Fariha’s Reviews > A River Dies of Thirst: Journals > Status Update

We believe sometimes, and sometimes have no faith
but it is indifferent to us
When it hunts us down one by one
then slays us with a cool hand

It is a killer, and innocent.

It is love, like a wave
Recurrence of our bliss, old, new
quick, slow
innocent as a gazelle racing a bicycle
and obscene, like a rooster
Reckless like someone in need
moody and vicious
calm as imagination arranging its phrases
Dark, gloomy, and bursting into light
Empty and full of its contradictions

The woman I will see tomorrow in the same setting, I also know. She is my daughter whom I left in the middle of the poems so that she could learn to walk, then fly, beyond this setting, and perhaps earn the admiration of the viewers and disappoint the snipers. For a clever friend said to me: 'It's time for us to move on, if we can, from a subject that makes people pity us to one that makes them envy us.'

The woman I'm seeing now in the same image on a colour TV screen, I have known well for forty years. She is my sister, following in the footsteps of our mother journeying in the wilderness: fleeing from a cramped war zone to a non-existent refuge.

That hurrying woman, crowned with a wool blanket and a pitcher of water, dragging a boy in her right hand and his sister in her left, followed by a herd of frightened goats, that woman fleeing from a cramped war zone to a non-existent refuge - I have known her for sixty years. She is my mother who left me behind at a crossroads with a basket of dry bread, a candle, and a box of matches ruined by the damp.

We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception

We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong.

We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets

We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba

We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer's belly

We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognises the importance of small details

We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: 'Our country is loftier and more beautiful!'

We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others

We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinne

We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan's gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial

But we have a difficult mission to perform: mediation between God and the Devil to get them to call a brief truce so that we can bury our martyrs.