Artwork by Mary Gagnon
Acrylic on birch. 4 feet by 3.5 feet. It is called “Right of return” and it depicts two sisters who, after being displaced by war into diaspora, finally make it back to their rightful land. It is a promise of peace and justice being restored to all lands.
My mother was born in a carafe of blood and oil,
pressed like burgundy tears of collapsing pomegranate skin between the refuge of escaped bullets and cinder.
Her bones were immaculate pillars trenched into holy land and anchors for our return.
I was the imprisoned stowaway of pulverized breath,
pinned across the clothesline of her heart, as she crossed the narrow passages of her displacement and grief,
with her chin tucked to her God and eyelashes pressed like olives between my grandfather’s proud knuckles and Fajr Prayer.
Her skin stretched taut over the foothills of the south, like sand and mortar,
purified by the wailing of women, children, and mourning doves,
over sutured leather boots worn by martyrs and boys clinging to linen skirts, sorrow,
and zaatar rolled into soft bread, soggy from clenched teeth and grinding jaws.
Hijra, a note scribed in tarry ink
that would bleed through my eyes like red tea stains resurfacing in the shackled lies
of what it meant to be
a generation removed from exile and remembered refrain.
Her hands an oiled dough folded over one another,
one purifying itself, then purifying the other,
rising with warm anise and Ikhlas.
Did the sea ever find solace in her brother’s decay?
His glass voice,
naked and restrained against the cedar door frame,
carried like a broken bird tucked into the end of a gun barrel
with a foreign boy, depraved and scorned against the trigger,
a minor note, a treble clef, wrapped around the staff of my father’s affliction,
unconcerned with the sun being blotted out by regrets and un-naming.
Can my name counter the death of her girlhood,
evoked in the slaughter of her father’s cattle,
the perpetual loss of land,
the staggered wandering across borders,
endured in the corrugated separation of rib bones and my bilingual appraisal of love, and war,
and coffee grounds,
and suburbs,
and news,
and knees damp in cobalt paint and salt water?
What Has Been Lost
If the chains oxidize between the weight of the occupied lies we’ve been told about who fought for who,
and to whom we owe our captivity and rusted wells,
and we became free to yearn for death,
reprieved from fighting for life,
and self,
and salted air, and sea,
I would resist until my last breath was wrung from my pores like detergent pregnant with blood stains and clay earth that was caked beneath my fingernails
from digging shallow child-sized graves, missing ivory candles and copper bowls of sage, due to blockades,
and prison tunnels concealed beneath the earth and castles of dictators,
whose teeth sharp, like lion and claws tempered like butcher’s blades,
quilted me within fragmented fractions of my settled dreams,
not born of my own recollection of displacement and the metallic bite of refuge and inherited feelings of being foreign in my own flesh.
If I could be promised that I could sit on the terracotta tiled veranda, of Siti Jamela’s 7th floor outpost over Mediterranean, lapping against my breastbone, and iron will,
and the embrace of my eyelids reconciling in the spaces of who I could have been, liberated from diaspora,
I would crawl across melted asphalt, thick, white, and blistered with phosperous, on bare knees and corrosive forgiveness,
to feel the sun scatter through the Cedar, and olive boughs on land that calls me home,
to smell the stone ground kahwa being cradled by air thick with prostration and Allah before dawn,
to have the call to prayer beckon to the pieces of me that are unnamed, and unaware, that it was possible to have no space to belong, and be misunderstood
in far off lands that refuse to pronounce my birthright.
I would score my skin with flint and smoldering matchsticks, to the mark the days I was forced to be subdivided from goodness and wakefulness,
and ancient knowledge of girlhood, born beneath coaled eyes and oiled hands.
I would know who distance had dismembered from the soft peaks of green hills and jasmine,
had fate allowed me to be a remnant of my grandfather’s land, and circumstance, and song.
I would be eulogized by the gentle bray of his lambs and the slaughter of his weeping.
I would bear the kerchief of my people’s refusal to surrender, and grief, and carful folding of manakeesh on Sunday from Suit Al-Khamees in Bint Jbail.
If I could,
I would carve myself from Baalbek stone, the salted sun my rasp, the inlay of my surname, my relief.
I would wear my sister, a crimson turban of endurance, across my furrowed brow, a symbol of my mother’s sajj bread and suffering, suffocating, and smoldering against the hot rounded stone of Hijra,
If it meant I could return us all to the soil, root, and seed of hearts entrenched in homeland,
instead of being personified proof of what happens when you uproot a cedar.
