I remember when we all jumped at once. Shy, red leaves glided in the wind like paper airplanes that never land. Smiles on the horizon of our eyes met faces we knew were out there but could not see.
It was summer. We were young, fruitful; an unlikely collection of flowers descending boldly upon a world which would have liked to believe we were mutants. We weren’t mutants.
The water was freezing. I was the first to dip my feet in because no one had summoned the proper courage to do so and because I knew the sun would break. So sitting on the dock, locking my knees with my hands, I met my fears at home and stretched out my legs to meet my reflection. It was numbing, liberating, tantalizing, except that Sarah conspired with Khalid to make my encounter with -15 degrees more intimate. They pushed me in, those weasels.
Days like those made me wonder what we're all really doing here. The four of us were never supposed to be. We were not allowed. We came from different sides of the same war zone—a bloodied, wretched place where children are dissuaded, disenfranchised, derelict. It dawned on me one night here that our very existence communicated a message that no tank or anti-tank ever could.
We were Muslim. Or maybe Jewish. No, seriously, what were we? Our elusive aura deluded even the most perceptive. We made no apologies. This frustrated the compartmentalizers, I'm sure. Not because they wanted our apologies, but because they didn't: they wanted to figure it out for themselves, but they couldn't. We were confusing. We were proud. We were just us, without conditions or preconditions: self-made heartbeats who thumped and longed for the impolite.
After my body recovered from the trauma, I shouted this to Sarah. I said, Hey, Sarah, what makes us beautiful? She held her head high, clearly still reeling from the success of her mischief, and, gazing outward in my general, ambiguous direction, yelled back: We don't apologize!
When the sun broke, I butterflied back to the base where the others were chatting. Opening my eyes after the last stroke I saw Khalid, Sarah and Amra lying on the plywood and staring at the caricatures of the sky. They were arguing with one another about the personification of the clouds. I spotted my moment. Yes, that's right, I attacked, splashing them with some of their own medicine in the form of ice on bear skin. Who ever said that revenge wasn't sweet?
Soon, we were freezing together—laughing, diving, spitting in the face of tanks and anti-tanks. The expanse of the lake was rejuvenating. We couldn't see its end but we imagined it. We embraced it, like a young love whose capacity it is to hurt us, but which we’d never fail going to bat for.
G-d promised us pneumonia, but we didn't always believe G-d, we only trusted Him.
And I remember. Purple flirted with orange above us when Khalid suggested it, that we'd all jump at once. He said it'd free us. That is, if you want to be freed. We scrambled back to the dock and readied the cameramen who weren't there to greet us, but who we hoped would take a photograph for the compartmentalizers to mull and choke over. We wanted this one imprinted in our minds. Like that time Amra crisscrossed a farm in India running from a cow she was charged to take care of but which refused to be milked. Like all those times when we'd choose dairy she'd suddenly complain that she's lactose intolerant, and how we'd always know that she's really just a coward. Coward, get it? Amra said we weren't funny.
We lined up symmetrically along the rugged floor of the last refuge point that still imprisoned us, and jumped.
Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Time We Let Free
Fear is not the only thing that hides in closets. Nor are shadows.
Memories, too, hide in closets—masking as old, worn-out jeans and rumpled t-shirts. Memories we may at some point wanted to deal with, but want no longer. Maybe these memories are in fact fears, or maybe they are romantic imaginings we had in our youths but which we have tucked under our beds at 14 or 15 because we were afraid of some shadows haunting us in the form of ghosts.
We believed in ghosts, then.
But sometimes memories are long and gone, their conception far and before the time that is now our own. Sometimes memories are histories, whether real or imaginary.
And often these histories precede us. They develop in generations different in thought and influence than what we have perceived of as familiar, and have become emblematic of transformations we perhaps once read of in glancing fashion but know very little about. As it were, these histories existed before we knew what was or was not in our closets or under our beds: before we first donned our baby body-suits and our size-zero slippers with teddy-bear patterns; before we knew of girls and boys and crushes and heartbreaks; and before we could consciously be scared of anything, let alone shadows that creep around in the dusty corners of our bedrooms where sunlight is—at best—a casual visitor (intruder?).
Yet they implicate us. These memories bind us. Much like traffic lights do, and systems of governance. Beehives and the instructions manual for kite-flying. (And what to do when your string gets tangled.) The law of gravity and that of cause and effect. Frustrating yet steadfast rules of sport. Baking bread and braiding hair. Skydiving. Tap dancing. Tap water. Snow days.
And love. And hate. And hate out of love. And love of hate. And the kind of hate that really makes us love a person, even when all we want to do is let them go.
Yes, these are memories, too. Perhaps they are learned, but so too is the history of war and the history of peace. So is the history of everything in between.
They are unspoken ghosts—these stories and statutes and smells and smiles of yesteryear. And still, in the closet they lay. And under our beds. Alongside the old notes that we used to pass in class when we first learned the rules of engagement. What was allowed and what was less allowed. Flirting and playing and wishing and dreaming. Alongside the titanium tennis racquet in silver (which no one had seen, but us) and the deflated tennis balls with faded, dying print. Alongside the grade reports and the old CD's. Alongside the children's books and the decks of cards. Alongside our deepest secrets, which the sun told the shadows when they rendezvoused.
It's time we let free. That we learned how to disentangle the kite and let it soar with a wave of the wind—ride the shape of a cloud and maybe kiss a raindrop or two. It's time we faced history, and time we faced ourselves.
No, I'm not only talking about the bad history of the world. Also the good. The happy. The charming. The refreshing and the audaciously creative history.
Like that painting you made one day in 4th grade, came home—through the kitchen, up the stairs, into your room—and threw away for whomever would catch.
Like that moment in elementary, middle, or high school that you wanted everyone to see but which no one was there for.
Like that picture of how it could have been to feel the fountain's water splashing against your face on that immaculate summer day when her friends were playing outside—laughing, living.
But how you dropped it, once, and how it shattered.
And how a new picture, with a new fountain, with a new summer day, and with laughing, and with living, and with water—how that would have set you free, and still can.
Memories, too, hide in closets—masking as old, worn-out jeans and rumpled t-shirts. Memories we may at some point wanted to deal with, but want no longer. Maybe these memories are in fact fears, or maybe they are romantic imaginings we had in our youths but which we have tucked under our beds at 14 or 15 because we were afraid of some shadows haunting us in the form of ghosts.
We believed in ghosts, then.
But sometimes memories are long and gone, their conception far and before the time that is now our own. Sometimes memories are histories, whether real or imaginary.
And often these histories precede us. They develop in generations different in thought and influence than what we have perceived of as familiar, and have become emblematic of transformations we perhaps once read of in glancing fashion but know very little about. As it were, these histories existed before we knew what was or was not in our closets or under our beds: before we first donned our baby body-suits and our size-zero slippers with teddy-bear patterns; before we knew of girls and boys and crushes and heartbreaks; and before we could consciously be scared of anything, let alone shadows that creep around in the dusty corners of our bedrooms where sunlight is—at best—a casual visitor (intruder?).
Yet they implicate us. These memories bind us. Much like traffic lights do, and systems of governance. Beehives and the instructions manual for kite-flying. (And what to do when your string gets tangled.) The law of gravity and that of cause and effect. Frustrating yet steadfast rules of sport. Baking bread and braiding hair. Skydiving. Tap dancing. Tap water. Snow days.
And love. And hate. And hate out of love. And love of hate. And the kind of hate that really makes us love a person, even when all we want to do is let them go.
Yes, these are memories, too. Perhaps they are learned, but so too is the history of war and the history of peace. So is the history of everything in between.
They are unspoken ghosts—these stories and statutes and smells and smiles of yesteryear. And still, in the closet they lay. And under our beds. Alongside the old notes that we used to pass in class when we first learned the rules of engagement. What was allowed and what was less allowed. Flirting and playing and wishing and dreaming. Alongside the titanium tennis racquet in silver (which no one had seen, but us) and the deflated tennis balls with faded, dying print. Alongside the grade reports and the old CD's. Alongside the children's books and the decks of cards. Alongside our deepest secrets, which the sun told the shadows when they rendezvoused.
It's time we let free. That we learned how to disentangle the kite and let it soar with a wave of the wind—ride the shape of a cloud and maybe kiss a raindrop or two. It's time we faced history, and time we faced ourselves.
No, I'm not only talking about the bad history of the world. Also the good. The happy. The charming. The refreshing and the audaciously creative history.
Like that painting you made one day in 4th grade, came home—through the kitchen, up the stairs, into your room—and threw away for whomever would catch.
Like that moment in elementary, middle, or high school that you wanted everyone to see but which no one was there for.
Like that picture of how it could have been to feel the fountain's water splashing against your face on that immaculate summer day when her friends were playing outside—laughing, living.
But how you dropped it, once, and how it shattered.
And how a new picture, with a new fountain, with a new summer day, and with laughing, and with living, and with water—how that would have set you free, and still can.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Why Peace in Sudan Matters
You sigh. A day's worth of searching for firewood in the remote outskirts of Abyei slowly fades as the sun above you turns a starker, darker orange. It then sets and sets off the recurring fear voicing from within: it will get colder tonight.
But that fear is compounded with an even greater one. You hurry, your heart beating fast and faster, back to the camp, to the "safety" of the camp, because you know those men. You know what they do and what they did. Your friends have been raped. And they have been killed. And the risk you take to defend your family is the greatest risk of all. And so you run, empty-handed, because you don't want to be buried the next time the sun turns a starker, brighter orange.
It began yesterday. In an unprecedented moment in our history, the people of Southern Sudan took to the polls to cast their vote on a referendum that could see their secession from the north and the subsequent birth of a new nation. This pivotal event was the intended culmination of a peace process between the north and the south, its timetable determined as part of the Naivasha Peace Agreement, signed in January 2005 between Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Government of Sudan. Independence is looming; decades of civil war, anguish, and genocidal crimes could soon come to an end.
Not so fast? The peace process could also well be undermined, as it has been undermined time and again by Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir and his proxy-militia in Khartoum -- nefarious violators of humanity whose own self-interest unleashed mass-atrocity crimes in Sudan's region of Darfur for the past eight years, leaving more than 500,000 dead and more than 3 million displaced. He and his clowns have done so before. We needn't look farther back than April of last year, when Al-Bashir, for whom an arrest warrant was issued in March 2008 by the International Criminal Court, conspicuously stole the election, gerrymandering his way to power via intimidation tactics and the instigation of unadulterated chaos - you know, typical behavior for a mass-murderer.
And so political turmoil has precedent. Violence has its stage set. The votes are being cast, and the world remains watching.
But what responsibility does the world have, anyway? Why does peace in Sudan matter so? Why does the international community have a responsibility to ensure that peace and stability endure after the creation of a new African state? To solve oil-revenue sharing squabbles? Secure post-referendum border demarcation? Speak, stand, stay?
Sixty-two years ago, delegates at the United Nations had a vision: that conscience should be able to stand up to power, and that the small countries of the world should not fall by the wayside as they submit willingly to the agendas of the big ones. Yes, this was the dream of Eleanor Roosevelt. A world rid of war. A world where the worth of a child in Nairobi was equal to that of a child in New York, and London, and wherever else. Sifting through the rubble and devastation of two world wars, she, together with the other idealists of her time, framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first bill of rights to which all human beings are entitled. These were thirty independent articles, not dependent ones. Among them was the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to security. The right to a nationality and the right to work. The right to an education and the right to participate in community-life. In other words, the rights we "know" but never knew we had.
Eleanor Roosevelt understood something profound about the world. She dreamed because she understood- not only the moral imperative that lay in giving hope and purpose to people everywhere; to protecting innocent civilians from the failures of their own governments; to democracy; but what lies beyond: namely, the nature of our connectedness in a post-modern world. That the butterfly admired by one little girl somewhere is the same butterfly admired by any little girl anywhere. That the persecution of one people implies a threat to all people. And that the grass really is only green until it's not.
The history of genocide teaches one thing: hate incubates. It festers. It grows. It multiplies exponentially until words become chants, lies becomes truths, and ideologies that once seemed ridiculous, well- are no longer. Incredulity dies. Rather, it dissipates, more quickly in a community environment than we realize. But what is community, after all? In Hitler's world, perhaps it was Germany, perhaps it was Europe. Yet, had he been able to, is there any doubt in your mind that Hitler would have exterminated the Jews of America? The homosexuals of America? The disabled people of America? All of America? I have little doubt. And that's for one very simple reason: in the so-called "logic" of Nazism, hatred of the Jew preceded the general hatred of mankind. The Pan-German idea excluded all who were deemed racially inferior. The blood stains of the 1940's bear evidence to what was done, not what was intended.
"Community" today implies and implicates differently than it did in post-WWII Europe. Differently than it did on 9/11. Differently than it did when Barack Obama defeated John McCain. Globalization is globalizing. And imagine Hitler with the power of the internet. Just stop, just stop and imagine. Frightening, I know. But it underscores the fundamental point: social responsibility in today's world has pretty big feet.
What matters there matters here. We cannot rest on our lawns, gazing at the stars, indifferent until tragedy knocks on our door, fainting with sadness when it does. We cannot remain diffident, blissfully ignorant, uninvolved, simply because the referendum (whatever that word means, anyway) is happening half-way across the world and not next door. We, at this historic crossroads, have a unique obligation to ensure that the world continues watching; that it does everything in its power to prevent future violence from unfolding in Sudan. Because peace is at stake there. Not only for them, but for us. And if we don't speak for them, who, said Martin Niemoller, will be left to speak for us?
The people of Southern Sudan are ready and deserving. They don't want self-governance. They want independence. They want the privileges we know, and those we often take for granted. They want to be able to protect their families and their children. To walk outside their towns and cities without the fear of being raped. To keep warm at night.
As we do, they want to be free.
But that fear is compounded with an even greater one. You hurry, your heart beating fast and faster, back to the camp, to the "safety" of the camp, because you know those men. You know what they do and what they did. Your friends have been raped. And they have been killed. And the risk you take to defend your family is the greatest risk of all. And so you run, empty-handed, because you don't want to be buried the next time the sun turns a starker, brighter orange.
It began yesterday. In an unprecedented moment in our history, the people of Southern Sudan took to the polls to cast their vote on a referendum that could see their secession from the north and the subsequent birth of a new nation. This pivotal event was the intended culmination of a peace process between the north and the south, its timetable determined as part of the Naivasha Peace Agreement, signed in January 2005 between Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Government of Sudan. Independence is looming; decades of civil war, anguish, and genocidal crimes could soon come to an end.
Not so fast? The peace process could also well be undermined, as it has been undermined time and again by Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir and his proxy-militia in Khartoum -- nefarious violators of humanity whose own self-interest unleashed mass-atrocity crimes in Sudan's region of Darfur for the past eight years, leaving more than 500,000 dead and more than 3 million displaced. He and his clowns have done so before. We needn't look farther back than April of last year, when Al-Bashir, for whom an arrest warrant was issued in March 2008 by the International Criminal Court, conspicuously stole the election, gerrymandering his way to power via intimidation tactics and the instigation of unadulterated chaos - you know, typical behavior for a mass-murderer.
And so political turmoil has precedent. Violence has its stage set. The votes are being cast, and the world remains watching.
But what responsibility does the world have, anyway? Why does peace in Sudan matter so? Why does the international community have a responsibility to ensure that peace and stability endure after the creation of a new African state? To solve oil-revenue sharing squabbles? Secure post-referendum border demarcation? Speak, stand, stay?
Sixty-two years ago, delegates at the United Nations had a vision: that conscience should be able to stand up to power, and that the small countries of the world should not fall by the wayside as they submit willingly to the agendas of the big ones. Yes, this was the dream of Eleanor Roosevelt. A world rid of war. A world where the worth of a child in Nairobi was equal to that of a child in New York, and London, and wherever else. Sifting through the rubble and devastation of two world wars, she, together with the other idealists of her time, framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first bill of rights to which all human beings are entitled. These were thirty independent articles, not dependent ones. Among them was the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to security. The right to a nationality and the right to work. The right to an education and the right to participate in community-life. In other words, the rights we "know" but never knew we had.
Eleanor Roosevelt understood something profound about the world. She dreamed because she understood- not only the moral imperative that lay in giving hope and purpose to people everywhere; to protecting innocent civilians from the failures of their own governments; to democracy; but what lies beyond: namely, the nature of our connectedness in a post-modern world. That the butterfly admired by one little girl somewhere is the same butterfly admired by any little girl anywhere. That the persecution of one people implies a threat to all people. And that the grass really is only green until it's not.
The history of genocide teaches one thing: hate incubates. It festers. It grows. It multiplies exponentially until words become chants, lies becomes truths, and ideologies that once seemed ridiculous, well- are no longer. Incredulity dies. Rather, it dissipates, more quickly in a community environment than we realize. But what is community, after all? In Hitler's world, perhaps it was Germany, perhaps it was Europe. Yet, had he been able to, is there any doubt in your mind that Hitler would have exterminated the Jews of America? The homosexuals of America? The disabled people of America? All of America? I have little doubt. And that's for one very simple reason: in the so-called "logic" of Nazism, hatred of the Jew preceded the general hatred of mankind. The Pan-German idea excluded all who were deemed racially inferior. The blood stains of the 1940's bear evidence to what was done, not what was intended.
"Community" today implies and implicates differently than it did in post-WWII Europe. Differently than it did on 9/11. Differently than it did when Barack Obama defeated John McCain. Globalization is globalizing. And imagine Hitler with the power of the internet. Just stop, just stop and imagine. Frightening, I know. But it underscores the fundamental point: social responsibility in today's world has pretty big feet.
What matters there matters here. We cannot rest on our lawns, gazing at the stars, indifferent until tragedy knocks on our door, fainting with sadness when it does. We cannot remain diffident, blissfully ignorant, uninvolved, simply because the referendum (whatever that word means, anyway) is happening half-way across the world and not next door. We, at this historic crossroads, have a unique obligation to ensure that the world continues watching; that it does everything in its power to prevent future violence from unfolding in Sudan. Because peace is at stake there. Not only for them, but for us. And if we don't speak for them, who, said Martin Niemoller, will be left to speak for us?
The people of Southern Sudan are ready and deserving. They don't want self-governance. They want independence. They want the privileges we know, and those we often take for granted. They want to be able to protect their families and their children. To walk outside their towns and cities without the fear of being raped. To keep warm at night.
As we do, they want to be free.
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