Sakr - The lost Arabs

For Candy Royalle, gone too soon but never lost & my brother, Mohomad, without whom I could not do what I do Here We Are People dont seem to understand. They say no, look, hell is over where the grass is greener. Or no, look, its where blood drenches everything. Nobody wants to reckon with the truth of this place. A palace in hell is still in hell. Freedom of movement in hell is stilllisten, hell is any place where someone is being tortured and we have been here for the longest time.

Contents

Boys with Their Pins Pulled Call it what you will, this place, like everywhere else beneath the sun, burns. The boys spread through it like fuel before the fire, torn khakis muted in the dust kicked up by the fuss. They are yelling or the earth is, and the noise is flame. The residents always leave a residue. A spreading stain, like these boys, if boys they are. Everything has a name.

Some are erased, others misplaced, gifted and taken away, or replaced. Here we have little stacks of mapped bone, they are kicking a ball while the men search what used to be homes. Shins bruised, knees creaking, little bronze busts gleaming, the ball bounces, if ball it really is. Rejoice regardless, someone is scoring a goal, though the posts are always shifting and so are the players, both the living and the dead. Neither is winning, despite the din, the hammerblows of this forge, making both boys and grenades indistinguishable. People screamlook out, duck, and any thing might be sailing in the air, a body or a ball or a blast.

Everything loses its form in the end. A child, frenzied, falls. The others surround him, a furious sandstorm. In this nothing space, you never know what youll be bending to recover,
whether your fingers will meet skin, plastic, or metal. No matter, the result is always the same: a name erupting. As the Bombed City Swells
(in a Viral Video) And the streets become rivers of no longer rushing water, wide and flat, dark and calm, a wending mirror of sky snakes its way between each small building of mud brick and stone.

A man drifts on a door of a home or sheet of unclear metal, his handmade keffiyeh chequered red and white around his dusty head, a pole in hand to convince the river to yield in the only tongue it knows: urgency, rhythmic and insistent, a language of push pull give take. Laughing, the man and his new canoe explore the reborn city, a desert wetness, even as others wade through the hip-high liquid roads, collecting debris, bemoaning the fate that scattered pots and pans, children and names, a past always floating just out of reach. When will the burst dam be fixed, they say, or is this the oceans angry work? Fools, the rootless man replies, look to the future do you not see the oasis has come to us, do you not see me blooming here like the rarest of flowers? Truly, the Arab Spring has arrived. Hanging Dry in Athens Who set the sky on fire? all the children ask, pointing little grubby fingers like guns at the sculpted grey banks backlit by flame or at least a sullen orange glare as if a giant tulip is budding there but when told so, none of them are fooled. All their lives paper clouds have resisted the sun, only now they appear to have caught on. A hideous wind is brewing, carrying on it the mewling of men, the acrid tang of teargas and the first drifting motes of ash.

Black snow! Black snow! the younger boys cry, stomping about with glee, momentarily forgetting the ominous horizon glowering in the distance. Later, from the safety of the hotel, I witness the caramello sky unwrapping itself in a hurry as a woman on a nearby rooftop gathers laundry off a clothesline, her dress and hair snatched and torn at, unpicking underwear, then shorts, shirts, jackets, and skirts, folding them all into a basket as if unaware an arsonist has set everything ablaze or else, at the very least, entirely unconcerned by the ease with which we burn. House of Beirut for Mona El Hallak Once, my ancestors would have been unitedin name if nothing elseknighted by the conquerors blade as Ottoman. Not Lebanese, not Turkish. I cannot imagine the ease of being only one thing. I am sure this too is a fantasy.

In Beirut, a memorial is taking over a house where every bullet hole has been given a name, a shrine to the violence that (r)ejected my family. Only in light of this can you call it Paris , otherwise leave that imperial shade alone. They say people are afraid to speak of the civil war lest it spark back to life. The war is not taught. Who knew my family have followed official policy for years? They will be devastated to hear it. All my knowledge is myth-made, media-driven, an inherited memory washed by a generation of tired hands.

Its small now, so small, the colours faded and riddled with perfect holes. I shake it out every day and lay it anew over my chewed childhood as a cape or shroud but never a flag. This Is Not Meant for You I tore this page from somebody elses book. It was written in Arabic so I found a man to lend me his tongue. Left the page splotched with his thickness & the following words: this was never meant for you. Your grandfather made that choice & you live with the ashes of it black on your teeth.

The Uber driver asked me where the local mosque was real casual like he didnt already know I had it folded up in a square & carried it everywhere. It was one of those nondescript places with a plaque, the kind you need to get close to read the inscription: this is not meant for you . I tried once to swallow a prayerful palace but got gum stuck on minaretsthese stones cant be hidden in a body. Everyone knows where they are. The driver releases me onto Sydney Road, a replica of home, all the Leb bread, smoke, & men. I try not to see my father in them but he is there no matter where I look, laughing with the ease of a man never pierced by a minaret.

In each gaping mouth I witness an old disaster, a rank tooth, a cavity holding captive my name. I kneel by the circle of my almost-fathers not in worship but to listen to what they have folded in their pockets: a language a sea a boy never kissed a son never loved a country that wasnt meant for them but which they carry everywhere. On the Way to Sydney Yellow fields ask too many questions for the sky to answer. It refuses to lower itself to what is knowable, a local geography of facts. Occasionally it will rain a torrent of dream, a world of water, more than we need or the fields require. I cant keep any of it in.

My hair gleams. I am a child again spilling free in Lurnea, an Arab boy among others, a boyhood of colours,
locust mouths descending on the mall, heavy with need. Heavier with regret. Or desire. One thing we never lacked were questions, bruises. Its okay. Its okay.

I have what they call a photogenic memory. It only retains beauty. Or else what it holds is made beautiful given enough time. Like my grandfather feasting on a snakes head to survive in war-born Lebanon. Like boys in Coles stuffing pockets with stolen answers. How to destroy the body slowly Breathe deep the image Of the burned body, the spilled Viscera, the obvious cartilage.

Swallow all the dead children. Feast your eyes on ruin, The lunar landscapes of war: Empty flags, cratered
Cities. Weigh down every last cell With suffering, but not as Jesus did In a single span of hours Wracking flesh & blood, cross & nail, Into godhood itself. A kind Of regression. To be human, witness Each act of woe & sin, Then live with it Knowing each blackened moment Is taking root, is breaking You. Every day for a hundred years If youre so lucky Live with this ordinary Divinity, live with this death as long as you can, & waste not a single day on a rose.