She Destroyed Rome
Likeness- a resemblance not affirmed, an analogy born into you. There is something so deific about this identity, about people who share the blood that runs through the course of these veins. The spikes that have shed from the stem, the flower’s banner petals that have shivered from the wind, shielding the newborns beneath it.
Likeness, a crestfallen soliloquy, has bordered my seamed flesh and uncoiled my birthmark. Cleaved my masque onto the sacred tree, its sister forests now bearing what holds me. The mithridate to this labyrinth, the poised ring of Saturn.
A mirror, when disintegrated into pieces onto the reflection of the opposite ground, does not lose its mimicking. It mimics itself in relation to its beholder and not the other way around. I feel the sound of bullets penetrating the air I’m enveloped in once a Palestinian’s flesh unties by the metal of the crusader.
The bloodshed has now reached my sleeve.
Identity is not a partitioned cemetery. Identity is a mollusk’s paresis after the hands, whose age lines were not made of the sea, steals its pearls. It creeps into the seams, the tiptoe that becomes a clatter. It is a conveyor of the clone you could have been.
I wept to my archangel, and his night brought me to a gallery of Armageddons, with sceneries where the believers of the Antichrist flooded Lod, and the son of Mary’s pathway frustrated his wrath, only to reach the gates of this Palestinian city and find familiar faces of the region hindering his slaughtering sight.
A life with no colonization would be the nightmare and the end of capitalism the same way patriarchy fuels the heart of capitalism. This is what an incubus is fed, whilst we are the ones called succubi.
How I feel the dishonor on behalf of Arabs enshrined by an assembled western standard, and how persuaded by sorrow I have been to hear what I hear and know what I know. The region where the worm has eaten us with its externally-fueled internal strife, where the dermestes gather for a feast of our dwindling flesh.
Every independence is another colonization. Every independence is an elusive colonization. Liberation is neither a day nor a process. Freedom does not axiomatically work for a cause or struggle. Liberation is not a celebration or a holiday. I laugh ruefully when Arab claims declare themselves and their lands as liberated and independent.
Freedom does not equate liberation. Liberation is a framework. Liberation must be a regime.
It is a frame of every moving portrait in your life. I have been born in a language-preserved family, and I did not allow myself be captured by another. My first word was in Arabic, my first lullaby was in Arabic, my first book, which I consciously chose, was in Arabic. My first written piece was in Arabic, everything I have been consuming had been primarily in Arabic. My first language and my first pride were in Arabic. My first love was Arabic.
And I glance at the nations adjoining me with sheer disenchantment. Their children now held to a sky of an imperialistic climate; their ancestral tongues forsaken. This language I have been dualistically abusing is solely glorious when I use it here, it moves the moment I move and then dies when I return to Arabic.
My return is as polished as my orchestration of these words because my English does not surpass my mother tongue. I am a writer; words do not gain their consciousness unless I allow their clay to breathe. I am the sculptor of a desolate creation left by the mortification of the unread.
We can call conspirers clods, or we can call them nation-rulers. I would swear to the petal that has shielded me that this nation-wide language erasure is conscious. I would pray to a truth that states the reason why colonial fiends feed the colonizees their language, deserting the history of the land. I would raise my hand and speak the oath of a scripture that denies the entry of a washed-out Arabian dialect.
The troops leave, but the footprint inscribes the grounds.
I have seen the soul of our language saturated by light dialects. Why have we ruled out the ring of حَرْفُ الهَاءِ (The letter H) when we speak? It is the alphabet of the soul, the vibration that comes from the heart, deep inside. Speak of it and your lungs shalt grow. It is the chime we use to express undefeated agony. “آهٍ”. Why are we so afraid to return to the mirror of our internal body?
And I have noticed that youthful Arabs are such amateurs when it comes to Arabic that they cannot differentiate between great and mediocre Arabic literature and poetry. You cannot know when to be truly mesmerized with what you are not properly conversed with. Every pawn in a chess board seems mighty to the novice.
I wept for the Palestinian and how pure they are; the holiest people are still in the chronicles of a true Arab Revolt. They would still give their scarce water to a nation in possession of a well when their own insides are starving.
And I shalt recapture Jerusalem. For you, I would.
If my question of religion ever changes, it would be because religion has been birthed from the womb of our land. If thunder strikes me as a religionist, it is because this is the one thing, the one cause most of our enemies hold, that belongs to us. Our enemies, who claim every genesis had been theirs, could not steal this. If anything about religions prove it right, it is that it had not been cradled by Western grounds.
Rome is not a city; Rome is not a nation. Rome is a regime. And you fight a regime with a righteous regime. I have been born to loathe what I conceptualize as more than just provinces. They must be dismembered, limb by limb, the way they sought our Jesus Christ. Rome is a world that seeks to watch you plead under its feet with dirt egressing from your lip.
But my ancestors were the first humans to develop agricultural practices, so even the earth is my capital and my paladin.
