By Button Poetry
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George Abraham, performing at Honey in Minneapolis.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
Counterterrorism with auto-translate
00:05
a history the First Intifada was a rain
00:09
of teeth Israeli intelligence marvel
00:13
that the beasts they’ve created and
00:14
became a celebration of bullets
00:17
this Mid East Frankenstein this rebirth
00:21
thing’s bare and dripping I once found
00:26
home in the empty between clenched jaw
00:27
lines and that was the street where my
00:30
mother grew up where sand and word flew
00:32
out of the mouth of a stranger who was
00:34
settler in this country translation what
00:37
does the immigrant call it when they
00:38
have no home to go back to once a
00:41
language failed me and I had no home to
00:43
claim to my own throats in Arabic the
00:45
word for tonsil translates the daughter
00:47
of the ears we are taught that to have a
00:49
body is to carry its lineage inside of
00:52
us and I’ve tried to make a language my
00:54
body was just my body my blood just my
00:57
blood but my tongue spat it out rejected
01:00
it like a mouthful of Arabic maybe it
01:02
was defense mechanism maybe it’s the
01:05
only way I know how to cough up blood
01:06
translation the only way I know how to
01:08
cop up history once I wrote down history
01:12
and it wasn’t a lie I didn’t create
01:14
massacre and the erasure and a white
01:16
woman called me crazy
01:18
he’s just crazy and I became crazy of
01:20
rising smoke crazy of gritted teeth
01:23
exhausts from the torch city of me
01:25
translation are you beside yourself yet
01:27
translation am i security threat enough
01:29
for this building yet in truth I was
01:32
never taught Arabic growing up
01:33
translation my father never wanted my
01:35
throat to become threat I don’t watch
01:38
the news anymore
01:39
translation I’m worried my people might
01:41
be on it it is as they say tomorrow’s
01:44
history translation hence always written
01:47
by the victors I mean to say it repeats
01:49
itself
01:50
translation have come to expect an
01:52
obvious outcome a learned helplessness I
01:55
saw a girl die on Facebook the other day
01:57
in the video autoplay translation how do
01:59
we mourn without a language to name our
02:01
dead the video repeated and repeated and
02:05
repeated and translation I am always
02:09
translating a history Israeli settler
02:14
expand
02:15
was illegal under international law
02:17
translation until it wasn’t
02:19
translation that’s not the point the
02:21
settlers were fleeing religious
02:23
persecution much like pilgrim settlers
02:24
flood here for America translation what
02:27
is colonization if not an aftermath of
02:29
hands of men searching for home and I am
02:32
the wrong land nice to beg a home of
02:34
just barely a floating thing stone who
02:38
refused to dance on water the oppressor
02:40
knows not your howl the way you splice
02:43
the air and that his freedom song video
02:47
footage Israeli soldiers shoots
02:50
child’s point-blank ten minutes later
02:53
the child’s cousin exiled with the Sun
02:56
in her hair comes punches the soldier in
02:59
the face takes history into her own
03:03
hands I still don’t know what to do with
03:07
my hands in history class
03:16
you
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
