#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/

More info - https://artistsatriskconnection.org/story/creative-memory-of-the-syrian-revolution