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| Pencil on paper (2015) by Randa Mdah |
I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die
I wasn’t around when death was for free
But I was there when my maternal grandfather paid the price of cotton
labourers’ sweat that made his Ottoman suit
The price of bare miles to the women of Bosnia
The price
of their tears on the chests of their men before the war
The price
of God’s banners
The price
of the emperor’s frivolousness and long-term sickness
Balkan
blood dripped on my school shirt
The teachers
found vows of vengeance in my backpack, and so fabricated chapters of history
I wasn’t around
when death happened by chance, on the road
But I was
there when my paternal grandfather paid the price of a signature at the bottom
of a page, the price of surrendering his village at the bottom of the mountain,
of taking the occupier’s hands off of it, the rebel’s taking his hands off of
his waist. With the move of a pen, my grandfather’s ink numbed
the slope. With the folding of a paper, the mountain folded history, with a
handshake, he took the valley’s hand from the tank’s muzzle.
The almond
trees died in the cardiac operation rooms, the wedding horses shrouded their
eyes with henna and killed themselves.
No one
cleansed my ethnicity. But the mountain’s spinal cord
broke. And so broke my chance to ever ascend it together, to look at Christ’s footsteps on
the lake and copy them.
I’m not the
miracle
I didn’t
walk on water and I didn’t heal myself of your love’s ailments
But it was
my heart’s water which I learned to turn into asphalt whenever I remembered you
I learned
to flee the lava that dripped from the mountains of your fear
And I
didn’t learn death
I wasn’t
there when death was a once and for all lesson
Where the
memory of the rocket betrayed it and so forgot the way
The bullet
that never meant to cease being a pen
The
massacre that passed by the main road and fired peace
When I was
walking in the back road
Picking
yellow daisies and watching wars drawn in cartoons
I didn’t believe
I would ever learn to die
Until
Beirut’s war drowned my mother’s lullaby in the well
The scent
of invasions emanates from the cooking oven
The
commando’s voice enters Um Kulthoum’s cassette
The skulls
that paved the city road, they leave the poster hanging beside the bed and lull
me, tapping my soft head like a long latmiya. So I stop crying, or they stop
crying in it.
My heart
grows in the well like a pomegranate tree, each time a branch is broken I climb
another on my way to you. All of me breaks, so I become a nest. The birds look
in the water and see the laughing face of a Bosnian, I look in it and see your
face.
I am the
child of tubes crossbred in a medical lab
I smelled
the scent of dead horses in my father’s sperm
And I
retreated
I was born
in the seventh month
After I was
beaten by Bosnians in my mother’s womb
And I
retreated
I didn’t
believe I would ever learn to die
Until the
Hebron massacre was committed on the cake of my ninth birthday. I lit the
candles on the carpets of Abraham’s house. They melted there alone and no one
sang upon them. The birthday gifts fall into the well, the gifts fall, vows of
vengeance, in my backpack
The vows
would’ve dug my grave had they any hands
The almond
trees would’ve stepped on it had they a spinal cord
The mountains
would’ve praised it had they any poems
The Bosnian’s tears would’ve creviced
its stones had they any beaks or claws
And I would’ve come out
To learn
the first lesson
That the
smashed skull in the poster is my skull
And that
the blood on my shirt
Is my blood
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