I reflect upon our terrible century. Perhaps our greatest challenge is to survive while remaining civilized. The savaging of cities from New Orleans to Baghdad to Sarajevo quickens the impulse to live and live well. Like the Lebanese in exquisite dress we de-coulter the world. Ladies don’t trash widows and sing macabre songs of death and market good looks and become common bores cheering the global rubble.
We strain our bodies to hear the blues- the deep subterranean blues crossing the planet from New Orleans to Beirut against the grain of sonic bombs. The heart breaks out in song and clutches at the irreducible fragment of Fairuz’s lyrical voice to retrieve memories of Marcel Khalifa’s gentle presence on an American stage that is closer to the heart than the proverbial jugular vein as it heals the savaged collective skin of the diaspora, a heart grieving far and wide.
Arising from the ashes of Beirut I refuse to die or kill though I may be killed for my body lies across an axis of terrible neighborhoods and evil villages and a continuum of civil criminals and my womb is a cancerous target to be excised and my children are a menace to the infertile elect and my city a vast refugee camp for the misplaced and distressed.
We strain our bodies against the dark masculine sky. Ana samad and I seek a multiplicity of third ways and choose the courage of life and scour the landscape for the Mezzaterra in every port city and dance with Rana in many a street wedding erupting in song and feminine ululations at the edge of the sonic bomb and the outer margin of every checkpoint and anticipate the release of fresh life at the dawn of decent maternity wards.
Ana Samad. I am the bearer of a great civilization worth living for. Ana Samad and I seek a multiplicity of third ways and choose the courage of life and scour the landscape for the Mezzaterra in every port city and I dance with Rana in many a street wedding erupting at the edge of the sonic bomb and at the outer margin of every checkpoint and anticipate the release of fresh life at the dawn of decent maternity wards.
And I repeat with dizzying joy and whirling pleasure and resist the dead despair of cripples cowering behind concrete walls and steel hearts and air conditioned malls and precious lives wrapped in slimy lies and mock the sterility of a world awakening to its shallow humanity and frigid bodies shooting missiles at children and relishing the smell of phosphorus as it
seeps its deadly poison into the great alive with hearts of steel.
I ululate with the women. Ana Samad. We are alive therefore we are civilized. We struggle against the lure of hatred deep and visceral that deems the death of any child a phallic triumph of roaring generals and Big men and docile manly women worshipping at the altar of arm chair generals come to save the village globe from the plague of happiness.
The civilized cultivate flowers and children who flower and write poetry on silk that flutters through the air and lands with enviable gentleness on green meadows amidst the laughter of children clutching at shreds of beauty from a feminine sky.
I am civilized therefore I resist. I resist therefore I am alive.
Ginan:
Does the Lebanese plight have a tragicomic element, as blues does?
Ginan Rauf
yes in a sense it does. I was also thinking of Hanan El Sheikh's
novel Beirut Blues... It has a long history of surviving terrible
invasions, a kind of will to live and rise from the ashes. hard hard
to explain. check out Robert Fisk's elegy to Beirut on counterpunch.org
We struggle against the lure of hatred deep and visceral that deems the death of any child a phallic triumph of roaring generals and Big men and docile manly women worshipping at the altar of arm chair generals come to save the village globe from the plague of happiness.
Ginan, wonderful expression of feelings. god is samad...god fights the dark side, those who deny happiness to others unless the dark side has its stamp of approval.
Funny, I always thought of the sky as feminine.
I'm worried about a potential lack of perspective. Is this indeed the worst humanity has suffered? Not to detract from its severity, but as what happened with 9/11, believing that one's own suffering is unique in severity, that one suffers alone, can lead to even greater suffering.
Ginan Rauf
Nakia- the reference to other cities and the alive is meant to
balance that sense that one's suffering is most significant. Lebanon
has suffered terribly but not exclusively. The suffering of New Orleans links it to the suffering of another great people- the African
Americans who were enslaved and gave the world some of the greatest music, literary traditions and so forth. they were samad-
steadfast and they too are bearers of a great civilization. The have
that in common with the Palestinians, for instance, who were denied a history, and sof forth.
Given the lack of attention in the mainstream media to Arab suffering in places like Gaza and Beirut I may be correcting an already existing imbalance.
Ginan:
My apologies- I wasn't speaking of your piece specifically, but the coverage in Muslim circles. There is an imbalance in those circles in the other direction- alas, the same imbalance that occurs when white skinned Muslims are suffering.
Mrrgfrrr.
Ginan Rauf
Nakia I totally agree. there is an imbalance when white Muslims are
suffering, no doubt about it. It needs to be corrected. I am writing
a piece about the racial hierarchy of evacuation and I take note of
how Asian migrants are being left behind. It is something of a bind.
A really wonderful writer Juan Goytisol wrote about how he feared the communtists because they raged against the bourgeois the way
he had heard priests rage.
That is the bind. So let's say a certain group is racist do we dehumanize them by shutting ourselves off from their suffering. Nasr Allah's speech leads one down this line of thinking, he says we
won't be the only ones to have our houses bombed, to live in fear as
it were. What gets corroded is our capacity to feel empathy. Can we
say a certain group has inalienable human rights and still critique them.... these are tough agonizing human dilemmas.
I think we can critique aspects of how people behave without denying them basic human rights. I can support the efforts of Palestinians to lead decent, peaceful lives, while opposing the efforts of certain Palestinians to disrupt the decency and peace of others. Violence should be opposed wherever it occurs.
About racist Muslims: I often meet these characters, and I shake up their tidy perceptions by presenting a different paradigm- one where Muslims care for those who suffer regardless of skin color. It's worked well for me, so far. I think we can tackle these problems without a loss of empathy, or risking the success of relief efforts.
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