Scrapped together in the months of February and March, Internet Automatism and Israeli Apartheid, IAIA, was a pseudo-project inspired by artist Rene Magritte. Magritte would spend days playing (surrealist) automatism with his comrades in an effort to find titles for his paintings. This is done simply — or not – by writing material that is non-idiomatic and improvised. Angered by the state of Israel’s continuous provocations, I then took the ideas of automatism and loosely paired it with the Kubler-Ross model and the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What emerged was non-linear and (some say) nonsensical. I wanted to pretend that I was passing around a blank page to selected comrades, and each time the ‘paper’ was passed to the next  person, it was “folded” —  meaning the e-mail that appeared in her or his inbox did not display the previous person’s written material. The finished product proved that nothing is ever definitive. Some responded months after I sent the email, others completely ignored, and, inevitably, I forgot about the experiment…until now.  So, to begin the automatism, I started with a speech that informed the terminally ill patient of its, his, or her dire and consequential death:

You are slowly dying, Israel. Your racialized Zionism continues to be a threat to the moral stability of Israeli nationalism. Jewish-Israelis are fleeing back to their home countries, kids are refusing to join the army, and many people are asking themselves what this is all worth. The continued existence of a Jewish supremacist/racist settler-colony is being delegitimized and the world is uncovering the truth of your apartheid policies.

The reactions are pasted below, anonymously.

^^^^

Denial: I am not an apartheid state.

Anger: I want to kill more Palestinians, annex more of their land, and appropriate more from their culture!

Bargaining: What if I give the Arabs their very own state? But it must be demilitarized, and I have to control the borders, air, and land.

Depression: I am only defending myself, but everyone hates me and delegitimizes my existence.

Acceptance: I am an apartheid state and I need to cover it up.

^^^^

Denial: Zionism is not threatening the moral stability of Israeli nationalism.

Anger:  I will just have to dramatically increase the amount of money I spend into making sure everyone else believes that as well.

Bargaining:  I should loosen up some of the laws on the Arab-Israelis to make it look like they are part of our society.

Depression:  There is no way to maintain Jewish hegemony and coexist with a rapidly increasing non-Jewish presence within our borders.

Acceptance:  Maybe we are threatening moral stability by excluding others, but so what? We have suffered enough. Never again.

^^^^

Oh wall of all walls.  The way you cut and carve the landscape to caress that which you hold most dear.  The towering obstacle you provide those who tend to your loving foundation. What is thy ultimate objective?  Why split the whole that supports you best?

Oh wall of all walls, when will you learn?  What of your ancestors and their deeds which were ultimately failures? Your brick and mortar are no match for the fluid which seeps a dark burgundy and stains your structure.  The grit, moistened by those who dare pass before, now crumbles as the rains from heaven reveal your inevitable demise.

Oh wall of all walls, why do you bother, when you know you crack the earth upon which you must stand?

Denial:  I am a wall and there is nothing you can do to surmount me.

Anger: I will stand here and wreak havoc on your daily lives and make it impossible for you to be as one, divided you are conquered!!

Bargaining: OK I will take down part of my wall, and this in turn justifies the existence of the rest.

Depression: I was only built out of necessity and now i am covered in epithet and cacography.  Why am I so ugly?

Acceptance:  There is no purpose to my existence, as history has shown us time and time again that I only cork an already shaken champagne bottle.

^^^^

Denial: I arrived to an empty desert. “Them” Bedouins attacked me from seven directions! oh! the horrid memory! They then ran away when I gloriously fought back, I won. I secured my walls.

Anger: I won’t forget! I won’t forgive! I kill to live!! (How could they make me kill their kids?!)

Bargaining: WELL!! I leave them this vast desert! They keep this entire tiny Oasis.

Depression: How can I ever give back what is rightfully mine (I have supporting divine documents)…..

Acceptance: My name is Israel, I am a born serial war criminal, I must live with my nature, and I deserve to be loved.

^^^^

Denial: This is my homeland, my holy land and I am of the chosen people.

Anger: What are these “bedouin” gentiles doing on my land?  I will kill and oppress them and make life hell for these subhumans who are trying to take over my holy land.

Bargaining: Perhaps I can trick the world into thinking that they are the terrorists and that way I don’t actually have to face the horrors that I have done.

Depression: I can’t understand why people don’t see that this is Jewish land and that only Jews have rights to this land.

Acceptance: I am a settler colonialist that has been oppressing and ethnically cleansing another group of human beings.

# 1: The Palestinian Libertine

And what of the Palestinian woman bent on proving herself as liberated? She uses sex and sexuality. Let me promptly tell you where she stands.

“I love the hallucinogenic feeling of the flame on my tongue and fingertips.”

To her, being open sexually defies all conventional standards of the Palestinian woman; it defies being traditional; it, for her, means freedom. Their circles are incestuous. She sleeps with she, and he with her. Of course, this caricature plays only with the sons and daughters of elite fathers. She keeps to her performance by manifesting her anxieties and talking about prohibitions, mostly. Her life is tragic, she insists on what is factual: that history barely mentions her;  not because it is the truth but because she is hindered, somewhat, by her two lovers.

Depending on her mood and victim, she exoticizes her story to those she seeks to seduce – a Bedouin from the Galillee, an unwanted child from Kufr Kar’eh, a descendent of Armenia, or a black African from Jerusalem (if she’s tanned enough.) No matter that nobody takes her seriously. She is unshackled and happens to be tired of being a woman – only she does not know how to say this.

Tattooed on each of her breasts is an ant: one queen ant and one worker ant. This is a reminder, she will say, that the empire needs constant suckling.

*************************************************************************

# 2: The Arabist Journalist

She wears white linen, smokes duty-free Marlboros, and sips her beer at a pseudo-Italian café called Pronto.

“Where there’s a church, there’s a liquor store,” she says with conviction, as if revealing a secret.

Holding her cigarette with a hand of fragility, she talks in a melancholic voice, a voice that tells you she’s been far from home for too long. She is alone. Her hair is tied. She looks as if she would be inspired by T.E. Lawrence. Carrying a plastic bottle filled with vodka in her purse, she insists on speaking in Orientalized Arabic – a process that deconstructs the very concept of phonetics. Twelve years it’s been since the porous red-faced woman left her Ford truck in the driveway of her rural East Coast home; she says this while convincing a young Palestinian man that “it’s all worth it”, that her work in the Middle East has helped people.

I watch her from a nearby table and all I can think of is that blue alien in the Avatar movie that everyone shamelessly talks about. They say he helps to liberate the natives, I say it’s a bunch of neo-imperialist propaganda.

“You know what I’d give for a hot dog and some ketchup?”

Aha!, her true motives come out. She files and flies, day in and day out, forgetting her story by sunset after fishing for stupor from the sky. It’s the “conflict” they will say, same shit different day.

*************************************************************************

# 3: The American Fetishist

I know nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. All that I know is from what her words and actions tell me. She keeps up to the demands of a different reality, one made of the mind and the imagination. And so it is that I absorbed this assemblage – a sudden barge of repeated and self-constructed virtual imagining – in a land of contradictions where caricatures seek to become in a land under siege.

A composite being emerges in a burnt orange scarf that covers her mopped hair – an article worn, she surmises, to display her cultural sensitivity. Dressed in neo-colonialist sartorial, a white linen tunic and Jesus sandals, she came to the Bank to work with a solidarity movement. No, I mean to study Iran. Iran? Why come to Palestine to study Iran? Never mind you – I was abandoned by my Iranian father you see? And my mother made sure I learned Arabic. Arabic? Iranians do not speak Arabic, dear.  Never mind you – I found my love.

It does not matter to us, dear fetishist, if you offer extreme courtesy and rush to wash the dirty foot of that wretched atheist. Fulfillment will not be found here.

Her idealisms are a reaction to the intifada stories told from a male Palestinian perspective wrapped in romanticizations. Influenced by the heat and violence, and their tragedies of being Palestinian, the man wearing the red Che shirt and keffiyeh – the Palestinian Romeo – self-aggrandizes a collective past, exploiting a people’s sorrow. He likes his women crusty. No matter. You fit the role. The activist-cum-fetishist pities the man, and asks to comfort him in bed. Amidst the political adventures she unravels herself in, she starts to love – unreal, lopsided love. But once she catches a glimpse of her newfound pet tarsier whispering his tragedies to another woman, a Swedish NGO worker probably, she ventures on to the next tragedy, only this time told in three acts, not nine.

*Beirut Impressions*

Every day is like yesterday but with a new name. She does not sleep. Every day they eat tabbouleh made by men in a small kitchen, drink almaza from a glass bottle, and talk about the commodification of the image with cosmopolitan crowds: they who raise their petty bourgeoisie pinkies to the trinkets of whiskey and waltzes. Of course, there is no such thing. In Hamra, the same 19 people attend every art exhibition and lecture. When a movement consists of the same 19 people, there is no movement at all. I have to insist on this. Sorry Beirut but you are draining me with your intellectual masturbation and coteries of pontification. This is not an open letter. I make an exception to those who are true and sincere to decolonization and liberation. This is not an open letter.

*Nazareth Anxities*

I live in an asylum: an outdoor institution where hunchbacks and sexually repressed boys follow my every thought. They consume me. It seems that I, too, have been inflicted with a sort of hysteria; there are traces of sorrow in my steps. I suppose the mad are not really mad, they are people who are capable of embracing their anxiety. So if anxiety is a way of control and I am unable to embrace it, am I a capitalist, then, of desire? If all the interests that I produce and consume have been shifted to desire, then maybe I am a prisoner of that which is not absolute. Dostoevsky rejects the absolute (2 x 2 is not 4) but I make sense of none of these images. All I hear is the rain and the hulk. Somewhere in the streets below he is thumping and screaming the incoherent.

*Yucatan Sketches*

When Adelita died, the girl with the gypsy scarf mourned by painting tulips on her face – white tulips because that was the color of Adelita’s skin. She never worked outside like the rest of her comrades. The girl with the gypsy scarf liked to be comforted; sometimes she was much too expectant of it. Love, to her, was something she could only feel from afar, so she loved almost everyone from her window: Emile, the man who smuggled weapons; Fernando, the revolution’s strategist; Samuel, the man who documented every death; and even Marabel, the woman who seduced the enemy for information. The girl with the gypsy scarf mourned for Adelita on the day of the dead by dressing up as death. She held her scythe and walked the streets, but the ritual did not satiate her.  Adelita was the only person who could ever satisfy the gypsy girl’s longings and calm her chronic hysteria. And so she walked past.

*Ceylon Scribbles*

In Vavuniya, the Sri Lanka Army is dressed in full combat.  Roads in Sri Lanka’s North-East Province are mostly unpaved, and every 10 km there is a checkpoint or military outpost made of palmyrah fronds and collected timber from the nearby arid forest.  Charles, a Tamil Christian, lives in Vavuniya with his wife and two sons. Despite running a successful garment trade in Jaffna, he – like thousands of his neighbors – fled the northern peninsula in 1996. He boasts how the only piece of ‘furniture’ he took with him is his antique piano. Now, he runs a small and modest music academy where he is finalizing edits for an album that will be released soon.

I wait to be approached by the supreme marker, the Israeli “security” officer who tags passports of the departed with a number that will decide the traveler’s fate. A group of Americans are in the queue beside me and so begins her monologue: What was yough pughpose of visiting Isghayel? Do you have a bomb with you? Weapons? Whegh in Isghayel did you go? Do you have any fghiends in Ghamallah? and on and on and on… As the lady moves to the next group, I, anxious and curious, ask the Americans what number they received. Number? yeah, what number did she give you? Uhhh…I’m not following you. let me see your passport. you see? I point to the sticker on the passport where there is a number  hidden between chickenscratch and Hebrew. see the 3? Oh… so what does that mean? asked the bemused American who looked like a soldier. Yes, I thought, he is definitely a soldier…

It was at this moment when I decided to stage a teach-in at Ben Gurion airport’s check-in line. If these tourists don’t know how Palestinians are treated then they will get a very brief lecture. Basically, it’s racial profiling, I say, by using a marking system with barcodes and all – it looks fucking sophisticated, but it’s really all systematic… and racist. You will know this because of their machinated reactions. Actually, sometimes I wonder if the head of airport security is human. But that’s another story. Let’s start with the marking system. Numbers go from 1 to 6. You got a 3 and that means you are neutral, most probably you are a religious tourist but in this case you are a U.S. soldier from Iraq who came to see the besieged birthplace of Jesus. Actually, said the soldier, I am based in Georgia. Ah…well, I guess that is why you got a 3 because if you were in Iraq and the girl saw that on your passport you wouldn’t get a 3, you would probably get a 5. A “3” is safe, you won’t get questioned and your bags won’t get torn apart. You don’t want a 4, 5 or 6. What number do you get? he asks. I usually get a 5 or a 6 – which entails a puerile interrogation, getting poked at with a piece of cotton on a stick while taking your clothes off then on, and what I like to call V.I.P. treatment: a ‘shadow’, which is someone who has to walk you to your gate. A “6” is kind of like the Nazi’s yellow star. Remember in the Holocaust how German soldiers would pin a yellow star on a Jew to demarcate his or her fate? Well, the 6 is the worst and it’s usually the Palestinians who get it. A 4 or 5 will also get you questioned and x-rayed, but it’s not like the 6er whose books she or he carries has to be “analyzed” by the Israeli kid who just graduated from high school. G-E-N-E-T. Jeen Gennett? he will say. What is this thief’s joughnal ah? Oh, it’s really fascinating – you should read it. It’s everything you ever wanted to know about sex and death, especially if you like men. (This will take the kid off track from his trained routine.) Back to the marking system. Now, a 1 means you are a white Russian, or Israeli settler. The 1’s are the chosen ones – they are treated like gods and even get to skip in line at the ticket counter. The 2 could mean you are a half-Jew or a brown Jew. Watch and see what happens to me.

Three hours later…

She sits down at a table  in the airport’s cafeteria next to people who are speaking Arabic. Filled with indignation and impatience the girl puts her bags down and looks at the young Israeli security officer who shadows her every move. why do you do this? It is protocol. protocol? don’t talk to me about protocols, this is absolutely racist – everyone in line with me was Palestinian. We do this for your safety. she looks into his eyes and they are empty, she wonders if he is real. safety? when’s the last time something happened in this airport? Well….that’s exactly it – never. exactly, never.

The girl gets up to get a coffee. He follows. i’m just getting a coffee – you stay and watch my things – that’s your job right?

The portly light-haired security officer asks her about Jose Saramago – the author of the book she is reading. you’re interrupting me, i was just at the part when Ricardo Reis is being interrogated by a police officer. Why is he being interrogated? no reason. they are skeptical of him because he is a writer. Ah, these writers.

She wants to mention all the Palestinian writers that the Mossad has assassinated - but stays quiet. She knows her role.

By the time she boarded her flight to Berlin – she wanted nothing more than to sleep. Her mind was elsewhere – already nervous about her re-entry in five days. If they deny me entry, I will go to Beirut, or maybe Amman – or Cairo…or…and on her mind wanders, anticipating her return home.

People say another war will soon start. On the road to Jerusalem I counted eight trucks carrying Merkava tanks. The tanks seemed to be heading north toward Lebanon – to their demise, of course.  Funny how in Nazareth one can feel so secluded from the State (if you just ignore the store signs in Hebrew, the fake Russian Jews who escape Sabbath on Saturdays, the undercover Israeli police, and the occasional hippie stragglers from Tel Aviv.)

It was yesterday morning when I decided that I needed a more visceral reminder of the State’s brutality, so I packed a small bag and headed to Jerusalem…well, first to West Jerusalem. At the Afula bus station, while in transit, I witnessed a “roadside memorial” if you will. An orthodox Jewish man whose beard fell down to his chest was holding black leather straps in his hand. He ushered a group of young Jewish kids who wore baggy jeans and baseball caps to his table of worship and tied the black leather straps neatly around each of their arms. The old man then exchanged their baseball caps for yarmulkes and tied a Lego block the size of a Buick around their heads. I, having attended the imaginary school of heretics at the age of 9, felt out of place once the servants of god began to shake and convulse to the written scriptures they held. Then, the negotiations. Processions of Prayer for free? No, no young boys. You must pay for God to forgive you. Of course, the conversation was in Hebrew, which I do not care to learn, but I noticed the exchange of currency and dissatisfaction on the boy’s faces. (And I’m usually right about my assumptions anyway.)

I board the bus, penned between soldiers wearing boots and strapped with M-16s. Everyone says I tend to exaggerate my anxieties but try being on a bus filled with 18-year-old unwavering nationalists who are armed and weary. You should witness the beauty, though, that is on my left: the hills and shrubs, olive trees and cactus, the stone – the long life of the stone whose birth we did not witness, and death we will not see. It makes me forget about this anger I’ve conjured. When I left Nazareth I walked past my friend’s ‘holy land’ souvenir shop, Where are you going? to Ramallah, When are you coming back? tomorrow, That’s a short trip  for such a long trip. i need a reminder. And so she left in haste.

So here I am, reminded of the sheer malice of Israel’s Apartheid. The word indignation comes to mind, but I suppose somewhere in some places people struggle for love, too. You must see West Jerusalem to believe it, and how the sun penetrates the watchtowers at the cattle-trade checkpoints. Then it’s the sulta falistineeya (Palestinian Authority.) It’s one oppression after another. Anger then subjection, subjection then anger – I wonder sometimes if my dissatisfaction will be everlasting.

Four hours pass and I reach Ramallah. I used to like traveling on the buses from Jerusalem to Ramallah because I would hear the most profound and absurd stories from Palestine’s pessimists, but it seems that a silent endemic is passing from traveler to traveler. Nobody spoke a word. I continue reading Saramago while looking out from my window on occasion. Once in Ramallah, I met with my friend at a pseudo Italian café where all the NGO workers go. On one table a British man is talking about the ‘conflict’ with some guy wearing a suit, and at the table next to Ra’fat and I was a Palestinian Romeo seducing an American Fetishist, probably some NGO worker. Can we go somewhere else? I hate this fucking place, it’s not good for my anxieties. He agreed and we left.

An overcast fills the sky. It is raining wherever one looks. The night freezes and so does the rain. A two month hiatus from Ramallah and what do I see? Hail, more and more tyrranical police on the street, shiny new road signs, and yellow hyphens painted on the road to separate traffic (shoo hatha al kharabeesh? a driver said to me.) But the best of all, or most absurd depending on how you look at it, is the metered parking. Funded by who, you ask? The World Bank. Because, you see, Palestinians need to know the value of western civil structure and order. No matter how silly it all seems, Hope is emerging – this is what North American journalists claim. I am convinced that Salam Fayyad, the appointed prime minister, has scissors sewn to his hand. He is the ubiquitous ribbon-cutting ceremonial puppet. A check point opens? He’s there, cutting a big red ribbon. An absurd spectacle celebrating some new Guinness world record that’s just been broken? He’s there, cutting a big red ribbon. A child who was born in prison is freed after two years? He’s there, cutting a big red ribbon.

I go to drink coffee with my familiar friends in Ramallah. Some Danish professor sits with us and asks us questions about Palestinian icons for a book he is writing (what promising field work, I say to myself.) I am surrounded by comrades who also happen to be professors - J, who teaches philosophy at Bir Zeit, and A who teaches a course on anthropology (also at Bir Zeit.) I leave the familiarity and intellectual masturbation to visit a friend at his al-Manarah office. After hiking to the seventh floor of a building we listen to Oum Kalthoum, exchange stories, and drink beer. His office is even higher than Al Jazeera’s, so we can see everything from the window. We even anticipate the winter’s night. I thought of Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and I felt like that deconstructed traveler. You never really know who the traveler is anyway so it very well could have been me or my friend, maybe even Salam Fayyad.

Everything’s changed in Ramallah. I’ve only known her for four years, but in four years the World Bank, Keith Dayton, and Fatah’s mafia have rewritten its history. Two years and another intifada is bound to happen, this time against the sulta. And the resistance will be started by the taxi drivers.

+++
Youssef and Layla: these are the names of the hunchbacks who live across from me. Soon the screaming will begin. I opened Dostoevsky to the page I last left, and to my disbelief the sentence read: I am as suspicious and touchy as a hunchback or dwarf. He then goes on to say that if someone slapped him he would have been glad of it. I stop to reflect on my hunchbacked neighbors and the laws of nature, be it despair and sadism, and how Youssef, the poor fellow who pounds on the doorway as I type this, feels, or how he must feel, when he is slapped in the face every morning by his bitter hunchbacked sister. Does he enjoy being slapped in the face like Dostoevsky? I find it bemusing that he fails to avenge his assaulter. Perhaps, it seems, he is unaware of the concept of revenge. He does seem to be unconscious. He does not think therefore he does, consequently, nothing. No, he is not possessed like the rest of humanity, that is, he is not convinced that the being is of importance. I suppose, then, I envy him. Dostoevsky says that all men should, in fact, be stupid. To be normal and hyperconscious is a fundamental nastiness, he says. I am not sure I agree. Either way, the sun has set and it is getting dark and I can only make out the surface of all this: the laws of nature and such. I must pack my typewriter and turn the lights on. More to come later…
+++
The souq is quiet and windy today. A brief ruffle of the bed sheet I have hung over my window is the only sound I hear. Usually, I can smell the bread that’s being cooked underneath my apartment by the bread-maker who wears the same charcoal-stained apron every day. Then there’s the arguing between one man and another. In between the Stalinesque battles a church bell will ring erratically, but none of it has happened today. My friend tried to explain to me how to interpret the time by counting the rings and discerning the sounds of the church bell, If it rings twice then switches to a soft ting (a ting? what is a ting?) it’s 4 o’clock, but for every 30 minutes that passes they add another ring and it’s usually louder (well…who is keeping count? I don’t get it.) A pregnant cat scratched at my door begging for comfort, or maybe she wanted food. How do you know she was pregnant, you ask? Well…I could tell by the way she was moaning, it’s like she was tired and heavy, but not heavy from gluttony because how could a stray cat be obese? you see? The souq is filled with tales of horror but only if you believe that horror is humor. Not the aristocratic nonsense that the nouve-riche of Nazareth has appropriated, but the true daily reality of alleys and madness. The serenity of the sirk, I mean souq, calms me.
+++
In other news, two white North Americans were caught stealing Haitian babies. (Please remember to distinguish — I can assure you that South or Central Americans do not like how North Americans have nominally appropriated the entirety of the Americas.) Headlines of a dead soldier here, a suicide bombing there, The imperialist will never take off his military coat, or at least that’s what it looks like in Afghanistan and Pakistan (not to mention the hundreds of imperialist aid agencies around the world.) I walked through the cemetery and smelled death then was told I walked too slowly by a Spanish-speaking tourist who was carrying a tripod. The gun of an undercover Israeli agent poked out from his underwear when he bent down to pick up something from the street, Shit, he’s just doing that to waste time so he can follow me, I conspired. Yes, I conspired. Whatever. This happens constantly, to one’s dismay, when living in occupied Palestine. Alas, at home. I now listen to the shopkeepers’ lock, the vegetable-seller’s moan, the woman beating her child for a low grade, the early drops of sewage water streaming down the built-in crevice in the alley’s walkway, and, of course, the muezzin, who reminds me of Marlon Brando, sing a prayer to his followers.

An experimentation on tragedy. Or — the result of being confined in your apartment for days.

Everyone warned me. Before I agreed to rent the apartment Ziyad said there were a few issues that I should be wary of. ‘It’s the neighbors. They are violent and abusive.’ Ziyad told me how every night, precisely at 2:30 a.m., the neighbors begin their daily and calculated rampage. ‘First, it’s the hurling of furniture that you will hear, then the yelling, which will echo because of the old walls in this building.’ The others, who are also residents of the Old City, compared the domestic warfare to a stormy Beethoven sonata. Everyone was vague about it all but I was nostalgic for a frail atmosphere. I imagined it would be conducive for my blood pressure to bring back the anxieties of the familial dysfunction I had left in Texas.

But the first night was brutal. I suffered greatly from the cold – a pigeon had flown into my window shattering the glass on the floor and I had no heater or winter blanket. Earlier that night, I had consumed a bottle of wine assuming it would leave me preoccupied with matters other than the gaping hole in my wall and the breeze it let in.

The night’s composition, however, began quite calmly. And it wasn’t at 2:30 a.m. like Ziyad had warned. I suppose, though, I was unaware of the time. My introduction to the neighbor’s voice, a woman, was faint, and her words incomprehensible. Soon thereafter her yelling was excruciating to listen to, but only because of her nasal congestion. She repeatedly screamed the incoherent but what I did make out were the words tfee 3alayk (I spit on you) and Arabic-language damnations, such as ‘God damn your father, and your father’s father’. The man would release a momentary cry here and there. But it was the woman’s final statement, or demand, that I recall most vividly: GO CUT YOUR HAIR. GO NOW!

I fell asleep wondering why she would ask him to go to the barber at 2:30 a.m. (If it really was 2:30.) It all seemed so fragmented. I was just trying to find creative ways to keep myself warm; I did not try to make sense of the situation, instead I embraced the noise. Noise that was marvelous, full of contempt, and imaginative. Funny how nostalgia always steers us back to perfection, I thought. Sure, it wasn’t the kind of engineered chaos I was surrounded by in my formative and adolescent years in Texas, but it was noise nonetheless.

It was later that day, while I was making tea, when everything came into context. Again, I heard the yelling coming from my neighbor’s door, so I perched myself on a stool to look from the kitchen window as voyeurs do. And that’s when everything made sense. The neighbor was a hunchback. A bitter and fragile hunchback whose nose was just as crooked as her back. Her hair was cropped short, like her body, and she was spitting and yelling again (but I couldn’t see at whom.) Slowly, the sound of heavy footsteps climbed toward my ear, and there he was: the brother who was victim to his sister’s daily acts of maliciousness. He, too, was a hunchback. I almost fell when I saw him. His spine was so arched that he could have walked on four limbs. Ziyad never told me they were hunchbacks. Not that there’s anything wrong with hunchbacks. I just didn’t expect two hunchbacks as neighbors – not only two hunchbacks, but a sadistic hunchback who beats her simple-minded hunchback brother.

He was carrying a plastic bag when he finally reached the doorway. On the balcony-cum-doorway were rows and rows of potted plants: fern, rosemary, lavender, and even little white flowers that looked like Jasmine. I felt ashamed at being surprised over this: as if hunchbacks do not garden. Suddenly, the sister slapped her brother. (I suppose, though, all slaps are sudden.) He, acutely conscious of his hopeless position, took a step back and allowed it all to happen through shut eyes. Even when she called his sister a slut, all he did was cover his face with his arms.  After spitting on him repeatedly, she snatched the bag he was carrying and threw it from the stairway window, then punched him in the nose and told him to get a haircut. He ran his wretched hand through his white hair. I looked at his clothes. I wondered if he dressed himself. The brown belt that held his pants high was the same brown color of his skin. Uncanny, I thought, how both of the hunchbacks have the same nose. Not only are they both unmarried hunchbacks, but they have the same crooked and hunched nose. Intrigued, bewildered, bemused – I stood motionless at the window wanting to absorb every calculated vulgarity and emotion. I ran to get my notebook but by the time I came back to the kitchen, they had disappeared. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow, I will carry my notebook and sit in the kitchen until it starts again.

Days have passed and still I listen to her screams and bullying. I captured this from my window, and though the quality is not the best, one can still understand what I mean by all that I have written.

Dear Disciples and Fellow -Ismists,

I am requesting of you, because I am the god of the-ism, that you submit your commandments to me by no later than January 83, 96:30 p.m. – otherwise you will be ostracized into one of our sects. (p.s. feel free to create a sect.)

Also, I request of you, because I am the god of the-ism, to bring in  more female converts and locate yellow parchment for our first book of -isms. (Our second book will be published in the near future after the-ism’s detritus.)

Note — if you did not know you are an -ismist, you failed to listen to me during one of my tangential sermons.

***********************The Responses*************************

Disciple #1 (Matthew):  Thou Shall Make Revolution

Disciple #2 (Alexia): Is is the word is the word that you’ve heard. It’s got IS it’s got meaning.

Disciple #3 (Adrianos):  Fuck everyone…and I don’t mean sexually.

Disciple #4 (Jowan): im sorry, i dont get it. it could be the English, or the mode, or something else.. I tried..

Disciple #5 (Deema): 1.  Always keep your superhero powers in check 2.  refer to commandment #1

Disciple #6 (Ahmed): Love, in the absence of respect, is not enough.

Disciple #7: (John): Thou shall not use any religion as an excuse to harm other, lest they themselves be punished by a slow painfully cruel death.  The Book of John!

Disciple #8: (Ed): Are you OK? Getting enough protein?

Disciple #9 (Ali): 1. Thou Shalt Demand Pure Serenity! 2. Thou Shalt Demand Satisfaction From Each’s Partner! 3. Thou Shalt Party! 4. Thou Shall give Ali Aoudi of Houston, Texas $543.68 when the moon is at its fullest.

Disciple #10 (Ryvka): go hard and/or go home.

Disciple #11 (Imran, co-creator): – The-Ism consists of the Allowed, the More Allowed, the Most Allowed. Halal; Halaler; Halalest. Kosher; Kosherer; Kosherest

Dear ********

I bought a typewriter today, but the “see” does not work. A khallenge, I know. These are diasporik days. Every day is like yesterday, languid but with a new name. Yesterday, like the night before, I dreamt of a series of numbers: 6543721 and I awoke repeating, obsessively, the numbers trying to make sense of it. I am trying, like you suggested, to remain unremittingly devoted to questioning everything. Even you were skeptikal, but I’ve revived the buried history of these numbers. The Khinese make it hard to unkover, but I managed to not leave any blank page empty. I suppose, though, that none of it means anything if nobody will read my interpretation. My interpretation, if you must know, is that Parissa, the heart-shaped rokk I found on the shore of Jaffa, has these numbers tattooed on her bakk.

Look, nonsense aside. You must know something, sweetfake. The most krukial thing in a revolutionary era is our konskiousness. We musn’t, you musn’t, just to reflekt sokial konditions but to reflekt on them. That is the reason. The reason I wrote to you today. Even though the “see” does not work. Now, let us finish the kommandments we have been writing, and kontinue with the revolution of the-ism.

Your diskiple,

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