I had this vision I had to walk people through how Palestine is my country and how I love my country. I sat on the ground and rocked myself and sang oshya. And practiced opening my veins and arteries. I had never been much of a countryman but I started seeing Micah behind my eyelids. Her pseudonym is Micah, and she is one of two surviving her family after Ebola— and the day of our meeting she was eighteen. How she looks at me while I cry during her interview because I know now how Pablo Neruda wrote Sonnet XVII— the only interview I ever stopped twice because we both could not stop crying. Because I watched the tears in her eyes fall down my cheeks. Because she is eighteen and I am twenty. Oh my God she looks like me. My mother prays for us both that night. Her eyes close as I fall asleep. oh, Mama Salone. I love my country. She looks like me. I return home to COVID who ruptures and punctuates my family in the same key, how mi fambol no de mis wan beat for repeat: ow di bɔdi de. Becɔs wi de yɛri se e bad1. I tell them of the police killings; we who survive the war breathe in time. We see ourselves entombed in death live televised and we rock and sing oshya. Everyone manages to call us terrorists. I begin to learn about the Republic of New Afrika — they look like me when they cry, across time. My hand on their chest as we fall asleep. I love my country. I love my country. She looks like me. She looks like me. Thus begins this habit of expanding my arteries, praying for my constituency. My family is huge and growing still; I brew very big pots of tea. I return to the city for graduate school, having missed Chicago, having identified most with those who “manage” to “wind up” “dead,” and I listen to my white classmates defend the apartheids which benefit them. I call poverty genocide and they flinch, debate with their left hands and their rights. I smile when I say ethnic cleansing instead of gentrify. The whole world boils down to labor and land, you manage your constituents as best as you can— and this is when I learn to pray for Palestine. When the streets of Chicago flood to support Sheikh Jarrah and I feel shame. Am I such an American, needing a social media campaign to pay attention to an obvious genocide? I should have been praying long ago. I begin to look for names to say when I pray and say my piece— I see this video from which I am still speechless. Palestinians in their own army, throwing rocks at colonizers in battle suits and guns quite literally coming to take their homes. A people made a barricade and declared their place and they look familiar, how the West calls them savage. How they throw their own hardened land to protect them in the face of state-sponsored hitmen and I decidedly breathe. Kneel at the foot of my bed. Say the prayer. Rock and sing.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
i love my country. i love my country. i love my country.
she looks like me. she looks like me. she looks like me.
Yousef Abu Hashem, via Instagram | stranded in Gaza, 2021
Dallas Goldtooth | Poem entitled Blood Brothers, 2004
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee | Statements and Newsletter on Palestine, 1967
Sanabel Abdelrahman via Instragram | 2022
Noor Hindi | Poem, Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying, 2020
Audre Lorde | Commencement Speech at Oberlin College, 1989
The Black Panther Party, via their newsletter | 1969
Taken from Twitter, 2023
May the grief burn you alive and your peace be without condition.
ismatu g.
How is your body doing? Because we keep hearing that COVID is bad for you all. —my family in Sierra Leone, 2020 | four years post-Ebola
I love my country//she looks like me.