Today we go to the other side of the world
Dubai and death: a travel note
It doesn’t matter how much we travel, it will still never cease to amaze me that you can get pretty much anywhere in the world within twenty four (24) hours. A single day, and you’re as far away from home as one can get.
As I write this from my hotel in Dubai, I can faintly hear the call to prayer floating over the desert haze and traffic din.
Being in this part of the world makes the daily news coming out of Gaza hit differently. We are currently about 1300 miles away from the unspeakable atrocities that the internet spews by the moment– doing its best to speak the unspeakable– rather than the seven thousand miles away that we would be if we were home. Being closer makes it feel closer. I guess it is closer.
But it probably doesn’t make it feel more real, as a swimming pool full of water shimmers less than a foot away from my toes, and a bottle of water is within arms reach, while thousands of kids are going thirsty a three-hour plane ride away from my lounge chair. To say this is unfair is trite, to say this is guilt-inducing is rote.
As I engaged in my morning doomscroll, the internet told me that Israel killed Palestinain poet Refaat Alareer along with his family in their home. The fact that he was a writer, and a poet, hit differently. Seventy five journalists have also been killed, for the obvious reason that they are tellers of truth, and truth is dangerous when daring to speak the unspeakable. But the fact that Alareer was also a poet– someone who dares to use language to tell the truth using not just words, but also beauty and art, makes his killing feel particularly egregious. Truth, and words, combined with beauty and art are the confluence of what I believe is the definition of poetry (and love) and this confluence should be the only thing that makes this life worthwhile. He dared to capture, then proliferate the imperative of life itself, and he paid the ultimate price for it.
Alareer was also co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, an organization of writers seeking to humanize Palestinian citizens who are trapped in the heinous misery of warfare.
If his murder is not the saddest poetry of all, then I don’t know what is.
What else do I say?
A poem:
The Mideast sun hangs blood red
Construction zones in the dessert press on with the insistence of mechanical things Steely
Unfeeling
Vehicles race to wherever on highways built for
Whatever
Piloted by a humanity
Too many feeling exactly that
Whatever
A poet dies