mia moraru > Recent Status Updates

‘If the invitation to speak is extended to Palestinians who were once wolves, they are now docile and defanged…If they advocate for themselves, they must narrate only their personal tragedies. Neither political ideology nor, God forbid, nationalist ambitions should ever incentivize their campaigning. It must remain individualistic, never for a collective cause and never through an organized collective..’

‘Palestinians exist in a false—and strict—dichotomy;m: we are either victims of terrorists.’

and there’s a steep price to pay to speak, prerequisites to meet; they’re interrogated and so on. a politics of appeal

dehumanization of palestinians is pervasive and necessary for the colonial narrative. passive reporting, not confronting the reality, in order for people to continue this status quo of violent oppression, if genocide. it has also distorted “normal” perception of reaction and validit, palestinians are not allowed to react except defeat

‘How do you break the news of what should be fictional?’

the passive reporting of palestinian death, how it’s so normalized that it is assumed, to the point of being boring.

‘Are we too acquainted with the horrific?’
yes

‘Find your tail…The meaning was clear. Curve in on yourself. Touch your tongue to your tail so you know where it is. You will form the inevitable circle, the. grinning that is the end. This immortal space is who and where you are, shapeshifter. Everything is shedding and everything is resurrection.’

‘“And you know what was the scariest part? …I looked into your eyes and you weren’t afraid. You knew you were slipping away but you had peace in your eyes.’

‘Sometimes, you recognize the truth because it destroys you for a bit.’

‘Ichuru chi ya aka mgba. One does not challenge their chi to a wrestling match.’

‘When we fell back, it tasted like a kind of death.’

‘…and we wanted to be angry, but Leshi had been a pit of beauty and we couldn’t find enough anger to keep us afloat.’

‘What are your fears? Why are you doing this? No, that is a lie. Try again. That is also a lie. Stop being afraid. Yes, now you are telling the truth. Do you see? When you say this, what are you trying to mold? Here is the edge of a cliff, do you have the liver to stand here? You should, you stink of power.’

‘“Your body language. How you talk. Your eyes. You’re not always the same person, are you?”’

‘The Ada could look back on her life and see, like clones, several of her standing there in a line. This terrified her, because if there were so many of her, then which one was she? Were they false and her current self real, or was her current self false and it was one of the others, lost in the line, who was the real Ada?’

‘I wasn’t sure what he was running away from, but I wanted to tell him that I was the wrong place to run to. It was impossible for me to love him. He had too much hate inside and he thought I would fall for words, as if you can get me with my own weapon. Try a god, I should have told him, they like when you run to them.’

‘The pain is so old, Yshwa. I don’t even have the strength to want anything anymore.’

‘Still, I am very lonely. They help me forget this, but sometimes it shows up like a continent shifting into my chest. I’m so tired of being empty. I turned it inside out and wore it like a glove, smeared it on the walls until my house shouted empty, empty, empty. I didn’t know what to do with it afterward. All I know is that it hurts to be in the spaces between freedom.’

‘When I think of them and the love I hold for them, it unfurls into a greater love. My chest multiplies with it. I even want to hold the faces of my friends and tell them I love them…I stop being afraid of relocations and I can move wherever I want because I know that I will be loved constantly across all space. And even if it fades with them, it will bloom again. We are all conduits. It moves through us freely.

‘The Ada wanted to be contrite. Asughara wanted to burn the world down.’

‘Ogbanje space. We could rest in it like the inside curve of a calabash; we could turn in on ourself, wind back to our beginning, make those final folds. Sometimes they call this the crossroads, the message point, the hinge. It is also called flux space, the line or the edge—like we said, resurrection.’

‘The space between life and death is resurrection. It has a smell like a broken mango leaf, sharp, sticking to the inner rind of our skin.’

‘…humans often fail at listening, as if their stubbornness will convince the truth to change…’

‘After you have let the wilderness in you come out and play, after you have spilled your darkness in front of a stranger, it can be difficult to look at them in the sentience of daylight. Besides, he was only a beautiful blip in the crazed timeline of embodiment—he mattered so much, and yet, not at all.’

‘’Of all the paths she could have chosen, she went and picked the one that was taboo to Ala, as if she would be allowed to complete it, as if she forgot whose child the Ada was. Life does not belong to us to take. And on top of that, she should have remembered that we are ogbanje; none of us die like this.’

‘Looking like Uche meant she belonged somewhere. It was like they were saying—we can see our blood in your face, you’re one of ours.’

‘’…never alone, as alone as you could want to be—anything, everything we ever wanted, even nothingness, if we chose that, even ends. I started crying at the freedom of it all…’

‘Their faces were like skies above me.’

‘…I could feel their age press on me. They were older than even Yshwa, old as forever…Here, with them, I bent.!

‘Even her flesh belonged to Ala, for, as we have said, it is on her lips that humans are born, and there they live until they die. … And to be named is to gain power, let alone to be named thrice over.’

‘Asughara was the blade, forever flirting with the softness of people’s throats.’