MOAYED ABU AMMOUNA
‘Ard Al Abad at Darkroom Amman
Mired in the barzakh of Gaza, possessing nothing but maps of ascension to paradise. Short distances separate their bodies from fatal storms; distances dense with earnest blood and shrapnel from an insatiable death, besieging and testing them. So they memorized the map well and redefined existence.
And yet,
These are images of what they were doing ahead of their departure, of loss in exodus, of collective sorrow and protracted rage; images of the daily struggles of Gazans in the face of immeasurable wars. Images of long runs with heavy hearts in an orphaned city full of dignity and explosion, of attempts to survive rivers of blood and the guillotine of death without success or with temporary miracles; a death deferred by time difference.
These are images of those who carried their headless children, searched through the rubble, screamed from under the debris bodiless and then disappeared in the news cycle and in the folds of numbers and figures.
Of radiant, delicate faces confronting annihilation through starry eyes large enough for all these soldiers, of bodies invaded by tanks and ignited by the necessity of justice, tha’r, and the sun of freedom.
They invented times of their own, chanting their dreams of an ordinary life without attributes, liberated from the hemorrhage of memory and recollections, the overlapping of time, without the anxiety of tomorrow and the burden of rage. Dreams of quietude and the reassured night.
These are images to answer for action at a time of war and an inherited, trembling dispossession.
To those who flood and roam, mired in the barzakh of Gaza and the voids of time, dreaming of an open, rooted ending, victorious without tears, bringing an end to the calendar of assassination.
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