Remembering the Jasmine of Ramallah; Or, How to Write to the Heart of the Matter in a Broken World

It rained last night and into the morning, and yesterday too and the day before, though it had hardly rained all winter and spring. Since the previous spring really, and even that was pretty dry. The newspapers say the reservoirs are up to 26 percent again. How to write to the heart of the matter?

Article continues after advertisement

*

I got a voice message from A. I listened as I walked to catch the bus. Her dad is still in Rafah and refuses to evacuate. She is expecting his building to be hit any day. But where could he go that is not also being bombed? I stood on the corner waiting for the light to change. Through the little speaker of my phone I could hear her voice shaking from all the months of fear and grief. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

The black-hole tug of the current moment is at the same time a centrifugal swirl. No narrative could contain all this. Too many shards are flying everywhere. Analysis explains nothing. More than ever, it’s a fool’s game, a stupefacient. Metaphor is vile. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

Yesterday on my way home I walked past two teenage girls making out in the same spot on the same bench in the same metro station where I had seen them making out the day before. As if time had been folded in a tidy crease. The skinnier of the two was smiling in the same way that she had been the day before, with the same languorous, defiant joy. As if she were gazing at the very heart of things, as if she were perched on a high ledge above it and had decided it was all hilarious. Wherever I was, she was somewhere else. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

R. messaged to let me know that B.’s son had been taken from the house by Israeli soldiers and held in the concrete guard tower at the entrance to the village. The soldiers had questioned and beaten him for four hours and when they were done they drove him into open countryside miles from the village and left him there alone in the dark.

Which son? I texted back. H. or S.? 

S., he answered.

I haven’t seen S. for six or seven years. In all my memories, he is a child, always wriggling, grinning, giggling, never still. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

I texted B. What could I say? I told him I hoped S. was okay, but of course he’s not okay.

Wallah, it was a long night, B. texted back.

How to write to the heart of the matter? He did a better job of it than I can.

*

I didn’t see it, but friends on the West Coast and my niece in Tennessee posted photos of the aurora borealis, sun storms so strong they drove the northern lights far south. Flares of energy spit out from a sunspot that’s seventeen times bigger than the Earth. A different S. texted photos from Washington state of the sky gone pink and green, treetops visible in the corners of the frame. It was weaker and fuzzier to our eyes, he wrote. His phone’s camera had picked it up better than he could see it. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

It doesn’t matter if I can put this into words. Literally everything in existence is more important. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

For months I couldn’t finish any of the novels that I was starting because even the ones that registered as good or interesting still somehow felt trifling and I figured only a Russian would do. Now I’m 600 pages into Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. At one point battalion commissar Krymov is arrested by Stalin’s police for unspecified political crimes—perhaps because he had praised Trotsky years before in front of a lover, and she had told another lover, who told someone else. Krymov is thrown into a cell that has just been vacated by a man on his way to be executed. It’s dark, but on the table he can feel a rabbit “molded from the soft inside of a loaf of bread.” He can tell that “the condemned man must have just put it down,” Grossman writes, because only “its ears had time to grow stale.” Imagine, your last act, the product of your last breaths, the final willful movements of your fingers: bunny ears. How to write to the heart of the matter? Grossman tried.

*

In the evenings, after the rains have cleared, the clouds cover most of the sky, towering El Greco clouds lit at odd angles by light from the sinking sun hidden somewhere behind the buildings. The streets and the squares are filled with people, but they’re not the same people they were a few hours earlier. They’re not going to work or coming home, they’re going out now. They feel free. It’s springtime and warm and the evenings are long and the air that we together breathe is abuzz with small hopes: a shared meal, the anticipation of a kiss, maybe a dance, laughing with someone’s hand on your knee. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

Last week the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre flooded after days of torrential rain caused the Jacuí river to overflow the dykes that had been built to contain it. The water knocked out the power so that the pumps didn’t work. Most of the city was cut off, the airport underwater, half a million people displaced. I was there once years ago. I remember walking through empty downtown streets at night, looking for some trouble to get myself into, failing. Hundreds were killed by floods in northern Afghanistan too, children carried off by the waters. Ron DeSantis signed a bill deleting the word “climate” from Florida law. Avian flu is killing off the sea birds and now seals and sea lions too and sandhill cranes and pigeons and crows and cats on farms and chickens by the tens of millions. A headline appeared unbidden on my phone: “Properly cooked hamburgers pose no bird flu risk.” How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

Mohammed El-Kurd published a piece for Nakba Day, on which Palestinians commemorate their expulsion from their lands in 1948. It usually falls within a week of Israel’s independence day, which is no accident. El-Kurd wrote about jasmine growing in Gaza and about resistance, revolution even, in the face of crushing defeats. “There is jasmine,” he wrote, “because seeds do not need permission, or a ceasefire, to germinate.”

Here too the jasmine is blooming. There’s a huge bush of it, a hedge really, just down the street, its scent so thick you feel almost drunk walking past it. I walk past it nearly every day. And already, before I read his essay, I thought of Palestine every time I did, of the jasmine there and how its scent had at times sustained me when the ugliness became too much. It sounds hokey but it’s true. The jasmine and the flock of parakeets that nested in the cypress tree across the street from my old building. I would sit out on the roof and smoke and watch them fly home, a shock of green above the dusty streets, chattering as they flew—every day at the same time, as the sun faded in the thin light of those Ramallah evenings. The jasmine there is a different variety than the kind I was used to from California. It smells different. Sharper of course, and so sweet it bends the nose. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

Where I live now it’s the swifts that sustain me. They fly off to warmer climes at the end of each summer and come back in the spring. Every year I’m afraid they won’t return, but so far they always have. They twist and turn, darting through the sky with astonishing agility, sculpting it into something more than three dimensions. They screech through the canyons of the city streets, chasing one another. They are feeding, voraciously, on whatever unfortunate insects they can find, but surely they are also playing. Surely they are capable of joy. How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

What if I am wrong and it has no heart? What if it’s just this forever, endlessly reproducing itself in more dimensions than we could ever count? Devastation, tenderness, loss wide enough to swallow the earth, infinite destruction, ecstasies that dim and reemerge as torments, pains that soften, slowly, into grace? How to write to the heart of the matter?

*

At the Nakba Day demo, at 5:48 pm exactly, we all lay down. There were at least a couple thousand of us. I couldn’t count. We lay down in the street, all of us at once. The asphalt digging into hips, spines, ankles. From that angle we couldn’t see one another. Just the feet, knees, elbows of the people immediately around us. But we could feel each other’s presence, could sense that by moving together and then refusing to move we had become something larger, an organism that did not yet know itself but that nonetheless contained us all, our tremendous sadness but also this sudden, fragile strength emitted by our collective body, by all of us acting as one.

A few pigeons flew past, in a hurry to get somewhere. Gulls circled above. Higher up, an airplane streaked across the blue. The leaves of the sycamore trees shivered and laughed. Even there, on the biggest shopping street in the heart of the city, the silence was almost absolute. From the sound truck, an air raid siren blared. The eyes of the woman beside me filled with tears. The siren blared and faded and blared again and the silence rose and fell, swelling beside it until finally, after I don’t know how many minutes, a voice rang out through a megaphone. “Free, free Palestine,” it shouted, and we all stood up.

_______________________

This essay originally appeared at Flaming Hydra.