Habūb.
He came with the wind,
And you can see it on his face.
Stormy seas, endless deserts, hostile trails over mountains unused to bare feet.
He wants nothing, but for the wind to stop blowing,
for his road to stop winding, constantly,
unforgivingly changing direction every time he hopes to arrive somewhere. Anywhere.
But there is no place for him; he is nobody.
Murmurs of an indignant crowd stirs up a storm that keeps him moving
Running to keep safe, although nothing can protect him now.
And when he finally falls, the murmur grows silent for a moment.
The world is given a chance to rethink,
A chance to right the wrongs, to wake up and smell the death of inaction.
The crowd regroups, changes its chant, repaints its door and stands there,
Ready to rise up and scream.
But they aren’t screaming for the death of the fallen man.
They do not wipe for his demise, searching for peace at the end of inhumanity.
They wipe for themselves,
they demand justice for themselves,
they cry STOP!
But it does not stop, it never stops.
And it is their fault.
Calais migration crisis, 2015-07-29
Crazy hair and a singing heart
Not enough metaphors left to tell this story.
Of dreams and impossible adventures of the heart.
Not the linear kind, but the explosives-and-walking-on-hot-coal type of adventure.
Of unexpected bliss and swarms of butterflies,
Of betrayed trust, second chances and elaborated excuses.
I make them as much for me as I do for you.
- The truth did not discourage you? you ask.
Perhaps you're shocked, perhaps you are still not sure if it did.
What can I tell you that you do not already know?
We act like we're surprised at what we are doing, yet this was the road we chose.
You turned the blinker on and I helped turn the car around.
And the ride is like a cabriolet on a sunny road to the beach.
Crazy hair and a singing heart.
What can I tell you about me?
That my relationship with truth is a very complicated one.
That I am strong, independent and fragile, and so very shaky on the inside.
That I will use your guilt against you before you can turn it on me.
But, also this:
That I will be gone before any of your disaster scenarios could ever come true.
Trust me, I am telling you stories.
Trust me.
Someone else's ceiling
It was true once, that the act of being chosen trumped any will of my own.
days consumed obsessing over someone I cared little or nothing about,
my world would expand and disappear to the rhythm of his whims,
and I would be rendered useless by words or gestures that never took place.
But life happened and I grew up a little.
My heart learnt to stay within its own boundaries,
and though my body sometimes opens itself up- the shutdown is usually firm and fast.
Fast and furious.
...
In a relationship of logistical efficiency, the small moments are lost.
Perhaps life is what happens in between those small moments?
The pause, the wait, the longing?
Matters of the heart are not meant to be scheduled, appropriate, orderly.
- they're not supposed to be safe.
But one day you walk through the floor and find that it is someone else's ceiling.
And you will no longer be able to tell up from down.
Stones in glass houses
We were rebels,
Soul rebels.
Phantasmagorically carving out a space in a hole we just barely began digging.
With stones in our hands and nothing but glass walls surrounding us,
we picked them up and started throwing.
Not the proverbial ones, but stones heavy with desire and sharp edges
The kind you cannot carry around in your pocket forever,
or they'll cut through the fabric, causing gaping holes that never heal.
The kind that can easily smash glass once they are released.
I know this.
But without the bruise, how can we ever tell where the boundaries are?
How much the heart can take? And wich frontiers are really worth crossing?
Or the answer to the ubiquitous question am I significant?
And as long as the glass remains intact, there's no reason to stop.
- is there?
Drones and dreams
Don't use your weapons, he said.
And I never got it.
If anything, he had all the ammunition; I was just trying to stay alive.
I used to pity myself in secret, mocking his position of power,
never taking seriously his military metaphors.
A few years later, I'm learning about vulnerability.
About how we keep it at bay by constructing our personally protective walls,
sheltering us from hurt and happiness in equal parts.
And it hits me how I've spent the last ten years perfecting the human shield.
Like oil and water, baby.
I am a preventative drone strike,
nothing ever gets through.
Lacking in precision, it takes out everything while searching for its target.
Annihilating threats and promises alike.
Leaving nothing where there was once something.
- Do you remember?
Never underestimate a peacock feather.
I read in the papers that giant frozen waves have been spotted off the coast of Nantucket.
Colder than water, softer than ice; the waves kept rolling in.
Defying density. Just barely breaking.
Breathing unevenly, I tell myself to get a grip.
This is not a car crash, not an unfortunate parachute landing, or a piano dropped from the 3rd floor.
This is not the moment when all my weaknessess break me.
- Hey, I say, and instead of meeting your eyes I move on. Barely breaking.
Like those frozen waves off the Nantucket coastline.
But the storm in my chest.
Experience concludeth nothing universally.
But then this.
The light trickles down the neck of a stranger,
plays on his skin and slides over my heart. Lightly, like peacock feathers.
It jumps off the pages of my favourite book and back up in the sky.
And if you crossed the street right next to me, I might be able to just smile and keep on going.
One of those days, when elation comes effortlessly and walking on water seems possible, if not probable.
So, despite this inner turmoil and all my outer insecurities.
In the face of such piercingly beautiful bliss that can only be intentional.
I'll be standing on the shoreline.
Which color do you want?
Outside this unfamiliar building, we're not sure what to expect,
and even less certain of what is expected from us.
Foyer Selah is a home for asylum seekers waiting for permission to stay in Belgium.
We, a group of well-meaning whites, with worries like "why hasn't he called yet?" or "hope it won't rain tonight";
I'm wondering if they really want us here or if this is just an imperative that we've invented.
The living room is big and bright and ridicilously over-heated.
It has the familiar feeling of a communal space, sparsely decorated but welcomingly colorful.
There is no suspicion, only big smiles, vivid hand gestures and eager attempts at finding a common language;
Arabic, French, Tigrinya, English and Somali bounce against the walls, looking for somewhere to land.
We have come armed with props, games, nail polish and curiosity.
At first it seems surreal, to meet someone for the first time and ask to paint their nails.
- Which color do you want?
Silvana, the smallest Eritrean 18-year-old I have ever seen, cannot make up her mind.
She looks over to her friend, a veiled Somali woman with a contagious smile who points to the turquoise bottle.
This intimate act becomes a way of interaction, of breaking down barriers too large to think about.
Or maybe reducing barriers that exist mainly in my mind.
Silvana is married. She doesn't speak much English, but she can say "husband", and she says it a lot.
Her phone is full of photos of the two of them together, looking young, beautiful and happy.
In between them are photos of shoes, glittery dresses and very exotic nail art.
She shows me a turquoise nail decorated with zebra stripes and miniature stones and looks hopeful.
I'm thinking how extremely normal yet absurdly abnormal this all is.
A young girl bursting out into the world, hoping to land somewhere less hostile than what she escaped.
A young husband who follows but ends up on another shore.
Weddings gowns, high-heeled shoes and a world of uncertainty and loss are all contained within Silvana.
She fingers the wooden cross around her neck and explains: "Orthodox".
- Are you a muslim? she asks as she starts to paint my nails with a shade of light pink.
A few hours later we hug each other and the girls are taking pictures.
I slip Silvana a small thank you note, and I wonder if she can tell that my head is raging with calm confusion.
She asks her friend to write a reply that says Yekenyeley.
It means 'thank you' in Tigrinya, she explains.
It's a story as old as the world.
We try to make a change in the life of others, and they end up changing ours.
What was it I wanted?
Write the world.
In 2014 I left Europe for the first time.
In New York, I lied to Joyce Carol Oats about being Belgian, and she gave me her autograph.
A man on a park bench wrote me a poem more true to my spirit than had I written it myself,
and some friends made me drink a shot of pickled garlic liquor (don't try this at home!).
On a boat along the Boston coastline I watched a Pakistani and an Iranian reenact the "I'm the king of the world"-scene from Titanic. It was glorious. In a restaurant on Elm Street, I talked about arranged marriages and feminism with an Indian friend who just a week ago had been a stranger.
Upon return to Brussels, I listened to Barack Obama speak to the youth of Europe. In a beautiful concert hall of red and gold, he said "Do not think for a moment that your freedom, your prosperity, your moral imagination is bound by the limits of your community, your ethnicity or your country." and I tried to imagine a European leader speak as though our souls were at stake, not just our economy.
I met a man who said my words are dangerous, that they take people to the darkest places and that I need to be held accountable for that. As I rolled up my sheet of paper, I wondered- just for a minute- if he was right.
Is there too much hardship in this world to make room for my difficult questions?
In 2014 I thought a lot about the world.
I was told stories of violence, war and discrimination. Stories about people who fight back.
Hiding notes of hope written for the universe, I imagined that small words can make a big impact.
I studied postcolonialism. I read Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Adichie, Azar Nafisi, Salman Rushdie,
and I wanted to be a warrior poet.
I listened to messages of peace by someone who knew Martin Luther King.
I watched the news and I thought to myself:
Write the word; Write the world; right the world.
Hegel for beginners
These floors are covered by letters, notes, scribbles and maps,
Handwritten shapes in black on white,
Blank slates sacrificed for the sake of synthesization.
My footprints in the corners, smudging the meaning of a noun, changing the tense of a verb.
Scattered coffee stains testifying my nocturnal attempts at amateur philosophy.
Covering the ground with unanswered questions, asking one after the other, asking for dear life
Proving and disproving myself, rebutting the thought before it reaches my tongue and sending it back
Back before language happens.
I wrote an essay on Hegel once.
There was nothing much that I really understood, but I remember an exquisite phrase.
For anything to happen, everything must be in place.
Maniacally, I rip out hundreds of pieces of paper and I write in clear, red swirls
E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.
Let the puzzle begin.
Another brick...
Smile, what else can you do?
I put them there.
Letters in bright white on a soft, dark blackboard.
The curve of the question mark mocking me, disguising the final blow behind its causual rhetorics.
- Where's the eraser?
And I am thinking,
that if I hadn't opened this abyss between us,
I'd be telling you about the movie I saw last night, the one which shifted my world a little.
Maybe we'd fight about the meaning, you'd challenge my opinion, but I wouldn't care.
Then I'd show you the shop just around the corner from here,
the one that sells the most exquisite Moroccan porcelain, the one I know you'd love.
And I imagine,
that if I hadn't drawn this line and watched it fall between us,
We wouldn't go about our days like two strangers who sometimes meet, accidentally.
With nothing to say, we politely ask about each others' lives as though we cared.
The air heavy with things we will not say.
But then I remember.
that some walls were built to crumble.
And all we can do is run for cover when the bricks come falling down.
An intergalactic somersault for absolution
These days,
when black bodies are butchered because- why?
when daftly diverging deities demand beheadings, and
when only those with the more gluttonous genitals are granted the word 'genius',
These days,
Life shows no sign of the apocalypse we know must be coming.
A world so weighed down by gargantuan pain and gaudy pleasures,
so tarnished by its own ineptitude, by the wounds of battles avoided, by its useless charades.
Surely, this world will break the snare?
defy gravity?
shoot far, far away, catapulted by a slingshot across the universe to make amends?
An intergalactic somersault for absolution.
But here we are.
The ground beneath us stained by the blood of butchered bodies, severed heads, humans cast aside.
No catapults or black holes to save us.
Not a shadow of the gloriously dangerous cloud of a nuclear bomb, nor its promised oblivion.
No, in the midst of its deepest, maddening moments,
the world does not stir.
Of mice and men
A cleverly crafted calculation,
offered to me as a generous gift.
Your hands stretched out, your face relieved as though after long laborious hours,
working on an impossible equation.
A problem can't be solved by putting it in an envelope,
the shakily licked stamp curls up, demanding action; satisfaction.
do not be surprised to see the orange colored ink running, leaving words halved, amputated in mid-thought.
Thousands of thoughts cut off at the waist. A sea of feelings desperately, feebly swimming to shore.
What's in half a word?
Statistical analysis and aggregation are your weapons of choice,
Taking to my orange mess as a scientist, eager to discover the root cause of an enigmatic disease.
Correlation, Causality? Choose capriciously.
I used to say that I write emotional algebra.
So why am I surprised to be treated like a mathematical problem?
objects in the mirror are closer than they appear
There's your name.
Attentively I observe each letter forming you out of strange shapes.
By now, the signifier has become confused with the signified.
Saussure would not approve. Signs are not supposed to cross over.
There are rules, you know, in semiology. Taxonomy, hierarchy, structure.
It is an analogy, not a metaphor.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
I always knew that it was dangerous. The way we spoke of nothing and of everything.
Disguising heavy significance as unbearable lightness, and trivia as philosophical problems.
Was language really given us to enable us to conceal our thoughts?
There is something I want to say, but I've forgotten how to talk other than in cryptography.
No longer capable of speaking unmetaphorically, unequivocally, unintentionally.
If I force us down to earth, will we fall into mediocrity?
Or will we thrawl the streets like two strangers together in exile,
looking for hidden meaning in the excruciatingly mundane?
Don't run away, it's only life.
Male improvisation
You had this idea,
that you are more broken than me,
that your breaking point is more precious than mine, somehow.
Recounting your thoughts, convincing yourself they are larger than life.
these emotions that cannot find peace within the boundaries of you,
you are just barely containing your words,
encircling me, disregarding proportionality and propriety.
I am the mirror at the end of a corridor,
a ghost playing along with your capricious guessing game.
What destroyed you? What cures your pain?
Why are you here in the middle of the night without explanation?
Don't break the spell, you said.
Don't break, I thought, holding my breath for you. For you?
It was a rehearsal, of course.
It was a mutual dress-up, with lines in a foreign language.
Your dark words made everything beautiful.
Even the imbalances between us.
I would have sensed your silent desperation.
Hesitation, exclamation, deprivation. In English.
Linguistic naïvité.
Eccomi.
The persuasive verses
My mind- a prison; a straightjacket,
a tightrope stretched between us,
slackening- tightening, slackening- tightening; ripping...-
swooooooosh.
More than 18 floors down we go,
like the beginning of a Salman Rushdie novel
falling through imaginary centuries of historical bantering.
Would we be like Gibreel and Saladin,
hopelessly trying to shout louder one than the other,
not realizing we're saying the same thing?
Would it turn us into fallen angels or opportunist devils?
Can we land on our feet without destroying everything?
Can we break the rules and be redeemed?
Will I ever reveal what I value, and risk it.
Risk it all.
To walk this tightrope?
A Dreamcatcher's Manifesto
Some of us are dreamers.
Living in many spaces; the past, the future, in parallel worlds, on imaginary planets, all at once.
Some of you tell us that we need to put our feet on the ground.
That life is about being present (you sometimes use this as a pun ).
About seizing the moment, living in the now.
But what if nostalgia is not about living in the past.
What if it's simply marvel at our memory.
At our capability to perfectly reconstruct a single moment in time.
And if we weren't present, how could we possibly remember nows, even years after the present became past?
We carry them all with us because we scooped them up, saved them
bottled them up for a rainy day that keeps on coming.
And what if imagining another world is not escapism, but creation.
What if it's an exercise in what-if? instead of merely reacting to the one scenario offered by your Reality.
How does anything, anybody, evolve without rejecting what is?
Without choosing what we dream over what we see, nothing ever changes.
We think new worlds because that is how the limits of life expand and become elastic.
You should try it.
So, indulge in your nostalgia.
Immerse yourself in the bliss of recalling the tiniest, unimportant details of a mundane memory.
Make other worlds, create images that others cannot see, build a treehouse out of nothing but imagination.
Maybe once in a while you'll catch yourself not being fully present in the now.
And maybe you will smile to yourself, not remembering what all the fuss was about.
On the verge of something amazing
It was half a lifetime ago.
We were young, so young.
And we did not know that good things come to those who wait and those who don't alike.
Anyways, we weren't going to wait.
Promises had not yet been broken, life was still new.
Writing our hearts out, pouring our hopes onto paper, telling our lives in love songs.
We sent letters across countries and we felt less alone, less confused. More alive.
Your life in another world- a different language- was the source of all my daydreams.
I grew up learning to love your foreign words; pazza, scema, strana...
I wore them like charms on a bracelet, letting them embrace me and define me.
Our letters read like the interactive diaries of two hopeless romantics on the verge of something amazing.
"Diaries are our lives, aren't they?", you wrote me in august 2001.
For a 16 year-old, you were pretty clever.
On the compartmentalization of dating
In the light of the fashionable mensplaining,
- anecdotes of condescending men explaining "complex" things to supposedly less capable women- ,
I am trying to come up with a word for its not-so-distant cousin.
Men who patronizingly try to explain, analyze or criticize the behavior of the women they are dating.
- for the women's own good, of course.
Obviously, in any relationship there must be space for constructive criticism.
My fascination lies in the kind of things that men feel they should and must, point out as flaws with women.
Have you ever been called too independent, too clever, too ambitious?
Too deep, too complicated, over-thinking?
Did he call you a coward because you did not give up everything for him?
It means stop challenging my authority. It means stay in your place.
It means don't forget what you are, what you are supposed to be.
And we- women- are all accomplices in this.
One friend told me to just pretend a little. To be a little more like a woman.
What does that mean?
Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the Nigerian expression "bottom power",
the treacherous and false sense of power women wield when we use our sexuality to persuade men.
False because we are just making a small dent in his authority, buying into the idea that the power is indeed his.
"it is easy", my friend said. Works every time.
I am torn between a profound sadness at the cynicism
of a world in which a woman knowingly cuts off her edges,
as to not hurt the fragile ego of a man who supposedly loves her,
And the anger at knowing that women cope with these ridiculous demands by inventing an insane logic
that diminishes men and women alike.
We expect nothing more than what we get,
in this world where everything is pardoned in advance
and therefore everything cynically permitted.
Unscorched by the blaze
I want to write meaningfully, with purpose.
About the destruction and desolation too expansive to be comprehended.
Deconstruct the clichéd imagery of occupation and terrorism,
decode the language of division; of invasion,
I want to carve away the ideology, dig behind history,
Write the story.
A taste of blood in my mouth.
Is it fear?
Fear for them or fear for me?
Fear of never being able to do anything I promised myself?
How shameful.
People are dying and I am shaking under newly washed sheets.
My sheets smell of Marseille soap and the people are hiding, screaming, exploding, giving up.
People are fasting, for faith, for hope, for love.
I am hungry, I think.
I am angry.
haunting abstraction
Emotional analytics is bad for business.
too much knowledge can wreck any imaginary happiness.
Proving yourself right is not the only way forward
And not all dark places need light.
There is no binary truth.
No grand narrative.
No alchemic formula.
There is only embracing uncertainty,
the courage to let go of all premonitions, predictions, calculations.
Trusting that copper coil of desire, buried so deep inside you're not sure it's still there.
Kicking off your shoes, walking the tightrope barefoot to something that may or may not become.
- is there nowhere out of the mind?
All I wanted to do was to rest my head on you,
On the idea of you, just for a minute.
The fear of you slipping away is tangible; I don't even know who you are.
The sense of things falling into place is laced with zemblanity.
Serendipity is zemblanity until proven otherwise.
A new frontier; the forensics of love.
A fingerprint of betrayal?
The DNA of neglect?
Everybody's guilty until proven otherwise.
How many fantasies in an infinitesimal space?
