In Class Response #4: Suheir Hammad, “First Writing Since”

Helpful Tasks / Things to Consider:

`This is a condensed version of Ms. Hammad’s poem; the full version can be accessed at
<http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/ac/shammad.html>

there have been no words. no poetry in the ashes south of canal. no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna. evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality. sky where once was steel. smoke where once was flesh. please god, let it be a mistake, the pilot's heart failed, the plane's engine died. please god, let it be a nightmare. please god, after the second plane, please, don't let it be anyone who looks like my brothers. i do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill. i have never been so hungry that i willed hunger; i have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen. not really. even as a woman, as a palestinian, as a broken human being. never this broken. ricardo on the radio said in his accent thick as yucca, "i will feel so much better when the first bombs drop over there.” on my block, a woman was crying in a car parked and stranded in hurt. i offered comfort, extended a hand she did not see before she said, "we’re gonna burn them so bad, i swear, so bad." my hand went to my head and my head went to the numbers within it of the dead iraqi children, the dead in nicaragua. the dead in rwanda who had to vie with fake sport wrestling for america's attention. yet when people began saying, this was bound to happen, let’s not forget u.s. transgressions, hold up. i live here, these are my friends and fam, and it could have been me in those buildings, and we're not bad people, do not support america's bullying. can i just have a half second to feel bad? thank you to the woman who saw me brinking my cool and blinking back tears. she opened her arms before she asked "do you want a hug?" a big white woman, and her embrace was the kind only people with the warmth of flesh can offer. "my brother's in the navy," i said. "and we're arabs". "wow, you got double trouble." word. one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers. one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in. one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed. one more person assume they know me, or that i represent a people. or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a flag and words on a page. we did not vilify white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma. america did not give out his family's addresses or where he went to church. or blame the bible or pat robertson. and when the networks air footage of palestinians dancing in the street, there is no apology that hungry children are bribed with sweets that turn their teeth brown. that correspondents edit images. that archives are there to facilitate lazy and inaccurate journalism. and when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we never mention the kkk? if there are any people on earth who understand how new york is feeling right now, they are in the west bank and the gaza strip. bush waged war on a man once openly funded by the cia. i've read too many books, know too many people to believe what i am told. i don't give a fuck about bin laden. his vision of the world does not include me or those i love. and petitions have been going around for years trying to get the u.s.- sponsored taliban out of power. shit is complicated, and i don't know what to think . but i know for sure who will pay. in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief. in america, it will be those amongst us who refuse blanket attacks on the shivering. those of us who work toward social justice, in support of civil liberties, in opposition to hateful foreign policies. "either you are with us, or with the terrorists" - meaning keep your people under control and your resistance censored. meaning we got the loot and the nukes. i have never felt less american and more brooklyn, than these past days. the stars and stripes on all these cars and apartment windows represent the dead as citizens first, not family members, not lovers. i feel like my skin is real thin, and that my eyes are only going to get darker. the future holds little light. my baby brother is a man now, on alert, praying five times a day that the orders he will take are righteous and will not weigh his soul down from the afterlife. both my brothers - my heart stops when i try to pray - not a beat to disturb my fear. muslim, gentle men. both born in brooklyn and their faces are of the archetypal arab man, all eyelashes and nose and beautiful color and stubborn hair. what will their lives be like now? over there is over here. all day, across the river, burning rubber and limbs workers are traumatized. the skyline is brought back to human size. i cried when i saw those buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart. i have never owned pain that needs to spread like that. there is no poetry in this. there are causes and effects. there are symbols and ideologies. mad conspiracy here, and information we will never know. there is death here, and there are promises of more. there is life here. anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting, but breathing for sure. and if there is any light to come, it will shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen. affirm life. affirm life. we got to carry each other now. you are either with life, or against it. affirm life.