As Israel enacts a genocidal war on Gaza, the words of Palestinian-American poet and physician Fady Joudah echo in my mind.
You who remove me from my house
have also evicted my parents
and their parents from theirs.
How is the view from my window?
How does my salt taste?
Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body?
I first encountered Joudah’s poetry and writing in May 2021 when an Israeli onslaught killed at least 250 people, including 66 children and displaced 74,000 people.
Now two years later, the people of Gaza are the target of what is being rightly described as the second Nakba. This morning, an Israeli air strike on a hospital killed at least 500 people, and Palestinians are being bombed as they are forcibly expelled from Northern Gaza.
The poem Remove by Joudah was first published in the LA Review of Books and Links in May 2021, and is reprinted here as a gesture of solidarity, for Joudah and for all Palestinians.
As Joudah’s poem reminds us, Palestinians are repeatedly required to prove their humanity and even love for their oppressor, even in the face of an ongoing genocide.
Remove
You who remove me from my house
are blind to your past
which never leaves you,
yet you’re no mole
to smell and sense what’s being done
to me now by you.
Now, dilatory, attritional so that the past
is climate change and not a massacre,
so that the present never ends.
But I’m closer to you than you are to yourself
and this, my enemy friend,
is the definition of distance.
Oh don’t be indignant,
watch the video, I’ll send you the link
in which you cleanse me item after limb
thrown into the street to march where
my catastrophe in the present
is still not the size of your past:
is this the wall
you throw your dice against?
I’m speaking etymologically, I’m okay
with the scales tipping your way,
I’m not into that, I have a heart that rots,
resists, and hopes, I have genes,
like yours, that don’t subscribe
to the damage pyramid.
You who remove me from my house
have also evicted my parents
and their parents from theirs.
How is the view from my window?
How does my salt taste?
Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love my body,
my body, my house.
Fady Joudah’s fifth poetry collection, Tethered to Stars, is available from Milkweed Books.