Goethe’s “To Lina” commands that the letters of the page, black on white, be not read but breathed so that our hearts “now can break.” What world imagines that its contracted heart is not already broken? I write this letter to you in the exposure of witness to the ongoing Nakba. I had always been told that you died in a camp. And that I was to be named after you, inscribed by your loss. Nearly everything I’ve written bears the initial of the name that was to hinge us in the kinship of the never forget and the never again—for anyone. The already assimilated German-sounding name of Lina that marked you became the Francophile Greek version of the Helene of burned Troys assigned to me. Every time I sign that name that is not really mine and not exactly yours, I hear echoes of the settler colonial violences of forced separation, the exterminating force of racialization, and the false promises of safety in clinging to a whiteness that would have none of us.
But did you know that lina, Arabic for a small date palm, appears in the Qu’ran in a passage that addresses the cutting down of trees? I did not consciously write Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization in your memory, but I confront the Israeli state’s genocidal machine of total destruction and its weaponization of displanting as a technology of empire—in your name. I hold on to that “H” that has no part in your name to keep company with the you who are also a stranger to me in the open hole of compounded loss to persist in and with the haunt of a heartbreak that refuses to look away from the unexceptional of genocide.
As with the ordinary of ghost stories, Lina, you came after me. I thought I was working on a project on how to make a life out of doing things with being undone, animated by an inordinate attachment to your daughters: my grandmother Bert, the statistician who schooled me in how we care for death, shows us how we care for life, and my great aunt Lis whose queer lessons in style were my lifeline. Did they learn to refuse the call of Zionism from you? I went looking in their papers for addresses, hoping to find where they reunited with your other two daughters. On a frayed yellow-brown envelope I found, instead, the ambivalent command: in one direction, “letters — throw out” and, in the other, “letters — throw away.” Yet, it was kept. Transmitted even.
Opening it disclosed the crumbling fragments of a correspondence with and about you. At the bottom of its torn pile of failed appeals for aid appeared two worn maps to a New Jersey cemetery—one from 1942 and the other from 1948, the year of the first Nakba. Each bears the same arc of a drawn line. The 1948 map is inscribed with what is still the shock of your name. I retraced the lines to the block fifteen section of the cemetery under the authority of a defunct refugee mutual aid organization. There, etched into a headstone, I found your name. Then on a Certificate of Death stamped by the Bronx Bureau of Records and, before that, on a list of one of the first transports of Jews out of Germany.
This past summer I made the journey with my old, analogue camera to the camps in southern France to which you were deported. I aimed to find ways to redirect the material testimony left in your wake away from the weaponization of Holocaust memory in support of the Israeli apartheid state and lay the ground, instead, across this throw-away world, for decolonization and solidarity with a free Palestine. The last stop was 36 rue Fauchier, the “refuge surveillé” known as the Hôtel du Levant, a detention center bearing the name for the pre-expulsion geography of Syro-Palestine. From there you were supposed to find transit to the US but were instead sent back to one of the camps in the Pyrenees. I found no trace of you.
I keep returning instead to a scene in which I felt as if I had been forcibly dropped in a throw that broke my camera. Keeping with what I take as your pedagogy in breathing through what shakes us offers a compass to the vertiginous airlessness and groundlessness of this moment in which the shattering charge of antisemitism—aimed even and perhaps especially at Jews like us who side with Palestine—breaks open our already frayed bonds with those who are supposed by the laws and norms of white heterosexism to be our kin. I have been re-reading Christina Sharpe’s injunction in “Lose Your Kin” that to do the necessary work of remaking the world we must: “Refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality. Refuse to feast on the corpse of others. Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative.”
To be with a free Palestine still as a praxis of love calls on us to become other and more to each other than a line of descent, to forge, instead, a living, breathing bond of support across the impassable of death, loss, and our radical differences to make the break as anti-Zionist Jews required for us to weave the kind of open, elastic breakaway bonds capable of forging the relations between Palestinians, Jews, and Palestinian Jews otherwise barred to us. Let’s cover the mirror traps of identitarianism, rip the straightjackets of the insecurity promises of the carceral, and summon a melancholy strike to make a break for it, for the justice called impossible and mad through the world-cleaving of our hearts.
With the “H” of a radical hospitality that hosts a whole host of nos—no to the apartheid state, no to the false equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, no to endless warfare.
Not in my name, not in yours,
Jill H. Casid
Dear Lina, – The Brooklyn Rail - Brooklyn Rail
Read More
No comments:
Post a Comment