I’ve been wanting to throw up for five days. In my blue sky resonate explosions and a bitter, nauseating taste stagnates at the back of my throat. The debris explode and scatter, the dust erases everything, especially the words. Useless. For some, it is just an eternal restart. For me, anger, distress, incomprehension, hatred also took place, at the base of my neck, and parasitize all my words, all my sentences, the least of my thoughts.
Everything wants to be vomited in disorder, in a filthy, viscous, black tide. And the cry of the blue bird, at the top of its lungs. Strident the bird. His words strident. While others have always been nestled in my cradle. But they have hardened a little, have chipped a little, withered, molded, rotted in my cradle. Cradle of civilization. Throat tightening, wanting to vomit those words again. Cradle of colonization, cohabitation, 1948. That’s it.
Be ridiculous to dance under the shards of bombs. Stretch out your arms, stained with blood, shrouded in tears, your eyes riddled with bullets. And sing, sing, sing, shout even in this mass which is peace, reason, measure. Howl “Shalom”, “Shalom” again. Link this story to mine. Make sure I don’t get out of it anymore. Let blood and sand swallow me up in this ballet of rockets. Howl in your joy to sprinkle your sky with new red stars and their smoldering trails.
And then justify yourself too, so that I believe it, so that I keep hope, so that the message seems convincing enough to me, well enough put together for me to applaud. Tell me about millennial history, lands uprooted, sacred heritage, Jews of the third century, Arabs of 1948, Israelis under enemy fire, head held high despite the resentment of the destruction that swept away its neighbors , and Palestinians hunted but proud, dead or alive, slingshot in hand or hand lost under the corpse of a house.
Oh yes, tell me again about my family, about my history, about the one that I will not be able to reject, about the one that I will not be able to distinguish, about the one from which I will not be able to draw the threads, to elucidate the reasons, do not distinguish neither the causes nor the nuances. Oh yes, bathe me in this hatred, in this acceptance of bullets and deaths, tell me about God and the Prophet. Tell me about the sky of Abraham and his starry descendants, tell me about Jacob and his twelve sons, tell me about this thousand-year-old tradition of which I am the daughter and which, today, carries me around the public square yelling ” Lehaim “, to life, to life, to life, and whatever the dead, and whatever the truth, and whatever the wounds, the deep cuts. Slashes in the skin first, in the flesh burnt alive, then in the soul, with rusty bars, hammered nails, acid thrown at all the values of humanity yet so slowly gathered.
And then, please, tear up families too, make father, mother, brothers and sisters cry, continue mountebanks of death, wizards of misfortune, emperors of desolation, continue to foment the decomposition of family ties. Point at the bird, imitate its mocking song, do not shoot it. (How to get out of its cradle? How to silence the bird?). Let him scream so that the family explodes, ties are destroyed, the sun slips away. Leave behind you only a dismal, empty, hideous silence, so that your shots resonate. I hear them, they hit every cell of my body, every part of my being.
Then, face the distress of my body convulsed with tears, this mute body whereas yesterday so noisy, this body incapable of choosing, of speaking out, of patiently evoking the story of a split, split between several. me, split between several families, split between several peoples, split between several eras. Unable to name all the names (today ten and one hundred and ninety, tomorrow how many more), to evoke all the traumas and all the nightmares.
Continue to spread noise and fury, madness and fury, may our father Abraham and Sayidna Ibrahim mourn their descendants and lean over my body to raise me with one extended arm and one powerful hand, gazes scanning the horizon and the rubble of the Middle East.
Bettina Lobel, Vincennes (Val-de-Marne)
