The Last Crusade
I have long despised the claims of humanity’s endeavors of taking the torch in the midst of the darkness and swallowing all its light, deflecting us from pursuing the fiendish presence in the hallway.
To speak of colonization as the banishment of humanity from the world’s soul is an eradication of any history when it comes to this colonization, that the world’s ruthlessness has by a star’s chance stumbled upon a people and took their childhood’s blue waterfall.
How many times have we labeled atrocities a lack of humanity, or a presence thereof, when the addition of a humanitarian concept belittles our torments and halts the road to clarity?
Neglected and buried archives of our Arab struggles are built on empires that have fleshed out of the ruins of racial, religious, and capitalistic battlefields.
Let my blood, that has not been born yesterday or a generation away, be convinced of the supposed lack of morality when it comes to regions like ours, and that morality is the shrouded subject we are missing.
A word like misfortune, child me rolling a dice, an ordeal of a creation, suits not my grandfather’s modest baggage when he was expelled and my understanding of history. But I have always sought the answer to the question of ‘Why us?’, and the complexity of its simplicity. It is not that I refuse to become a sacrifice for destiny, but it is solely that I have seen an artist with many muses. As a tailoring woman, I must unweave the threads of one understood misery here.
How could I hesitate when most of the crusades occurred in the holy land of Palestine?
This may be an exorbitant status of things, for we are told to separate religion from everything, as it is said to depreciate any arguments we wish to imbue. But I can just state that the Nakba started on 1948, like they all say, as if the holy people did not espouse the maltreated of those times and give them shelter. But it was not I who gave these people illnesses, we gave them mattresses when theirs were holed, and food when their bread was swollen with mold.
To whom it may concern, this religious interpretation breeds as the division of what is deemed to be ‘Eastern’ and Western religions, a hierarchy played by a carousel of Semitic vying. It is a black veil, a pyre between the trees, a multiplying mirror intimidating thee.
When Lucifer’s wings struck the earth, his feathers littered the earth even though the grounds were his newest condoling sanctuary. This treason transmitted to the natives of this earth, till now unable to walk through the darkest of alleyways because of his damned whispers.
The aristocracy hates nativity, the Jerusalemite capital of the world and its genesis. That is why theft is a promise, and refuge is larceny. You cannot imitate the attitude and shade of the quill, nor the words and linguistics of the doctrine. The fallen angel despises its mortal foe for his alight from grass to dessert founded a hostile, envious rival within the earth because earth was never created for him.
He seeks to torment the natives for he, himself, cannot be a creator of a new, kindred earth.
But there are revolting spaces, now invaded by creatures, even he has not dreamt of. They sought alleged supremacy, and were plotting for more than a thousand years. Under the entombment of the glazing moon, Jesus became a porcelain doll, Yule a garlanded tree, and the land’s hosts refugees. They did not ask of the people of Christ, or the descendants of his apostles.
Hand me that blest branch when my palms are waiting to be watered by oil and fracture the bones of the shoulder where the angel refuses to bid me farewell when I conclude in praying.
Have you seen what the statue has built me in defiance? My horse of wired clay, my armor of corroding metal. They have left me bread painted with the color of power; my throat bordered like a Ramallah checkpoint.
But I have an Arab name, one I take pride in, and my raven iris cannot save me. I cannot flee from this ill-starred physicality, and I do not wish to converse in writing because this battle has left me pointing my rapier into ribbed frames of those who have walked across every corner of the earth.
I have grown out of my shell, my body now studded by a mail coif. I am in a violent ballroom with this new stolid feature, I do not wish to cover the sight and ancestry of my hair color.
It seems my flesh is imprinted in wool for I observe and absorb this. Not even the silent lambs can declare their confiscation, it is the coat of the camelids cloaking me and no one else. And that mattress founded when my mother was born espouses me still, with its moon-eyed projection and its acting blaze of an orb.
This storm-born ground has been overrun with drought, I ought to have become analogous to the Visigoths, I am told. But my tribe is not Germanic, and the blooded-antiquity stored within my veins has pulsed at the memory of an erstwhile autumnal harvest moon.
This systemic and systematic illness runs deep like a reconnecting river, perhaps the way the Nile and Euphrates have been positioned on their defiling flag. To seek the solitude of a longing world, that is to separate the continents from the oceans, as if our chasm is not drawn by the ultimatum of the tides.
Yet, we can speak of how the gazelle is once more the alibi of a falcon, the national treasure of our arid grounds, and the glory of our ascending martyrs. We can speak of how a Free Palestine would be a last and final crusade.
