Hope
Hope’s not quite as it seems,
it’s slimmer than you’d think
and less steady on its feet.
Sometimes, it’s out of breath
can hardly see ahead
and cries itself to sleep.
It may not tell you all this
or the times it cheated death
but, if you knew it, you’d know
how Hope can keep a secret.
A poem from Palestine Wail by Yahia Lababidi
Renowned aphorist Yahia Lababidi’s Palestine Wail writes alongside a catastrophe beyond words, trying to shelter in words what remains of our humanity. To be a Minister of Loneliness and Lightkeeper, tending to the light.
— Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge
Palestine is personal for writer, Yahia Lababidi. His Palestinian grandmother, Rabiha Dajani — educator, activist & social worker — was forced to flee her ancestral home in Jerusalem, at gunpoint, some eighty years ago.
As an Arab-American, Lababidi feels deeply betrayed by the USA’s blind support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
In Palestine Wail, he reminds us that religion is not politics, Judaism is not Zionism, and to criticize the immoral, illegal actions of Israel is not antisemitism — especially since, as an Arab, Lababidi is a Semite, himself.
Using both poetry and prose, Lababidi reflects on how we are neither our corrupt governments, nor our compromised media. Rather, we are partners in humanity, members of one human family. Not in Our Name will the unholy massacres of innocent Palestinians be committed (two-thirds of whom are women and children) nor in the false name of ‘self-defense’.
In turn, Lababidi reminds us that starvation as a weapon of war is both cruel and criminal, as is collective punishment.
Palestine Wail invites us to bear witness to this historical humanitarian crisis, unfolding in real-time, while not allowing ourselves to be deceived, intimidated or silenced. We are made aware of the basic human truths that no lasting peace can be founded upon profound injustice and that the jailor is never Free…
Yahia Lababidi, an Arab-American writer of Palestinian background, has crafted a poignant collection which serves as a heartfelt tribute to the Palestinian people, their struggles, and their resilience in the face of an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The collection, described as a love letter to Gaza, draws inspiration from the rich literary tradition of Palestinian resistance literature. Lababidi, known for his critically-acclaimed books of aphorisms, essays, and poetry, brings his unique voice to this personal, political and spiritual work.
Palestine Wail addresses us in a variety of voices: outrage, lamentation and pity, in attempting to honor the pain of the oppressed Palestinian people, while also celebrating their enduring spirit.
Lababidi’s Wail, ultimately, is a prayerful work seeking peace, healing and reconciliation—a testament to the transformative power of literature to keep hope alive in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
These are necessary and truthful poems. Yahia Lababidi powerfully illuminates this heartbreaking time and terrible season in the history of our world. This book, like a lantern in darkness, brings to light the truth of lives we must learn to honor and remember. — James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Creativity, and Self-Compassion
Yahia Lababidi’s stunning and resonant collection, Palestine Wail, addresses the outrage felt by many of the oppressed Palestinian supporters and more. He also speaks of the lamentations of his people and the show of pity, compassion, and empathy from many members of the human family from all around the world.
— The Indefatigable Longing For Peace And Rapprochement In Yahia Lababidi’s Palestine Wail By Michael Parker.
Introduction: Wounds as Peepholes
“Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.” That line, from a movie adaption of Damage by Josephine Hart, affected me deeply the first time I heard it as a young man. In context, it was delivered as a perverse badge of courage. It also served as a cautionary tale or warning. What happens when our hearts break?
We can live like a hardened scab, impervious to the mighty winds that shake the mutilated world around us, or become more like an open wound, sensitive to the slightest breeze of suffering or injustice we encounter. I believe most of us try both ways and oscillate between one and the other. “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.” This aphorism was coined by Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, a visionary who recognized, profoundly, that our wounds and those of the world are ultimately one. What that suggests is that our larger allegiances must be to one another, past the narrow-heartedness of loyalty to any particular nation-state. After all, as the big-thinking and generously spirited Einstein put it, bluntly, nationalism is finally “an infantile disease . . .the measles of humankind.”
Ultimately, daring to care about the pain of others is not an option, but a shrewd form of self-preservation. For as Martin Luther King, Jr., reminds us, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” How it is, then, that we are told never to forget 9/11 and the nearly 3,000 innocent lives taken, and yet in the same breath we never remember the unjust “war” exacted in retribution and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives killed in the process? If we can agree that all human life is sacred, we must insist that all murder is unholy. Like American soldier-poet Brian Turner tells us in his devastating report from Iraq, Here, Bullet: “it should break your heart to kill. . . nightmare you.”
If we choose to turn our back to the wailing of our suffering world, and carry on amusing ourselves to death, violence like a karmic serpent will wind its way to our doorstep. If we wonder, cynically, Why should we care about Palestine the way we do about Ukraine? how can we avoid finding ourselves confronted with protests in our schools? Or police brutality in our communities, gun violence and the unhealed horrors of race relations in America? Or the unstoppable plaintive cry as old as the creation of a nation of American Indians at Standing Rock? Or physically and psychologically damaged war vets who, we tell ourselves “fought for our freedom”? Or the problems of homelessness and uprootedness? Or the growing numbers of refugees seeking—like our ancestors, wherever they came from—peace and freedom? Or terrorists of all sorts who have taken the shape of our shadows? What are these but the unsettling side-effects of our pandemic of indifference?
If all this does not wake the sleepwalker, they are confronted with another type of disruption: the eruption of hateful reactionary politics at the voting booths in the US and across Europe, driven by leaders without vision or integrity who don’t reflect our nobler longings and disregard the better angels of our nature. If we don’t speak in unison and declare: Not in our name, we will find ourselves cutting off our nose to spite our face, shooting ourselves in one foot and chewing on the other… while waiting for the world to change. But here’s the truth: we can’t bury pain and not expect it to grow roots. What we can do is try to attend, tenderly, to its bitter-sweet fruits.
“The creative adult is the child who has survived,” as Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us. Over time, I’ve come to be fascinated by moral or spiritual wounds and how best to put them to use. What if we were to view our wounds as peepholes through which to view the world’s wounds and tend to the wounds of others — and our planet — as an extension of our larger body? These words from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem became my own when he called us to “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
Long before him, another virtuoso of suffering, Sufi mystic Rumi, voiced this timeless insight: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” If the wound is where the light enters us, then how can we keep our wounds clean? One way is to recognize that we are all wounded—and wounding. And to remember that exceptionalism is dangerous nonsense that enables us to inflict pain on others, knowingly and unknowingly. If this is so, we might try to forgive damaged people (including ourselves) since they can hardly imagine the pain they inflict on others.
Another human perversion comes to mind when we see how bullies seek to play the role of victims. I look at the dangerous folly of the Middle East, and I look at the self-defeating arrogance and self-congratulatory ignorance of the United States, and what I see is this: the same gaping world-wound, bleeding because it is not being compassionately dressed. We need a different approach, one rooted in a deeper wisdom, to connect with one another at the place of our wounds and try to heal, together. As American psychiatrist Morgan Scott Peck put it: How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others . . . But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.
We forgive to live. Because, as an Arab-American bridge of a man by the name of Gibran reminds us: “Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?”
This collection attempts to answer to that haunting question.
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Purchase the book from Daraja Press.
