Do You Hear Me? What Now?
By Ibrahim Nasrallah
Translated by susan abulhawa
What now?
We tell you now, as we told you seventy-seven years ago: What now?
You slaughtered us with a bloodlust no murderer has matched
but we did not die.
So what now?
You invaded our cities and villages, our wheatfields and olive groves,
our green plains and towering mountains.
You splattered our faces with the blood of our children at every sunrise.
What now?
You made up fifty thousand new names for all of our cities and villages,
and all of our rivers, brooks, and springs,
and the valleys nestled between two mountains, between two mighty stones.
What now?
You stole our herbs and wildflowers, our blooming slopes and deep valleys.
You stripped our birds of their names,
and claimed the clothes our mothers embroidered with their hearts
and the tender gazes of their daughters and sons.
What now?
You devoured our thyme, the fruits of our vineyards, the blue of our sea.
You kidnapped our waves and stuffed them into a dim barracks that you secured with bullets under that banner of death you call your flag.
You wrote your anthem with the anguished wails of our mothers as they collected the torn flesh of their children from the rubble and the screams of the wind.
What now?
You cast us away behind every river and ocean and sea, to banish us; to beautify your savagery with our absence.
You scrawled on the walls of every massacre that we do not exist, neither here nor there, and you swallowed the clouds in our sky (but you caught neither their lightening nor their thunder).
You erected checkpoints to arrest a future meant for us, because you know the past only knows our faces.
So what now?
You crammed us into the darkness of your dungeons, so that our lives could fuel an eternity you claimed was yours alone.
You fortified your fear of our olive trees with nuclear bombs gifted to you since the first emergence of your claws.
What now?
Whenever you wished for a plane, they gave you a hundred.
Whenever you desired a tank, they granted a thousand.
Whenever you wanted a warship, they gifted you a fleet.
Whenever you awoke to shoot one of our children, they sent all you could fancy of bombs too heavy for the earth to bear.
Whenever you came upon the laughter of a little girl,
or an old man who has been here two thousand years before you,
you would remember that you were never here.
You filled your Talmud with fresh hatred,
erased the street that heard her laughter
and shattered the cane he pointed at you, saying:
“Leave this land and never show your face here again.”
So we tell you as we told you fifty-seven years ago: What now?
You hate trees.
Have you ever seen anyone hate trees more than you?
A genocide of three million trees obliterated at your hands since the dawn of the millennium.
(We will not mention our dead and wounded, for this world does not care about our martyrs.)
Who hates trees more than you?
To rip them from the earth, to set fire to their roots,
to scatter the birds from their nests,
to orphan the grass,
to build dens for hyenas on our hills,
to sharpen the fangs of our children’s nightmares,
to plant wounds between the hearts of lovers.
So we tell you, as we told you forty years ago:
What now?
The land you scorched will reap only dead fruit. What now?
Were five hundred villages not enough to erase?
Cities whose fields you churned,
whose alleys you choked with gunpowder,
whose shadows you hunted with bloodhounds,
whose graves you buried as deep as you could.
(You may kill a person, but you cannot bury his shadow.)
So what now?
All these walls you hide behind,
from Washington to London to Berlin.
All these regimes, remembering they haven’t wiped out a people somewhere on earth for some time,
hand you everything you need to destroy us—
lest the generals and theorists of ethnic cleansing
forget how exterminations are done.
But what now?
For you, all the Arabs with no trace of Arabness
the crescents stripped of Islam,
and crosses for two million Jesuses in Gaza.
All of them bow to kiss your bloodstained hands,
to smudge your fingerprints from the scenes of massacres,
and from the weapons.
Hymn singers, enchanted by:
“Glory to God in the highest. On Earth peace and goodwill among men,”
plant the glory of your cruelty on Earth,
and place war in your hands like a precious sword,
so that joy may be yours alone.
(For peace on Earth is not for us.)
So we tell you as we told you thirty years ago: What now?
Rabid dogs tear at our souls in Ramallah,
while “men” of straw imagine they have a sense of humor, and say:
“Does a victor return home on foot?”
And they laugh before the glow of their screens, mocking Gaza’s agonizing march,
as if they had forgotten—amid their barking—
that every evening, they will crawl back to their humiliation in Ramallah’s suburbs,
licking the footprints of your soldiers.
But what now?
Seven walls blocking God’s four directions.
No South here, no North, no East, no West.
Make sure the walls are higher behind which the sun rises,
so we forget it is there,
so you can be even more certain
that sunlight was created for none but you.
And walls beneath the earth,
water’s throat clogged with cement,
to crush the fingers of those who slip through the night’s darkness,
imagining freedom’s embrace and the warmth of their beloveds.
What now?
Everywhere, we are there:
from Chile to Japan,
from The Hague to Johannesburg,
in water, in desert,
in mountain and plain,
in blood and oil and rage,
in the nightmares of princes,
in the recklessness of presidents,
and in the giant fridges called homelands—
stockpiled alongside cattle of all colors, ready to be your sacrificial feast.
So we tell you, as we told you 471 days before death:
What now?
A thousand massacres, thirty wars, hundreds of thousands of dead,
twenty thousand gouged eyes,
a hundred thousand amputated limbs,
stretching to dust away this darkness,
millions of backs bent under the weight of years and wounded hearts
All this, and that, and more,
tell you now, as they have always told you:
You will not stand today.
And you will not stand tomorrow,
in the way of our return.
Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted from their land in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in the Alwehdat Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, and began his working life as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked as a journalist and a cultural Director. He has been a full-time writer since 2006, publishing 14 poetry collections and 22 novels, including his epic “Palestinian Comedy” series of 12 novels covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history. Four of his novels and a volume of poetry have been translated into English, including his novel Time of White Horses which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2009 and for the 2014 London-based Middle East Monitor Prize for the Best Novel about Palestine. Lanterns of the King of Galilee was also longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013. Three of his novels have been translated into Italian, one into Danish and one into Turkish. He is also an artist and photographer and has had four solo exhibitions of his photography. He has won eight literary prizes, among them the prestigious Sultan Owais Literary Award for Poetry in 1997. His novel Prairies of Fever was listed by The Guardian newspaper in the top 10 most important novels written about the Arab world. In 2012, he won the inaugural Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity for his literary work. His novel The Spirits of Kilimanjaro won the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel in 2016. He was awarded the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel The Second War of the Dog. In 2020 he became the first Arabic writer to be awarded the “Katara Prize” for Arabic Novels for the second time for his novel A Tank Under the Christmas Tree.
susan abulhawa is a novelist.
The poem “أتسمعني؟ وماذا بعد؟” originally appeared at Al Quds. Image: Saleh Najm and Anas Shari.