No Normalization But Life
Ly Thúy Nguyễn
No Normalization But Life (Or the 62nd day of genocide)
C'mon, do one act of life today. Vacuum your floor and carpets; cat hair bundles, knotted against the machine's hollowed openings. Put on an incense, sweetening the air with the smoky presence of unsaid prayers. Say a thought out loud. Deepen your teeth into freshly baked pita bread. Marinate your chicken in learned spices--nutmeg, curry powder, cloves, black pepper, and sea salt--and cook them patiently. Invite humanity to eat with you. Hunger is not humane.
Do another act of life. Let water wash through our parched lips and dry throats. Isn't it strange, those apps we download to incentivize ourselves to stay hydrated, or belly-filled? Being smaller doesn't make living easier. Doesn't minimize what we must witness or hold. We must drink if we want to cry; the infants no longer could, their bodies squeezed of water--no tears on open flesh. Say it with me, our survivor's guilt will not absolve a thing, not even our own complicity, or rage.
Do an act of life, please. Suture a loose button, hold the fabric close to your chest. Sing a lullaby you remember. Speak your wishes out loud. It used to be a miracle learning that the world exists beyond our horizons. You are no longer powerless, kids.
I want to name my dreams after them./
A PRAYER, A WITNESSING
old title: Another day on earth (or the 67th day of genocide)
Thousand disappear under rubbles when I look away for one day. My phone, an archive of death streaming live. The ethernet is also an occupied landscape. Homelands and diasporas meet again, or for the first time. I hear from the witnesses I was too busy to look at but just like me, they know their horrors and only imagine some. A girl with olive skin--greyed with dust--eyelashes enfolded in things and lives immaterialized, speaks up against a camera to the archive of life transformed to millions witnesses. "I wish I had died with my mother, so I don't have to suffer what remained." We will never truly understand that, but we will try. What was felt will be felt again, (I wish), like a threat. What is the point of learning about (in)humanity? I ask the young people I teach every time I go through the war of my people and theirs. My stunted inner child locked inside walls that no longer collapse and besides people who might have survived bombardment, always look out at a window to nowhere but peace.
(Homeland is the direction you must draw for yourself, a map with street names so private empire can't destroy or seize or rename).
Perhaps I must learn how to beg, then to despair. Knees on the floor, head lowered in shame, begging for a life spared. I must learn to forgo dignity, shattered ego pleading to a benevolent God whose enemies must be mine. Maybe a prayer from a godless communist like me might entertain the Most Merciful so one more rock will be hurled at the tanks and one more kite will soar into a horizon without explosions.
Hungry soldiers strike. Feet in sandals, skinny jeans & black joggers with printed T-shirts, generic sport uniforms, blurry faces. Their missiles the size of a big forearm. Once it hits, if it does, four squares of a pavement crack. Pedestrians avoid it, curiously, filming it for "war edition" bread-baking vlogs.
People, by the hundreds of thousands, scream onto cold faces and hot batons, each strike resembles the past hundreds of years where all witnesses, strangers on this archive of lives undead, collide. It was your ancestors and it was mine, in cages, in wagons, in trucks, in prisons, in camps, in reservations, in boats, in tents, in rivers, in seas, in deserts, in jungles, in torture chambers, in burned and then banned books, in photos in archives in records in flames, in front of Most Forgiving God and most monstrous foes whose crimes I spend my life learning. Polices are prison guards are armies are border patrols are slave catchers are colonial tools are human shields with weapons, each strike births a revolutionary and a thousand witnesses, and what is a murder with many witnesses, must be a life transformed. The girl with olive skin paled with dust and rubbles on her eyelashes know things we never will, but on God we will try.
Mouths--mouths--mouth--mouths towards every direction, every map we must draw on top of palimpsests. We will rewrite our enemies' history too, you cruel bastards, we will see you to the depth of hell you caved up for yourselves, and the truth will burn through your souls and all the witnesses will be there but you will not be mourned, you who spread corruptions on the land. You will fade into oblivion and we all will live. How is that for a prayer?
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Bio: Ly Thuý Nguyễn (y/thị) kêu gọi các đồng nghiệp, người viết vẽ và nghệ sĩ sử dụng tiếng Việt hãy viết về/cho một Palestine tự do và một thế giới không hung ác.
