Diaspora Grief

I understand better now why the elders and the women yell curses in the faces of the invaders and refuse to evacuate their homes. 

It’s not quite bravery; it’s the nihilistic acceptance that sets in once your naïveté has been worn down (as it can be only through first hand experience), and you know you cannot change the course of a genocide with your individual isolated hope, and you know you will see atrocity after atrocity, and you know that the machine of war will march forward and keep chewing up our humanity and our life (even though this march is not inevitable nor unpreventable nor natural).

I understand better now why, generation after generation, my people return to gaze at the soil, plant seeds and nourish them as if there were no choice but to do it, and work their gardens from five AM until dusk, looking downwards all the while.

It is sustenance, but also — it is because our best peers are buried here. For the earth I inhabit and weed and water is the earth of the shelled and mined field beds halfway across the globe, the earth of the undiscovered graves in the territories not yet liberated, the earth of ongoing ecological destruction at a scale not yet documented or understood. I gaze down, pluck a weed, and tend to two years (ten years, hundreds of years) of collective grief. My ancestors watch me quietly. Their turn is over and now it’s mine. 

I understand better now the heavy chill that runs from my heart to my veins when I walk the earth at that one section of that one park three minutes away from my house, with its scent of pines, its hushed silence of a carpet of shed needles, its visual ordered array of barren tree trunks. For it is the same earth, same pines, and same forest floor of the mass graves of Izyum. I step into my nearby pines on purpose and I am transported to pay my respects to the tortured and murdered ones who were like me and have been brought up like me and spoke like me (a voice says, it should have been me). I make an altar of found pinecones and branches and nature’s miscellany. I visit the nearby trees to do this but I know that distant forest well too; the softest parts of me live there now.

I understand better now, more viscerally, that my body will return to this same earth, too. I wish to hold the body of the civilian, dead for months and discovered recently, cradle them closely and arrange their bones into a restful posture, provide the comfort that was violently torn from them in their last moments/days/months.

I wish to join them in their space and rest, this sentiment materializing in an inextinguishable daytime wish to sleep for a long time. But it isn’t my time yet, there is collective work to be tended to here, and joy to be squeezed out of the spent grain of the life of this persistent witness.