I sat down to write, but nothing came out. I am speechless although I have everything to say.
Suspended in an inner world, I linger in that mysterious place where images and emotions swirl before they converge into words. I have everything to say. But today, all I have are images and emotions. All I have is language. A father kissing his toddler’s lifeless feet. Toes so tiny and pale. Leaflets dropped from the sky, taunting refugees with weaponized words of scripture. Paper cuts of anger score my soul.
My friend Yasmin posted a memory from Gaza, a video of our friends cutting into a watermelon together. The knife slices through the rind until eventually the fruit collapses into shards of bright red flesh. Flesh that’s meant to see the sun. What a relief. Everyone grabs a slice, imperfect and jagged. I feel I am right there with them, quenched by the melon’s sweet hydration, a merciful respite from the present.
Life is the experience of teetering on the razor thin edge between existence and annihilation. In Arabic, if you take the word love حبّ and insert the letter ر, it turns to war حرب.
I am speechless but I have everything to say. What’s the difference between speech and language? Sharing a watermelon in Gaza among friends is language. A child’s laughter is language. The unhealable rift of exile. Lovers locking eyes over the floodwaters of revolution. Intifada and all its reincarnations, defiant and unrelenting. Your silence, too, is language.
We will never be the same, I keep repeating. But that’s both our inheritance and destiny as colonized people—we never get to stay the same. Apocalypse after apocalypse, our souls get pushed through a sieve, forced to reckon with the impurities you’re so sure we have. Maybe that’s why we adore the earth, we see its core every time we uproot. Maybe that’s why we revere the moon, we know what it’s like to harness the dark. With the insertion of a single letter, love gets shattered by war. Hubb becomes harb. I look again, and revise: love engulfs war.
Today, I am less of speech but full of language, in all its melody. Imagine watching a watermelon being sliced into. A thick green exterior gives way to protective white gauze, and then — a shocking burst of red. Speckled with black, the seeds remind us the future lives within the now. Close your eyes and bite—a thirst quenching illusion for a parched mouth.
We’ll taste it someday, that is certain. But for now, we stay thirsty.
Thank you to my friend Yasmin Abuomar and our friends in Gaza for the photos from a beautiful day.