#KiyiyaVuranInsanlik
(Humanity Washed Ashore)
for Octavio Paz
(though we differed in our politics)
How the empty imprint of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s dead body
Found its way from the surf near Bodrum, Turkey’s shore
To a sandbar on my local river I’ll never know — technology
And ‘hand of god’, both — both images now indelible
In memory. The sand along Turkey’s shore has been washed —
Thousands of times over — with Aegean salt water. And the guard
Who lifted and carried the then-nameless toddler’s body away,
May unspeakably be having breakfast with his wife, the horror of dead bodies
Washing up on shore having been rendered mute by their numbers.
I, too, have had to find a way to go on with — in spite, not along with —
The business of life within this mesh of powers. How do we
Find ourselves, though alive, somehow too face-down in sand.
More than five years after September 2, 2015 and the headlines
Have yet to change. According to the London-based Syrian Observatory
For Human Rights, Biden ordered retaliatory airstrikes that killed at least 22
Within weeks of his inauguration. While Trump was building a wall
Along the Mexican border, the creative memory of Syrian revolutionaries
Deterritorialized and archived the revolution by building the Idlib Walls —
A reminder a government’s overreaction to a group of boys painting
Murals on their school walls sparked a revolution that has yet to end.
The most recent addition to the Idlib Walls includes a mural for
George Floyd — Idlib shouts “No To Racism” out to everywhere and
Nowhere in spite of cultural differences and massive economic inequalities
Giving rise to opposing movements of deterritorialization and
Tightening borders. Everywhere the story’s the same — “white” people
Afraid of losing the identities that allow them to pass through unquestioned,
While absconding with the identities of others — the islands of Lesbos, Kos,
Manus othered geographies of organized abandonment. Whoever heard
Of states willingly ceding, rather than conquering and colonizing, land? In February
2021, one hundred thousand were detained at the Mexican border. Worldwide,
Over eighty million have been displaced from their homes, twenty-six million
Are refugees living abroad. Countries are now actively engaging in
Explusions in defiance of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Life rafts
At sea, emptied of fuel, bob listlessly on water reflecting an other-worldly
Sunlight, the surface glistening with dislocations produced by
Life-shattering formations that are beyond the legally recognized
Responsibility of systems. The tether to where I live too tenuous to hold me,
On one island the shores are lined with abandoned life-jackets. On another,
Oil slicks. On another, the skeletons of eroded and ruptured civilization.
Link to the Idlib Walls - https://creativememory.org/en/idlib-walls/idlib-walls-timeline/
