impart our manifold rushes of disconnection for a soil that could harmoniously be of equal yet relative significance to all rather than none.
Are we going to leave a future with those that would want to even read the tainted history of their forefathers? Will we even be forefathers.
Shattered glass and rivulets of blood, traversing down boatfuls of barren streets. The dust accumulating and the rubble moistening beneath the curdled proteins and the clotted rocks now crimson with the flesh of human skin. Not humans, just mere creatures of a certain similitude that drowns in the glory of unsubstantiated power. The putridity unfolding within the cascading throne torn, Alas. There is strength in the might of oppression. And there is strength, in the blood of the unnamed.
The Genres of Life 