AURORA LEVINS MORALES
On the first day the earth shook all the time, a constant trembling underfoot. I was in the forest, watching ruby-crowned kinglets in the underbrush, sitting still in the presence of trees that were seedlings when the Ottoman Turks took Palestine. When I came home, the roof of tranquility was gone.
On the second day the journalist on the radio said there were old men sitting in the street weeping. He held the phone out his window so we could hear the whisper of limbs trying to find each other.
On the third day I am trying to write about Gaza, but in my mind’s eye is a silver-toned photograph of Wounded Knee, one hundred and eighteen years ago today. I want to write about the dead of the last half hour, of the last five minutes, about the mosque, the police station, the children walking home from school, but what fills my inner eye is cannon fire tearing through buffalo hide to where families lie wrapped in fur, and afterwards silence, torn edges hanging still in the bitter winter air.
On the fourth day I say Gaza and my mouth fills with rivers of blood: Sand Creek of the Cheyenne, Bear River of the Shoshone, Mystic River of the Pequot, Red Bank of the Sauk and Fox, the Coayuco and Loiza and Mayagüez of the Taino.
On the fifth day I think about the concept of retaliation. I remember that when the Sauk returned to their village by the great river, the white general said it was an invasion and ordered a massacre. To conquerors, every act of resistance is an atrocity. Surviving is provocation enough. Among the occupied, not even babies are civilians.
On the sixth day and every day after, I think of tight spaces: the holds of slave ships, cattle cars, canyons, London bomb shelters during WWII. I think of the most densely populated place on Earth on fire with the doors locked.
On the seventh day I realize I haven’t been sleeping. When I lie down I see pictures, so I get up and turn on the lights. My stomach hurts all the time. I watch a mouth form the words “there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” and I realize that she means there are no humans there.
Days eight, nine, and ten I am organizing poets, collecting a sheaf of voices so we can begin tearing and mending the story.
Today one of the poets says her whole family, gathered in a basement in Gaza, almost died last night. I learn about laser weapons that explode people from the inside, depleted uranium shells, something that’s shredding people’s limbs much more than the “usual” bombings. Suddenly, I am sixteen reading about “daisy cutters” and other devices meant to tear apart the bodies of all the families in Viet Nam, because the maimed and agonizingly wounded will heap greater burdens on the so-called enemy than the merely dead. I am sixteen reading about napalm, etched, like all my generation, with the photograph of the naked girl running down a road from a village in flames.
On the eleventh day I dream I am one of a multitude walking without legs. On the twelfth day I recognize the smell of these weapons, the stench of them drifting across the beaches and hills of my country, playground of armies, where every nightmare device, every terrible substance, has its trial run and incubates tiny wars in the cells of everybody downwind.
I stop writing. I can’t write. I sleep a few hours in the dawn. At night I am wide-eyed, listening to a silent movie. The news has edited out the voices I most want to hear. The murderous assault dies down to the slower, grinding to death of a people, but I still can’t sleep.
I don’t sleep until I arrive in Cuba, the leading exporter of hope, until the Jewish neurologist holds my hand, says he is the descendant of Ukrainian migrants, says his son is in Israel and thank God, he says, not in the army, nowhere near Gaza, not part of it, and I ask how it was for him, how he felt, not knowing what he believes, and he says I had a heart attack and I look at him and say that’s when I stopped sleeping.
We stand there for a moment, holding hands, and in the morning, I begin to write.