Dedication

Dedication

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To those whose memory, imagination, and bodies are my memory, imagination, and body. 

From the collective to the one under the same assault, no matter our location on Earth. 

“Our bodies have different ways of knowing, but our bodies know.” 

To the martyrs who witness from above, and the living who witness on the ground. 

To those who will be killed on the last day of the war. 

To those who will be killed on the first day after the war ends. 

To those who succumb in the humanitarian window of horror. An hour before the pause, a minute after. 

To those who die of a broken heart during and after the war. 

To those who gather their families to die together so that no survivor suffers survival alone. 

To those who scatter their families so that they’re not all wiped out from the civil record. 

To the babies whose death certificates marked their brief presence on earth before their birth certificates could be issued: they were not given names. 

To the elderly who endured 1948 and lived to see their descendants erased. 

To the young born under the sign of siege and are the only members of their families left: Will you stand up and form a small nation? 

To those who died because dialysis was no longer possible, no water, electricity, and fuel: you were murdered. 

To those who will develop kidney stones and liver failure from unclean water. 

To diarrhea, cold, and flu. 

To those who are maimed and will search for their missing limbs underground, across borders, and won’t find their extremities after they find them. 

To those whose cherubic hearts couldn’t handle the shock, and to those whose nicotine hearts blocked the flow: you, too, were killed. 

To those who were killed because they refused to leave their homes to live in tents. To those who were killed on their way to the tents. 

To those who were killed in their tents with the cats they sheltered. 

To those who were killed in UN shelters and in schools. 

To those who were killed because they were medics, nurses, doctors, teachers, coders and decoders, and the last honest journalists. 

To those who thought their biggest fear was to outlive their children. 

To those who are free of the fear of death, because tyranny spoke its final answer, and it was total. 

To those in a concentration camp the size of a metropolis: the only life they knew. 

To Jerusalem and Jenin. To Jenin and Jerusalem. 

To the children who played in the craters the bombs made, if the sand was right. 

The bodies we count are not the bodies we retrieve from the river to the sea. 

And the bodies we retrieve are not always identifiable. 

To those who guard their dead from the starving dogs of war who are different from the dogs of war that starved them. 

To those who cannot guard the corpses from rats. 

To those who rummage through the rubble for clothes, gloves, forks, plates, soap, toothpaste, and wooden furniture to burn for cooking and to keep warm. 

They will not accept your apology after the genocide, “O theology of empire.” 

To diapers, scissors, sanitary pads, to shoes, prenatal care, and onesies. 

To beards and headscarves. 

To erased archives that housed centuries. 

To pulverized libraries. 

To Saint Porphyrius and the Omari Mosque. 

And to those who hold vigils, day and night, for a hand sticking out of a crack in the wreckage. 

“Wave to us, can you wave to us?” they say. And she does. And it buoys them from the river to the sea. 

To those who never heard her voice and loved her in silence. 

To those who cried over the animals they left behind: some cows, some goats, many chickens and ducks, and to the ducks and chickens that starving dogs did not spare. 

To the roosters crowing over the rhythmic blasts. 

To starlings, sparrows, seabirds, sardine, and mullet. 

To mules and donkeys dying of a thousand cuts: Who’s whispering in your ears? 

To the horses led from stable rubble to rubble stable. 

To palm trees, zaatar, basil, and tomatoes that weapons poisoned. 

To palm trees: the natural reserve for the phoenix ashes. 

To olive oil: preserver of time. 

To natural gas reserves, may you be a stake through the heart of vampires. 

To flour, bread, and bakeries. 

To those who did not fulfill American media’s requests to boil the ocean: those who couldn’t celebrate their birthdays with cake and candles during the massacre. 

To the martyrs who did not furnish their photos for their killers to air them on their compassionate TV. 

To the martyrs who did not speak English. 

To the relatable and unrelatable, the translatable and untranslatable Palestinian flesh. 

To those who recite the verse of return. 

To those whose minds have shattered into shrapnel nothing can remove from their souls. 

To those with dementia: may it save you from the full scale of terror. 

To forgetfulness when a mercy. 

To remembrance when a mercy. 

To crutches and wheelchairs. 

To those who composed songs and sang them to the syncopated thuds of annihilation. 

To life. To light. 

The light is dead, long live the light. 

To those who prayed in the pitch-black night to the power of God, the only power available to them, but could not meditate on moon and stars. 

To those who found a way to fall in love, make love, construct a romance, a secret rendezvous, hold a wedding, and dream of moon and stars. 

To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. 

Have your pigeons come home? 

To those, to those, to those. 

We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.

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References

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[…] by Fady Joudah. Milkweed Editions in 2024.

"Palestine will be liberated in Arabic" w/ Fady Joudah, Makdisi Street Podcast, 29 November 2024. Listen/watch here, including Fady Joudah reading Dedication.

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Further Resources

‘Passages Through Genocide.’ Read, share, translate, to support the Poets of Gaza.

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