STRANGE FRUIT, a reclamation story in which we collect and humanize our dead.
A mural depicting George Floyd on Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, April 2021.
Some context, before you read the story. I originally wrote this piece after the lynching of Ahmad Arbery, and felt compelled to revisit it with the ongoing genocide and dehumanization of the Palestinian people. However, this is not a piece about war. It is not a piece full of wailing and despair, hopelessness and dread. It is a story about the reclamation of bodies. Day after day, we see images and videos of Palestinians being pulled from the rubble. Some are whole but bleeding. Others are more flesh than form, bloody and dismembered. Even as I write this preamble, I think of the video I saw of the father carrying around two plastic bags filled with the pieces of his son. And I think, ruminating on these bodies and body parts, ruminating on people trapped under rock and steel, of the ties that bind us, Black Americans, to Palestine. It's not a hard comparison to make and solidarity should come easily. Our cops are trained by the IOF, and the weapons used to destroy cities overseas are made in the US of A. Though others may discredit it, Black Americans know the look of a genocide. We know what it’s like to be bombed indiscriminately, to have our loved ones be splayed in the street. We know what it is to a martyr, to be lynched in broad daylight with no one to scream for us save for ourselves. We know what is like to resist and to have that resistance demonized, for our oppressors to say, “Well, yes, we bombed your neighborhoods and poisoned your water supply and poisoned your air, and true, we kill you every chance we get, imprison your children and terrorize your streets, but have you condemned the gangs?” James Baldwin said to be Black and to be conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage. Eyes open— “woke”, if you will—we see the shape of it, how white supremacy and the lust for money drives murder after murder, killing after killing. But we see love too. We see communities coming together to heal after a lynching. We see bombed churches in the south rebuilding, reshaping around the wound. We see the men of Gaza pulling babies out of the rubble and clearing their faces, singing songs to terrified children even as their voices crack. We see people cooking, people singing, people smiling despite it all. In the 60s, they sang ‘We Shall Overcome’; I sing it today knowing that it is true, that evil is not forever, misery is not forever. I have no doubt in my heart that the Palestinian people will survive this long night. O fellow children of darkness, o fellow roaches threatened with the boot of extermination, hear me now! The thing about roaches— we’re very resilient. Be it white phosphorous or the tainted waters of Flint, we survive and we will survive, and in five years, ten years, twenty years, the empires that threaten us will be no more, and we’ll tell our children and great grand-children about what brought us to where we are. Now. Let’s go collect our bodies.
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