MY GOD IS HUNGER
MY GOD IS SNOW
MY GOD IS NO
MY GOD IS DISILLUSIONMENT
MY GOD IS CARRION
MY GOD IS PARADISE
MY GOD IS PAMPA
MY GOD IS CHICANO
MY GOD IS EMPTINESS
MY GOD IS WOUND
MY GOD IS PAIN
MY GOD IS MY LOVE OF GOD
MI DIOS ES HAMBRE
MI DIOS ES NIEVE
MI DIOS ES NO
MI DIOS ES DESENGAÑO
MI DIOS ES CARROÑA
MI DIOS ES PARAISO
MI DIOS ES PAMPA
MI DIOS ES CHICANO
MI DIOS ES VACIO
MI DIOS ES HERIDA
MI DIOS ES DOLOR
MI DIOS ES MI AMOR DE DIO
바카라La Vida Nueva (The New Life) by Chilean poet Raúl Zurita
Written using an airplane in the sky above New York City in June 1982, Chilean poet Raúl Zurita바카라s La Vida Nueva subsequently appeared as photographs of that sky-writing in Anteparaíso in 1982.
바카라All this time I told myself we were born from war바카라but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence바카라but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.바카라
바카라Ocean Vuong, On Earth We바카라re Briefly Gorgeous
Was I a fruit that had itself pierced by violence? Was I born from war?
You have now come to believe we are born from beauty.
Like him.
You could hear the drones in the sky over the phone. You have read that eyewitnesses have said Israeli forces are using sniper drones in Gaza. In November, 10 people in a tent café were killed in a drone attack. You can바카라t form your sentences. How do you ask someone in a place like that for a story? You ask anyway. You are ashamed of sitting at your desk at home. The sky is quiet outside. You suddenly see him in your head, standing underneath a parapet of a destroyed building, holding his phone and looking upwards to see if a drone is headed towards him.
Motasem Dalloul, a journalist in Gaza, asked you for a word count and a deadline. He said he would like to tell his story.
His two sons and wife were killed in Israeli airstrikes in 2024. His house was destroyed.
바카라Don바카라t come to Gaza,바카라 he said. 바카라It is dangerous.바카라
There was a pause. More drones. Like the buzzing of bees. His voice was getting drowned.
바카라You can바카라t come to Gaza,바카라 he said. 바카라Nobody can.바카라
You know you can바카라t make it to Gaza.
There is a wall. An iron wall. You are just a journalist.
There are too many walls in this world.
There are too many wars.
You remember that last line from John Milton바카라s Sonnet 19: When I Consider How My Light is Spent: 바카라They also serve who only stand and wait.바카라
How does one give a word count to someone in a war zone? Or even a deadline.
바카라Write everything,바카라 you had said to him. 바카라Send it when you can.바카라
He sent a couple of lines. He said the reality of a Palestinian journalist is that he has to cover the deaths of his loved ones and the destruction of his homeland.
He said he would send more later.
You waited until the last day.
You kept a page in his name. It would remain blank. Awaiting, a verb. It is an active state.
Waiting has no ending.
You will wait. He can send it a century later. Your hope is sharper than a machete, more piercing than a bullet.
Dalloul lost his two young sons and wife in 2024 in the war in Gaza that has unleashed images of violence and loss and brutality and seems endless. He lost nephews and nieces and brothers and sisters and uncle and his home.
You can바카라t write on his behalf.
***
You first saw Valentina Iribagiza, a survivor of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, almost two decades ago at your university. You remember that she was wearing a pink dress that afternoon.
She was at Syracuse University to tell her story. She was only 13 years old when the genocide where more than 800,000 Tutsis were killed by the Hutu majority in Rwanda happened. A Tutsi girl, she had hidden herself among the corpses of her family and neighbours in a church in her village for days. Her machete wounds had been infected and she had a fractured skull.
You remember a particular scene from the 1997 film, Valentina바카라s Nightmare: A Journey into the Rwandan Genocide, by BBC reporter Fergal Keane, that you saw then. In a dark church room, a girl moves a little. She is not dead. But that바카라s not enough. There are corpses around her. Nights must have been strange in that church with the dead.
Around 20,000 civilians were massacred on April 15-16, 1994, at the Nyarubuye Roman Catholic Church in Kibungo Province, where they had taken refuge during extreme violence in Rwanda that killed more than a million people, mostly belonging to the Tutsi ethnicity, in 100 days of violence.
For days after the slaughter of her village, Valentina, the 13-year-old Tutsi girl, lay hidden among the corpses of her family and neighbours, her wounds festering with infection.
How is any reconciliation possible?
Valentina confronted those nights amongst the corpses of her people over and over again to tell the world what happened.
Violence hadn바카라t spoilt her.
She is here to live out loud.
***
Zurita wrote about the Atacama Desert. He drew lines in the sand. He wrote in the sky. He poured the sea in an old building.
You dreamed once that you were walking through the desert with him.
The poet recited these lines from his poem 1973.
바카라What matters is that
I need love and I바카라m alone. It doesn바카라t matter
that men have taken off like rats. That바카라s
life. I know a lot about it. Or at least, as
much. It had caught up with me, life, that
is.바카라
He held the pen steady in his hand like he once did in another town by the sea where you met him in 2016, where he had filled seawater in an old warehouse by the sea and written a poem for Galip Kurdi, the brother of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian toddler who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in the summer of 2015, as his family fled the war in their country. Alan바카라s body washed up on a Turkish shore.
Galip, his elder brother who was five at the time, and his mother, Rihanna, all drowned.
Zurita called his installation The Sea of Pain. At the end, you were confronted with a poem.
바카라I am not his father, but Galip Kurdi is my son,바카라 Zurita wrote in the poem.
You have walked in The Sea of Pain with Zurita.
He had held your hand then.
You haven바카라t been to Gaza or Syria or anywhere where there are continuous wars, but Dalloul and Valentina are my people.
MY GOD IS LOVE.
It was the 1991 Gulf War that heralded another era of war across the world. They had announced that the Cold War had ended, but war, like termites, returns, corrodes and erases. There was Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995, Serbia-Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan starting in 2001 and Iraq again from 2003 and then Ukraine and Palestine and Syria, again.
Africa has its own timeline that never gets punctured with peace or a pause. These places suffer from neglect and we only hear about them when they are at their extreme.
Outlook바카라s twin editions at the beginning of 2025 are about who we become when we are at war and we have almost always been at war with each other, even the oldest and the biggest democracies.
We have been spectators and consumers of war. Few have gone in and told the stories that are hard to cover and to report. Here, we have tried to listen.
Stories take a lot out of you. To listen to someone narrate the horrors is difficult. You don바카라t come out unscathed.
In these two issues, we have tried to tell the biggest story of our times. The story of wartime바카라in fragments, because all wars leave us fragmented.
(This appeared in the print as 'Song For His Disappeared Love')
