A more straight-forward translation of "the Arab West" would simply be "North Africa." When one says, "al-maghrib al-'arabi," one means the region consisting of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the Western Sahara, and Mauritania, but it literally means "the Arab West," as in the West of the Arabic-speaking world. Still, there's something to the literal translation. This poem is, after all, a retelling of "The Waste Land," an Arab Waste Land. And Eliot was far from shy about borrowing from "Eastern" culture for his poem, too.
I hoped this translation would force readers to question where the line lies between appropriation and exchange, between condemnation and pain. It's a strain, I think, to say Eliot's intentions are entirely benevolent, or that al-Sayyab's are, either. These are, after all, the songs of nations. And nations are, as the poems tell us, built in blood and tragedy. In what we preserve and what we destroy.
Translation makes similar demands. Some things are inevitably lost, left behind. Such acts of creative destruction raise ethical questions: where do you draw the line between your own mind and the poet you're translating? When and where can the original be left behind?
I don't know where one begins to condemn destruction, linguistic or otherwise. I only know that while walking the long, dry road of this translation, I felt a great deal of anger. Not because of the translation itself, but the memories of Lebanon it brought me back to.
I only spent a summer there, and I imagine my experiences would carry less weight for most people, but I can still remember my cheeks flushing and my throat knotting up as I fumbled lies I wasn't even sure I needed to tell at the airport. I'd come from Jordan and had spent a weekend in the West Bank a few weeks prior. The West Bank's security is controlled by Israel, and an Israeli stamp on your passport can land you in Lebanese prison. The US State Department makes very clear that, should this happen, you will be on your own.
I was careful to cross in and out the West Bank at a bridge that didn't issue stamps and had turned my bags inside out several times to make sure there were no stray shekels hiding out in a forgotten crevice, but I could still feel the knot in my throat growing as a customs official took me to a separate room. "What are your plans in Lebanon?" he asked again and again, his brows furrowing in some combination of suspicion and confusion as I spun a fragmented yarn about teaching Palestinian kids English while on vacation (I was supposed to be on a tourist visa). "Here to see the sights, you know, the Roman ruins in Sur," I said, pronouncing the heavy Arabic "ṣahd" at the beginning of the word with pride that only confirmed his belief I was a spy for God-knows-who. "Tyre," I corrected myself in equally stilted French, then stared quietly at the off-white floor.
Noiselessly, another official entered the room, shoulders erect with the smug authority of middle management, and frowned in my general direction. Together, they thumbed through my passport seven or eight times, whispering Arabic that I pretended not to understand. After they decided I was too incompetent to be an Israeli spy and too Jewish to be an ISIS insurgent, they cut me loose, and I stumbled out to the parking lot to find a very frustrated volunteer pick-up. Another volunteer scheduled to arrive at the same time—also American, but bulky, bearded, and Sunni Muslim—wouldn't join us for another eight hours.
When he was finally released, he gave us the low down on his interrogation. "They kept asking about the car bomb," he said as we sweated through the night in Sur. "That sucks, man," I said, feeling stupid for feeling bad for myself. A week before our arrival, a car bomb had ripped through a suburb in Beirut. This was the summer of the 2014 World Cup. Residents of this primarily Shia suburb had gathered to watch the game when a General Security Agency officer noticed the driver of a rusted Mercedes acting suspiciously just after midnight. Reports are vague here, so let's imagine him loitering a bit too long or circling around the block one too many times. Perhaps he was smoking a cigarette and staring at passers-by with an unnerving intensity, his eyes narrowing as he looked to see who was wearing shib shib and who had on dress shoes, who was wearing a breezy button up and who had the stiff camo cotton of the Lebanese army clinging tightly to their soft belly. Whatever it was, the agent stopped him, and the man did whatever it is one does to set off a car bomb. The explosion wounded twelve people and ignited an enormous fire, coating the night in smoke, blood, and panic.
When we got the news in Amman, the other study abroad students looked at me with uncharacteristic concern. I think a few of them even told me not to go, or to at least think twice about it. For the first time, I was on edge about going as well. Until then, southern Lebanon had, strangely, seemed like the safest place for an American Jew to be north of Jordan and south of Turkey. "No one wants to fuck with Hezbollah, not in their home turf," I told anyone who would listen, which was nobody. After the bombing, this logic didn't feel so foolproof. The bomber was believed to be tied to Sunni extremists in Lebanon, retaliating for Hezbollah's support of the Assad regime, and was rumored to be affiliated with ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
As I headed off to the airport, the friend I had been crashing with crossed me, pursed her lips, and hugged me tight. "Andrea, you do know I'm Jewish, right?" I laughed. "You'll be fine," she said. "In shaa' Allah," I replied, cracked a crooked smile, slung on my overstuffed traveling backpack, and headed down the stairs.
For the great Arab warrior,2 Messali al-Hadj...
2 The word I have translated here as "warrior" (mujahid) might be more literally translated as "one who struggles." Mujahid comes from the root ja-ha-da, to struggle. A "mujahid" usually means one who struggles for the sake of Islam.
My high school Arabic teacher, a small, devout Muslim woman from Egypt, used to explain to us that, "The first jihad happens here," and she would wrap her tiny, weathered hand into a determined ball, then tap it gently against her chest. "You must first struggle inside, in your heart," she would say, smiling her wide smile. She would also say, "In shaa' Allah I don't die," without a hint of irony whenever we shouted, "See you tomorrow, Usteza!" at the end of class, so I think she had conquered her own doubt many years before I met her. But living in a post-9/11 Midwestern city, I imagine she struggled for her faith on a daily basis.
What does it mean when the struggle is no longer internal, has become outward, violent? Coming from a country that had lived under the yoke of French occupation for more than 100 years, surely Messali al-Hadj, the father of Algerian nationalism, had earned the right to violent rebellion, if anyone had. And surely he'd searched his soul before turning to violence?
Soul-searching aside, he remained a staunch supporter of the democratic left over the course of his political career. His politics oscillated from Communist to Islamist to Arab nationalist, but he remained steadfast in his opposition to fascism, even as other Algerian nationalists sought an alliance of convenience with the Nazis. After refusing to support Collaborator-in-Chief Marshall Pétain in 1941, al-Hadj was sentenced to 16 years hard labor and 20 years banishment by a Vichy court, spending the remainder of the second World War imprisoned.
Al-Sayyab published his poem in 1956, two years into the Algerian War of Independence, a conflict that would continue for six more years. Both French colonial and Algerian nationalist forces routinely kidnapped and tortured rival soldiers and suspected spies. Both also targeted civilian populations they believed to have cooperated with the enemy, carving up their bodies and leaving them in public view to illustrate the consequences of betrayal.
The war's tit-for-tat, indiscriminate killings are famously depicted in the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. As attacks against Algiers' police escalate, a French official leaves a dinner party, crosses into the Muslim quarter, and places a bomb at the doorstep of a suspected militant. In the morning, shirtless young men stack children's lifeless bodies on shattered cement.
Later, three female rebels trade their abayas for thin blouses, long, polka-dotted skirts, and bags packed with explosives. As one—young, attractive—passes through a checkpoint, a soldier calls after her, "Going to the beach, mademoiselle?" "How did you know?" "Oh, just guessed—would you like some company?" "Not today, I'm afraid. I'm meeting friends." "What a shame. Another time?" "Who knows... " She smiles faintly and turns away. At a café, an Air France terminal, and a dance hall, the rebels slide their bags out of sight and walk away. A man smiles. A child licks his lips. The bombs explode.
A good deal of violence also took place between nationalist factions. A few months after al-Sayyab published his poem, the Messalists and militants from the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) began assassinating one another in coffee shops. The FLN soon got the upper hand. By the time independence was achieved, they had securely gripped the country in one-party rule.
What does it mean to be the face of a deeply fractured, violent rebellion? And how do you remain committed to democratic leftism in the face of executions, assassinations, mass murder?
One night in Sur, the other volunteers and I sat on the roof and debated a similar dilemma: the pros and cons of armed struggle against Israel. Eight years earlier, Israel decimated southern Lebanon after Hezbollah kidnapped several Israeli soldiers. It was a deeply unpopular war in both countries.
We smoked shisha as the debate raged on, fumes drifting over the blue-black Mediterranean and the green lights of mosques in the distance. A young American man, A, was advocating for active, violent intervention. D, a young woman with dual American and Lebanese citizenship, squared off with him.
"You're talking about war—you do realize that?" D said. "Yes," A replied. "Okay," D snapped, and rolled her eyes. "But are you ready to die for your cause?" A paused. "Yes," he said, but his voice cracked. D nearly screamed, "But who are you to make that decision for everyone else? For the entire country?" I just watched, but I wanted to ask A what my high school Arabic teacher had asked me: had he first searched his soul, had he first struggled from within?
Here, in the wilderness,
I read my name on
a rock on
a red brick
on a grave.
How should you3 feel, staring
into your grave? Are you
alive? Dead? And what might it mean
to see your shadow on the sand,
dark as a minaret or
a graveyard, the light of glory
passed? Dark, dark as a minaret,
the name of God reverberating on it,
a name of God inscribed within, Mohamed
engraved on a green brick, exalted, so
high...
3 I've taken a liberty with the text here. The Arabic would most literally translate as, "Then how does a person feel, looking at their grave?" But there's something off about this "person," this individual. Somehow, it feels both too removed and too intimate. After all, wasn't the speaker just reading his own name on a grave?
Perhaps al-Sayyab is trying to allow the speaker to take on a wider historical meaning, to allow him to embody the victims of various European empires in Southwest Asia and North Africa. But can any one speaker embody so much, so many kinds of suffering?
I don't know that shifting to the second-person pronoun necessarily fixes this problem, either. But I do know violence doesn't literally unfold on this impersonal, historical level. It happens to actual, singular individuals. To you's.
A few years after teaching in Lebanon, I got a job as a caseworker at an organization meant to promote academic freedom and protect threatened scholars. I worked on the protection side. Every day at my desk in lower Manhattan, I received dozens of applications from scholars around the world, replying with standardized emails requesting CVs, documentation, etc. If everything checked out, I would pass the case off to a supervisor, who would try to get them a job in a safe country. If they weren't in immediate danger, or they didn't have the publications or prestige for us to land them a job in our network, I'd apologize, tell them we can't help everyone, that demand far outpaced supply, and send them a PDF of other resources—then walk to the wide, fourth floor windows, watch buskers hustling, shoppers rushing past them, retail employees taking smoke breaks, making calls below.
"Dozens" was not a normal number. A few days before I started work, the Turkish military tried to overthrow President Erdogan, who had been rapidly accumulating power for the past several years and threatening their grip on the country. Erdogan responded by cracking down not just on the military, or even on the police, but on any source of dissent. Several years earlier, thousands of Turkish academics signed a petition calling for an end to the Turkish military's campaign against the Kurds in the southeast, so academia saw especially intense pressure. After the coup attempt, the government shut down 15 universities and began locking hundreds of scholars up on falsified charges.
A coworker was still reviewing every email I sent when I found myself responsible for managing ten times our normal intake. Our team leader described it as a "deluge," which I told her always makes me think of the end of Imru al-Qays' mu'allaqah (hanging ode):
The mountain, at the first deluge, looked like a giant draped in a striped cloak.
Mujaimir's peak in the flood and rush of debris looked like a whirling spindle.
The clouds poured their gift on Ghabeet desert 'til it blossomed
As if a Yemini merchant spread out all the rich clothes from his trunks,
As if the little birds of the valley of Jiwaa all woke in the morning
And burst forth in song after a sip of old, pure, spiced wine,
As if all the beasts had been rolled in sand and mud like onion bulbs
Drowned and lost in the depths of the desert at evening.
Except we never got any rich clothes or intoxicating birdsong. Instead, we got report after report of torture in overcrowded prisons, of students threatening to kill their professors, of relatives snitching on their loved ones. Of all the risk reports I got from Turkey, it was the last of these that bothered me the most. It became a common theme among many applicants. So-and-so's cousin, uncle, even, in some cases, brother or sister, would allege so-and-so was a coup-supporter and threaten to turn them into the police, knowing full-well this would land them in prisons where detainees were reported to be routinely raped and abused.
I have a hard time accepting the people on the other end of those emails and Skype calls could be abstracted into some historical individual. The threats, the violence, the intimate intimidation—that was happening to you's.
Dust and fire now ravage your meaning,
invaders kick you without shoes,
even without feet,
and from you bleed
wounds without pain or blood,
your death
complete—as is ours,
the living, the dead:
me, Mohamed, God. And this
is our grave: the remains4
of a dust-covered minaret,
God's name and Mohamed's
written on it, on this shattered
porcelain and brick.A shadow falls on the daylight, the shadow
of a thousand elephants and spears,
the color of Abraha
and, reflecting on the guide's
hand, the broken Kaaba.
4 Taken at face value, the original word here, "inqaaḍ," means something that has been destroyed, like a building left in ruins or rubble. But there's an interesting root beneath this surface-level meaning: na-qa-ḍa, to destroy, abrogate, or negate. It's the same root used for a veto.
The 13th century Arabic lexicon Lisaan al-'Arab (Tongue of the Arabs) lists three items one can destroy, abrogate, or negate: ropes, contracts, and buildings. Anything held together by a bond, anything relying on its foundations. Here is one thing I think ought to be included: memory. Perhaps it isn't included because its absence is a kind of presence—that feeling after you've left the house that you've forgotten something, the feeling something's missing...
One day in Burj al-Shamali, one of the Palestinian camps where some of the other volunteers taught outside Sur, an old man told us a story. He spoke in short bursts of Arabic, pausing to let one of the volunteers translate. He had survived the Nakba in '48—one of some 750,000 non-Jewish Palestinians driven from their homes—and been in Burj al-Shamali ever since. When I try to recall the details of his story, my mind goes hazy, caught between fragments of Arabic and English, but I remember Zionist settlers surrounding a town with rifles, firing on civilians, I think at dawn. "They even killed the children," he said. "They did this just because some [non-Jewish] Arabs blew up a bus. Just one bus," he told us. "What a tragedy," I think someone said, and my stomach grew tight and cold.
Here in the wilderness,
I read my name on a rock, on
two graves, generations
between them, preparing this pit for two:
my great grandfather—
pure sand now, pure black
ash settling on the grave—
and me, his son in death, his meal of clay.A tide was flowing
from my grandfather, his call
filling the shores: O
valleys,5 revolt! O
bloody generations,
crush these chains,
like an earthquake
shake off this yoke, or crush it
and crush us with it.
5 One weekend while teaching in Lebanon, the other volunteers and I went to see the Baalbek Ruins in the Beqaa Valley. The ruins were enormous—a massive ode to Mesopotamian and Roman grandeur. What fascinated me, though, wasn't the size of the stones themselves, but the reliefs: snake heads swirling into intricate flowers, lion nostrils flaring. Some looked like the Star of David. I snuck away from the group and sketched the long curls of Corinthian columns, the warm, dry sky, the orange, barren hills wavering in summer heat.
When we were getting ready to leave, a plainclothes member of the mukhabaraat (secret police) approached, asked us what we were doing, and kindly encouraged us to head back before it got dark. I thought that was odd (mukhabaraat are never polite), but he was the last person on my mind as my head throbbed on the bus and everyone else sang, "Ya 7abib 'aaaaalbi!" off-key, clapping, clapping, endlessly clapping. The next day, we found out why he'd wanted us gone so badly. ISIS troops, joined by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, al-Nusra Front, had entered Lebanon for the first time and surrounded Lebanese army checkpoints in Arsal, a town about an hour north of Baalbek, at the same time we were at the ruins. Angered at the arrest of an al-Nusra Front militant in Lebanon, they opened fire, stormed a police checkpoint, and took control of the town. Had we headed north instead of south, I can only imagine how overjoyed they would have been to have found a bus full of Americans.
For five days, the Lebanese army struggled to take control of the town, trading government buildings and strategic hills back and forth with the Islamists. Before the Lebanese army finally drove them out, the Islamist forces kidnapped 19 Lebanese soldiers. Later that month, they beheaded one of them and posted a video of it on social media. According to The New York Times, the video shows the soldier flailing on the ground, kicking dust into the air as his captors announce his execution. I chose not to look it up. A week later, they beheaded another kidnapped soldier. This time, they took photos. I didn't look at them, either.
In the days after the beheadings, I wrote about the trees. Lebanon is famous for its cedar forests. When the wind picks up, the cedars sway, just slightly, their broad, brown trunks standing calm, steady, their thin green needles fluttering in the breeze.
Our god wandered haughtily
between bands of heroes,
from camp to camp
and flag to flag,6
the mighty god of the Kaaba.
6 Another weekend in Lebanon, we visited a park given to Hezbollah by the Islamic Republic of Iran, near the border with Israel. The park's most notable attraction was a large Star of David on the ground. It was meant to symbolize the Israeli state—the Star of David appears front and center on the Israeli flag—so visitors could literally walk all over it. Several of the other volunteers did so, stomping gleefully.
Not that I saw. When we got there, I wandered around the park's well-kept swings for a few minutes, then returned promptly to the bus, where I discussed why I thought Arabic semantics were inherently more poetic than their English equivalent with a Syrian-American English teacher. We watched thin clouds hover beyond the greenery of Golan farms, trading Arabic and English descriptions of their passage past the sun, when another volunteer, J, clambered onto the bus with a frown.
"What's up J?" I shouted. But J was reluctant to join. "Come on, what's going on man?" "Did you see the star?" J asked. "No," I replied, confused. "Oh," he said, looking at the ground. "What star?"
So I heard how A, D, and a few others had trotted on the symbol of my religious upbringing. The whole way back, I could feel heat rising in my chest as we descended through the winding hills, the smothering darkness and humidity covering me in an almost teenage angst and gloom.
That night in Sur, we had a debriefing on the roof. The conversation drifted among the usual topics—occupation, liberation, etc. But I couldn't help myself; I had to bring it up. I tried to remain calm as I said, "You have to understand—the Star of David doesn't just represent Israel, or even Zionism. It's a symbol for Judaism, period." Blank stares in the warm glow of shisha embers. "Like, it was on my kippahs growing up." More silence. "Well, look, I can understand if Lebanese people who've spent their whole lives here don't know what the Star of David means, but you guys grew up in the States, around a bunch of Jews. Frankly, you oughta know better."
D came in hot: "Are you serious? You do realize Israel occupied this country for more than 20 years, right? And there were Jews in Lebanon way before Israel existed? And there still are?" M, one of the program's organizers, quickly intervened: "I think what Sam and D are both saying is we should all be reflecting on our privileges, what allowed us to get here in the first place." Face reddening, I fired back, "Well, yeah. We're all American, or at least have dual citizenship. That's a privilege I have, and that you guys have, that a lot of people here don't." D glared at me; M blushed.
The next day, another volunteer said to me, "Well, you weren't trying to make any friends last night, were you?" I laughed. "You know what? I don't care. I'm tired of putting up with this bullshit. If something's wrong, I'm not going to keep quiet." He chuckled and said, "You know what happened to Socrates, right? That's what happens when you ask too many questions."
He gave me far too much credit. I wasn't on some Socratic quest for truth—I was just angry and lashing out. I would like to imagine a version of this conversation where I remained calm, measured. Perhaps I would rattle off facts about how the Star of David developed over time—how in antiquity it wasn't only associated with Jews; how, in the Middle Ages, Jewish mystics identified the star with David's shield, a sign of protection, and how it was only adopted by Jews more widely in the Renaissance. How the Nazis pinned a yellow Star of David to Jews' chests, and how I'd like to imagine the Star of David of my childhood kippahs could represent reclaiming Jewish humanity, separate and apart from its use in Zionist colonization, and later, the Israeli flag.
But I didn't know all that then. And ignorance like mine is at least as big a factor in hard conversations like these going sideways as is the vitriol inflaming them.
Yesterday in Dhi Qar he wore
armor tinged with the blood of Numaan.
The god of Mohamed and of my Arab fathers
was spotted in the Rif waving the revolutionaries'
flag. In Jaffa, we saw him weeping
in the rubble of a home. One day, we even saw him
fall from the clouds. Wounded, he stumbled
among us, prostrate, begging. We didn't
tend to his wounds. Instead, we, his servants, offered him only
bread and cattle, our voices trembling
as he wailed. Had we prayed,7 his blood would have oozed,
and so a mouth quickly bandaged him
with verses that soothed
our fear of this truth: we could revive him
if our revolutionaries simply said,
We redeem him!"
7 The words I have translated as "prostrate, begging" and "pray"—"yastajdee" and "sajadu"—appear, at first glance, to come from the same root: sa-ja-da, to bow down or to prostrate oneself. While "yastajdee" derives from a root associated with gift-giving (ja-da-aa), meaning, literally, to beg for alms, it's likely al-Sayyab knew his readers would hear the sonic connection between seeking charity and humbling oneself before God.
I grew up with Reform Judaism. In Judaism, we bow, but we don't prostrate ourselves the way Muslims do, bending on their knees, hands peeled out in front of them. In Jewish prayer, we stand, bow, sometimes rock back and forth on our heels. I haven't been to synagogue in many years, and, as a semi-informed Reform Jew, I only rocked myself into piety on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Dehydrated, head throbbing, my stomach having curled over on itself many times throughout the day, I would rise and fall with the call and response of melody.
Those days, I was keeping kosher. I started shortly after my Bar Mitzvah and kept it up for about seven years. For the first four or five, I felt, in some unsayable way, a connection that sustained me. By the time I got to six, I just remember enviously salivating as my girlfriend gnashed her way through a thick, juicy turkey leg at a rural summer fare.
A few months later, in the cool autumn air of my sophomore year, a young blonde woman wearing a full-length black skirt and loose long sleeves waved me down as I passed under the swirling black metal of my college campus' gate. "Trip to Israel? It's free if you're Jewish!"
Jet lagged, shakshuka-stuffed, I exchanged uneasy quips about studying Arabic with the Orthodox chaperones leading the trip. "You know, I took an anthropology class from a Palestinian professor," exclaimed an Israeli-American woman a few years older than me. "He kept trying to convince us they had culture. But he just showed us like, pottery and villages and stuff—I was like, that's not culture!" I stuttered, went silent. "I just don't get why people always try to call it a political conflict," she continued. "It's not political; it's religious!"
A week later, sitting next to the collapsed, sand-red columns of an ancient Judaic site restored by the Israeli state, dust and warm Mediterranean winter sun beating me like an old rug, a rabbi explained the development of the Talmud and the Midrash: "These books were written by rabbis in the Middle Ages. While not divinely revealed by God in the same way the Tanakh was," he said, "they're still divinely inspired—the word of God, so to speak."
Did I really believe these rabbis' words were divine? For years, I couldn't keep the question out of my head. Then, one night in Lebanon, we heard a dull thud in the distance. Standing in the dim-lit kitchen, I cocked my head to the side. "You think that was a firework?" I asked one of the other volunteers, but I knew it wasn't. I'd grown used to firecrackers, random firework displays, and occasional gunshots. This was different.
The next night, we heard it again. And the next. After digging through Twitter, I found the source. On the other side of the Lebanon Mountains, someone was shooting rockets into the Israeli-held Golan Heights. Israel responded with artillery fire.
For about a week, Israel had been pummeling Gaza with its vastly superior military technology. Every day, we saw civilian deaths in the headlines, children in particular. The worst incident came when Israel shelled a UN school sheltering some 3,000 people. The Israeli military claimed Hamas militants were operating out of the school, using the UN-personnel and non-combatants as human shields. Ten people died. Dozens were wounded. By summer's end, over 2,300 Gazans had been killed, more than 10,000 injured, both mostly civilians. Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed, around 1,600 injured in Israeli territory.
Whenever I think back to that summer, I wonder about history—expulsions, massacres, occupations—and how it weights intention, capability. If you're willing to kill civilians, does it matter what you're trying to achieve? Does it matter how much you've suffered, how much power you wield, how much damage you can do? I think it does, but I wouldn't offer any praise to the Israeli military for not wiping out Gaza entirely, or to Hamas for failing to cause as many civilian casualties as they might've with a better arsenal or more effective strategy. What's clear to me is how quickly these situations escalate, red lines crossed. When colonization lines up the dominos, nationalism blunts our touch, do we understand the consequences? Do we see the bodies we're piling up?
It all began, more or less, in Hebron, earlier that summer. Hebron, or al-Khalil, is the resting place of the Biblical matriarchs and patriarchs, including Abraham, the founder of Judaism. This has attracted a flood of Orthodox Jewish settlers, who believe the town should belong to "greater Judea." The Christian and Muslim Arab population has not received them with open arms. In a near-weekly ritual, protestors pour out of mosques after Friday prayers, chanting and throwing stones until IDF soldiers fire tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowds, then descend into them, Billy clubs swinging.
My itinerary and timeline during my weekend in the West Bank made it difficult to avoid spending at least part of the day there on a Friday, so I came late, hoping to avoid the mayhem, and spent most of the afternoon on my host's patio, sipping black tea with his wife and sketching the lemon tree in their garden. When I headed down to the tomb, my shoulders tensed. No one was outside except IDF soldiers, fingers resting lightly on the triggers of automatic weapons, black metal glinting in the late afternoon sun.
Inside the tomb, I remember a curling, golden screen and an elevated stone coffin, I think. I couldn't relax, so I left quickly. On my way out, a soldier stopped me. "Where are you staying?" he asked. "Up there," I said, pointing to the hill I came from. "With the Arabs?" he asked, incredulous. I shook my head yes. "If you need a place to stay, there's a hostel here, in the Jewish quarter. Very nice. Lots of American tourists come, Christian, Jewish. They all like it very much." He smiled a little too familiarly. "Oh, thanks," I said. "But I'm good." Suddenly, his face went grey. "Okay." His finger moved to the trigger of his weapon. "Call us if you need any help."
The next morning, I chatted in Arabic with my host's wife over omelets, oranges, and tea. "There were protests yesterday, before you arrived." I nodded my head. "Something very bad happened," she said. "Oh, yes?" I said. "Yes," she said. "Several of the children, they are makhṭufeen." I shook my head side-to-side. Makhṭufeen—for the life of me, I couldn't remember what it meant, but I knew it was bad. "Terrible," I said. "Yes," she said. "Terrible. We don't support this."
My host came in soon after. "How did you sleep?" he asked me, in English. "Great! I was thinking of seeing the market today." He pursed his lips for a moment, then said, calmly, "I don't think that's a good idea. Did you hear about the protests?" "Yes, we were just talking about them." "Ah, well, several of the Jewish children are missing." Makhṭufeen—I remembered: kidnapped. "They are going from house to house looking for them. They may shut down the city soon." "Oh," I said. "So no time for the market then?"
Israel responded to the kidnapping in full force. Over the course of 11 days, the IDF raided homes throughout the West Bank, arresting around 350 Palestinians, including almost the entire West Bank Hamas leadership, and shut down all transport in and out of the territory. By an enormous stroke of luck, I crossed back to Jordan a few days before they closed the King Hussein Bridge.
About a week after the raids ended, the abducted Israeli teenagers—Niftali Frankel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Rifrah—were found dead in a field north of Hebron. Authorities believed they were shot shortly after their abduction. Settlers across the West Bank sought retribution, trying to kidnap Palestinian children, hacking into men with hatchets. On July 2, in the space of a few hours, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian teenager, was abducted and burned alive. Meanwhile, Hamas had responded to the arrests by launching rocket attacks on Israel. Israel began airstrikes on Gaza, filling our headlines in Lebanon with Palestinian civilian casualties.
Not long after the airstrikes started, someone in Lebanon had had enough and decided to take matters into their own hands. For the first two nights in Sur, we could only hear the vague thud of shells falling in the Beqaa Valley. But it grew more and more clear, and soon, we had a front row seat. Someone was launching rockets into the Israeli-held Golan, first on the plains some 10-20 kilometers south of us. Each night, they were pushed back, and, before long, the rockets and the Israeli returning fire were exchanged on a soccer field just outside Rashidieh, the camp I taught in.
I can't remember how the shells sounded. Just the flares reaching into the sky, casting the plains, clouds, and sea in a white glow. A friend said, "Awfully nice of them to give us a light. Like fireworks." I laughed. The next day, we had about half the kids we normally taught in class. They were pretty shaken up, almost literally—their homes had been rumbling all night.
For a moment, I thought about packing up and leaving early. My girlfriend, who was working in Iraqi Kurdistan, said to me on a Skype call, "Just promise me you'll leave if you feel like it's not safe." I promised. I felt unsafe. I didn't leave.
She was in for her own turbulence. We had planned to meet in Beirut at the end of the summer. A few days before her flight out of Erbil, ISIS troops got within 20 miles of the city. The Obama administration began airstrikes to push them back.
After a few days of her rearranging flights, me constantly refreshing news headlines, and both of us getting very little sleep, she made it safely to Beirut. Things had long since blown over in Sur. But something had changed, though I couldn't have told you what or how or even when. I would get angry for no real reason, and, whenever we talked about ISIS, Palestine, or Israel, my head would cloud over, basic facts just beyond reach.
The next year, back in New York, my therapist asked, "So what does it feel like? Physically, I mean." "It's like... the idea of water boiling. Like, this white... feeling, like above a boiling pot, but here," and I pointed to the crown of my head, "in my brain."
I haven't felt that sensation in a few years, but sometimes I'm reminded of it. Today, I walked past Flushing's historic synagogue. I moved here recently, and, whenever I pass by, I like to watch its copper roof oxidized into a distinguished neoclassical green, its lavishly adorned beams looking like they were plucked straight from ancient Greece. I just can't get myself to go inside. I don't know if it's my collapsed faith or the fear that the violence could be for me, this time, real.
Without warning, a swarm
of locusts8 burst from the shadows, setting fire to our homes.
It was almost as if the waters of the Tigris, where the swarm
turned back, had confessed their secrets in blood and ink.
It was almost as if the swarm's judgment had so petrified
pregnant women that they gave birth to ash, had
shod horses' hooves with crescents
forged from fallen minarets, had bit
the prophet of Mecca and dragged
two heart-hungry lions
through Levantine soil, then
fed Jesus to the hungrier one,
slaking its thirst with baptismal water...
but wouldn't this have caused all the Eastern deserts
to hasten to the struggle? Has the swarm returned
today, I wonder, to take its vengeance on us?
Maybe because God is still in our villages, because
we haven't killed him? Or perhaps because, despite
our constant hunger, we didn't consume him.
Nor did we sell him, like they sold their god
made with the gold we toiled for, like they ate
their god when they were hungry, their god that we
created with our bloodied bread.In Paris, prostitutes lie on pillows
of Christ's pain. All night long sterility ferments
in their wombs, planting a dragon's tongue. Hissing,
it tosses iron legions at our sanctuaries, soulless knights
growing nearer, conquering our castles in the foothills,
ever nearer to Yathrib and our holy Mecca.
8 The "swarm of locusts" is understood to refer to the Mongol hordes that decimated Baghdad in the year 1258. The sacking of Baghdad was brutal, its citizens slaughtered, its many libraries burned to the ground, thus the "blood and ink" in the waters of the Tigris. The astonished women giving birth to ash are taken by some commentators to refer to the subsequent decline of Arab civilization.
The swarm transmutes into the crusaders (Richard the Lionheart—the "heart-hungry lions") and, in the following stanza, contemporary French colonial forces (the "iron legions" tossed at historic Arab and Muslim sights). While constructing this long list of historical foes to the Arabs, al-Sayyab took great pains to avoid categorizing Christ or Christianity as a Western or European force. Jesus is sacrificed to Richard the Lionheart, inverting the role of European crusaders as protectors of Christianity. Instead, Christianity is constructed as a key part of Arab identity under assault by hypocritical Europeans.
When I first read this poem, I had to wonder, as a Jew, what al-Sayyab made of us. Had Zionism—and its reverberations around the region—precluded for him the possibility of a Jewish-Arab identity?
In part. In a series of 1959 autobiographical essays, al-Sayyab claimed "international Jewry" had used its "wide influence" to turn global public opinion against Hitler, part of a broader pattern of "vile Jewish hatred." Al-Sayyab's anti-Jewish prejudice was part and parcel of his break with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). Over the course of the 1950s, al-Sayyab had come to regard the ICP as overly influenced by Jews, whom he believed to be Zionist in essence, the true masterminds behind communism, and the puppeteers of communist parties throughout the region.
As evidence, al-Sayyab pointed to Jews who had "infiltrated" the ICP and taken over key leadership roles. The ICP's support for a joint Arab-Jewish government in Palestine was therefore part of a Jewish scheme to flood Palestine with Jewish immigrants. At the behest of the Soviet Union, the ICP later shifted its stance on Palestine, temporarily supporting partition. Al-Sayyab claimed the pro-partition decision set his Jewish comrades at ease. Many Jewish communists in the region during the 1940s and early 1950s were, in fact, anti-Zionist.
Perhaps more to the point, he was chasing ghosts. By the time al-Sayyab was writing, most Jews in Southwest Asia and North Africa had gone to Israel—some voluntarily, others not. In Iraq, anti-Jewish violence and discrimination had been accelerating for some two to three decades before al-Sayyab began to emerge into the literary spotlight. During the interwar years, Nazi propaganda, altered to obscure Hitler's disdain for Arabs, found fertile ground among the country's Arab nationalist military officers and paramilitary youth movements. To them, all Jews were necessarily Zionists, supporters of British rule in Southwest Asia and the Zionist colonization it enabled. In Baghdad, 1941, this exploded into the Farhud: some 180 Jews killed, 1,000 injured, hundreds of homes looted, stripped bare.
The situation was compounded by Zionist activists. In an effort to hasten Jewish emigration, Iraq's Zionist underground sought to undermine the authority of traditional Jewish leadership and spark anti-Arab panic among the country's Jewish community. After a 1950 law was passed allowing Jews to leave Iraq if they forfeited their citizenship, a series of bombs exploded in Jewish quarters, cafes, businesses. Activists from the Zionist underground were arrested, two put to death. Whether these activists, the anti-Jewish Istiqlal Party, or Israeli intelligence were responsible for the bombings has been debated ever since. Whoever was behind the bombings, most Iraqi Jews took advantage of the denaturalization law, and by 1952, the vast majority of the Jewish community had fled the country.
This, I feel, is the crux of the problem with monoethnic nationalism of any stripe—by deciding who's in, you also decide who's out. And the forces of history shift these definitions almost overnight beneath our feet.
The Jews from Southwest Asia and North Africa are now largely known as Mizrahim, though some scholars believe this category to have been created by Zionist discourse. My own Jewish heritage is Ashkenazi—Central and Eastern European. The other largest community of Jews is the Sephardim. They come primarily from the Iberian Peninsula and were mainly driven out by Catholic conquest. Many of them fled to North Africa, so there's some overlap between Sephardi and Mizrahi communities and liturgical traditions.
After the creation of the Israeli state, Ashkenazim went on to fair far better than their Sephardi or Mizrahi counterparts. Mizrahi Jews faced especially widespread prejudice, economic and otherwise. In one of the most egregious instances, thousands of newly arrived Yemeni parents were told by Israeli authorities their children had died—in reality, they'd been put up for adoption for Ashkenazi Israelis and Americans. In 1997, Ehud Barak, then the leader of the Labor Party in Israel, went so far as to publicly apologize to Mizrahi Israelis for the discrimination they'd experienced.
In my study of this region's history, I've often wondered if it's possible to build a nation that does not exclude, that can incorporate many identities under a wider banner. As an American Jew, I'd like to believe this is possible.
But in the Trump era, I'm reminded of something James Baldwin once wrote: "In the same way to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one's interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified and suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history." What, I wonder, have we left undiscovered in the nation of our self today?
I think we might've gotten a glimpse in Charlottesville. By sheer happenstance, my dad moved there about a month before the Unite the Right protest. No one in Charlottesville expected the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and Incels to amount to anywhere near what they did. As I watched live newsclips of men my age in khaki pants and white polos waving tiki torches at UVA students, my dad was at dinner with his partner about two miles away without the faintest idea of what was happening just down the road.
My dad's a photojournalist by training, so he went out to shoot the next day. As he worked his way through the crowds, he avoided the gaggle of other photojournalists, looking for "quiet moments" instead, something less melodramatic. He didn't really care about "shooting men in capes—you know, with hoods." He wanted to capture the people standing up to them.
In one shot, two women wearing sunglasses and blue athletic shirts chat and smile as they hold a large, black plastic sign: "ALWAYS / ANTI / FASCIST." In another, a woman wears a pink shirt covered in deep red and bright magenta tape spelling "END / WAR." She holds her camera phone up to a Unite the Right protestor's face.
When he did capture the Unite the Right crowd, they weren't exactly "in action." In one of his photos, a protestor holds a round, black plastic shield, probably from a Halloween costume. It's tiny against the white t-shirt draping over his plump torso.
In a different photo, you can only see a Unite the Right protestor's lower body. He's wearing very blue jeans, and you can make out the edge of a forest green tactical vest at the top of the frame. A black pistol rests perfectly balanced on his leg in a strap-on leather holster, complete with a Punisher skull fading into the American flag. At the right edge of the frame, slightly out of focus, a black AR-15 dangles in front of him, his fingers hovering over the trigger.
Despite their "really bad B-movie" look, as my dad put it, the right-wing protestors emboldened one another. Later that day, a young black man, DeAndre Harris, saw a friend being hit in the chest with a heavy wooden flagpole. He ran over, swung a thick flashlight at the pole, missed, struck the assailant, was pepper sprayed, chased into a garage. There, six Unite the Right protestors punched him, kicked him, and hit him with flagpoles.
The same day, another Unite the Right protestor ploughed through a crowd of counter-protestors in a gray Dodge Challenger. In the video of the attack, you can hear people screaming, then bodies fly into the air like rag dolls before the driver crashes into the back of a convertible, totaling the front of his car. Around 20 people were injured in the car attack, five in critical condition, and one, Heather Heyer, was killed.
In the aftermath of these attacks, I'm especially struck by one thing my dad said. The night before the main event, the protestors shouted, "Jews will not replace us! White lives matter! End immigration! Blood and soil! Blood and soil!" their distorted faces lit by small tiki torch flames. To my dad, all this amounted to was fear. "You weren't scared while you were shooting? I mean, yeah, you're a white guy and all," I said, "but you're still Jewish. A Jewish photojournalist."
"No," my dad said. "And I'll tell you why. I feel sorry for those people, I really do, because they... you know, they're scared. They've been in power for a long time, for ages, and that transition's coming, and they know it's coming. And they could actually embrace that, and be a part of a better world, you know... or they could resist that to try to stay in control. And I feel sorry for them."
Should I, like my dad, pity the neo-Nazi and former Klansmen who, on April 13, 2014, killed Terri LaManno, aged 53, at a Jewish retirement home, as well as 69-year-old William Corporon and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Underwood, outside the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, home to the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, where my mom has taught art for over 20 years?
Pity was the last thing on my mind when I woke in the dark red sheets of my girlfriend's fifth-floor apartment in Amman. The horns of Jordanian road rage might've woken me, or the light creeping through the blinds, but probably it was my girlfriend, an earlier riser than me.
Reading the news, she muttered, "Shooting in Kansas City... three people dead." "What? Where?" I said, sitting quickly up. "South Kansas City... At the Jewish Community Center." "Does it say who?" "No... just three victims. A woman, middle aged, and an older man... one younger, a teenager." I grabbed the laptop. She glanced at me. Her throat twitched. "Tell them I'm going to be late for class."
At a café across the street from the University of Jordan, I sipped Turkish coffee, refreshed WhatsApp again, again. Finally, a message from my mom arrived: Yeah I'm okay. I left just before it happened.
So all it amounted to—then, for me—was fear. But for the dead, their families, their friends, it was, is, real.
Here in the desert, I read my name
on a rock between two other names,
the world of the living
breathing as blood flows
in your veins, beat to beat.
And, standing over a pit, a red brick
illuminates the earth
without the flash of lightning, blood
naming the land, extracting
meaning drop by drop,
so that I might know it's my land,
so that I might know it's part of me,
so that I might know it's my past,
and there can be no life without it, a fitful shade
among the blinded ghosts.
Is that our valley, teeming
with raucous banners?
Is that our past glowing
in Alhambra's windows,
glowing on a green brick,
God's name inscribed on it still
with our blood? It's dawn—
is that the call to prayer?
Or is it the battle cry of revolutionaries
rising up in our fortresses?
Graves labor to resurrect
millions of dead;
Mohamed and God and the faithful
awake: for our god is
within us.9
9 Six floors down from my apartment window, Flushing's pear trees bloom white, redbuds ripen pink, first week of May 2019. On my computer screen, headlines stream: the Israeli military and Hamas exchange sniper fire, airstrikes, tank fire, rockets, civilian deaths, injuries. It's yet to be seen if it will be a repeat of 2014, but I find myself thinking of dominos and bad intentions.
The consequences of colonialism and renewed ethnonationalist fervor are far from limited to Palestine. Last week in San Diego, a white, brown-haired 19-year-old walked into a synagogue. He wore sunglasses and had surprisingly broad shoulders for a boy his age. This may have helped him strap on the tactical vest he wore and allowed him to effectively wield the AR-15 he was carrying. Perhaps he stopped a moment after he entered to observe his enemy, to think about hot metal popping through soft flesh. Or perhaps he just opened fire.
Whether he paused or not, 60-year-old Lori Gilbert-Kaye is reported to have spotted him first and thrown herself in front of the congregation's rabbi, at whom the boy had taken aim. Gilbert-Kaye, who was at the synagogue to say kaddish for her mother, was badly wounded, and died later at a nearby hospital. Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein reports being startled by a boy in sunglasses, throwing up his hands as a reflex. Bullets burst through them both. Later, even after four hours of surgery, he would lose his right index finger.
After he was shot, Rabbi Goldstein grabbed several nearby children and rushed them out of the way. The boy had already turned his attention to a second room, which had a handful of people in it, including several children. Maybe he knew this before he continued firing and decided it would be a good place to maximize casualties. He got off several shots before his gun jammed.
Inside the room, Almog Peretz, an Israeli visiting his family for Passover, saw a rifle pointing at the children, flung open a pair of large doors leading outside, and yelled for the children to run, shrapnel piercing his leg. His eight-year-old niece, Noya Dahan, ran outside with metal shards embedded in her skin.
The boy brought a handgun as well but had dropped it in the chaos of the first shots. Jonathan Morales, an off-duty Border Patrol officer who happened to be a member of the synagogue, grabbed it and chased him outside. Army veteran Oscar Stewart heard the shots and joined Morales in the chase. Morales fired several shots as the boy sped away but didn't strike him. He later surrendered peacefully and was taken in unharmed.
He freely admitted to the shooting, stating, unemotionally, that he was trying to "defend [his] nation against the Jewish people." He also claimed online to have set fire to a nearby mosque and he drew his inspiration from the killing of 51 people at two mosques in Aotearoa / New Zealand, earlier the same month.
Last fall, a white nationalist in Pittsburgh was considerably more successful. During Saturday morning services, the man, heavy-set with thinning grey hair, ran into the Tree of Life synagogue with an AR-15 and three semiautomatic pistols shouting, "All Jews must die!" He fired, continuously, for about 20 minutes. By the time he finished, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger were dead.
Taken at its most literal, the last line of al-Sayyab's poem might translate as, "Verily, our god is within us." If this is true, this internal divine presence has known so much blood flowing on soil, so many night skies glowing white.
