16/07/2006
Dear I’,
As a nation, we are practicing your choreographies. We embody physical actions and repeat them again and again and again until they stay in our bodies forever.
The moment I chose to leave you was at the end of one “what to do in case of a war” practice in school. It was the first day of school after the summer of 2006. I was ten years old. There was still “tension” on the border with Lebanon, as the government and media called it. So we needed to practice what to do in case rockets were sent to Haifa while we were in school. We went to our classes, and suddenly the alarm sounded. All of us, the kids from Haifa, who were experiencing war for the first time in our short lives, recognized the alarm sound, knowing it from our summer experience. We all knew the agreed-upon choreography. The school’s version was explained to us before the practice began.
- Hide under the tables.
- Walk in a line, divided into pairs, behind the teacher to the school’s shelter.
- Wait.
We went out, and my panic attack started. I could not name it back then. I remember where I was standing at this moment, the exact feeling of an inner shaking. I remember a feeling of urgency in my body. I remember my tears. I remember the feeling of the space being blurry. I remember the need to run away. Now, I had the same feeling, just like during the summer of 2006, after the first alarm sounded in Haifa, and I refused to stay home. The same as when I see helicopters.
The same as when I feel in physical danger. You taught me that if I hear the alarm, I need to hide and run away. So I did. I looked inside the knowledge of a 10-year-old for a solution. I went crying to the principal's office. I told her I wished I lived in France, like my cousins and other family members. Saying I wished to leave you. Maybe this was when I started to romanticize Europe and France, the moment Europe started to be my escape route. When the Mediterranean Sea also started to represent the gate to the “PeaceLand” in my childish imagination.
A’, the principal of the school, looked at me. She tried to tell me that it is not better there and that also, in France, there is violence, and—even more frighteningly—anti-Semitism. It was 2006, and there were protests in the streets of Paris. A’ told me that in the news, you could see the fires in the street there. It did not matter to me. They don’t kill each other, I was thinking.
To be able to live in I’, you, we have to accept violence, war, and trauma as a regular thing. We must accept that you, I’, cannot do your part in the state-citizen agreement regarding safety. I could never accept it. Schulman wrote: “it is a distorted social norm to see the wish to repair as an assault.”
Bye,
N’
25/09/2024
Dear I’,
It has been some time since the last time I wrote to you. Since that last time, I have been willing to engage in a conversation with you. Last time we talked, I asked to resign from paying your monthly allowance that permits you to keep me financially tied to your crimes. I asked you to stop paying, so I will clean myself of you. Clean my guilt. You birthed me, and I am covered with the blood you have shed. How can you ignore the historical mirror in front of you?
Last year, you were willing to recognize it and break up with me as well. Even in our last separation, I was obedient to your laws. It took me five years to ask to be removed from officially residing within you and to stop paying your taxes. I did so after I saw images from Gaza. Your violence replicates the one contained in the images you taught me to fear.
How can you ignore the historical mirror in front of you? Maybe you are a weight I shouldn’t run away from. Maybe you are a guilt I must feel for the possibility of transformation, of deconstruction. Whenever I think I am starting to be cured of you, you prove me wrong. You find new ways to habituate yourself under my skin, in my lungs, in my mind. You traumatized me. It is a traumatic experience to hide in shelters and hear the sounds of the rockets. It is traumatic to grow up believing you have to hold a gun one day to become part of society.
You keep forgetting that being traumatized from war doesn’t protect you from genocide, and being traumatized from genocide doesn’t protect you from doing genocide.
I met a guy from Gaza last month. He paid for my ticket to get into a club that night, a ticket that I considered too expensive, but money he was willing to spend to party with me despite our disagreements. This me is also you, partially and paradoxically. I keep carrying your name. I keep finding identities between me and parts of you.
Seeing the Jews suffering as the only real suffering is absurd. It minimizes the diversity of human suffering. It means underestimating the many faces that violence can have. It is dehumanizing. To add a truth to a space does not deny another truth. For change and peacemaking, we must learn empathy. We must fight for the understanding of human plurality. We must give space in our minds and bodies to more than a mere superficial form of truth. We must become friends with those we have learned to think of as enemies.
Now, I am trying to take my identity and make it into a verb. By writing you this, I am practicing my identity as separation, as rebellion, as opposition, as deconstruction. To decolonize myself, as you will forever need to be a practice. A movement. A dance. I am shifting from dancing to your memorials to dance your memory in my body, and, from there, to dance away from you. To expel the I’ that is in me constantly through love and compassion. To destroy you by redefining and relearning my roots, my Judaism, and my belonging to the land between the river and the sea.
Bye,
N'
- Image:
Ruth Patir, (M)otherland, 2024, video stills. © and courtesy of the artist
