Symbol of Hope, by Sliman Mansour
Yahia Lababidi presents the Introduction to his new book of poetry, Palestine Wail, together with a poem from the book
INTRODUCTION: Wounds as Peepholes
“Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.” That line, from a movie adaption of Damage by Josephine Hart, affected me deeply the first time I heard it as a young man. In context, it was delivered as a perverse badge of courage. It also gives voice, of course, to a cautionary tale or warning. When our hearts break, do they break open or do they harden?
We can live like a hardened scab, impervious to the mighty winds that shake the mutilated world around us, or become more like an open wound, sensitive to the slightest breeze of suffering or injustice we encounter. I believe most of us try both ways and oscillate between one and the other. “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.” This aphorism was coined by Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, a visionary who recognized, profoundly, that our wounds and those of the world are ultimately one. What that suggests is that our larger allegiances must be to one another, past the narrow heartedness of loyalty to any particular nation-state. After all, as the big-thinking and generously spirited Einstein put it, nationalism is finally “an infantile disease. . .the measles of humankind.”
Ultimately, daring to care about the pain of others is not an option, but a shrewd form of self-preservation. For as Martin Luther King, Jr., reminds us, “an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” How it is, then, that we are told never to forget 9/11 and the nearly 3,000 innocent lives taken, and yet in the same breath we never remember the unjust “war” exacted in retribution and the hundreds of thousands Iraqi civilian lives killed in the process? If we can agree that all human life is sacred, we must insist that all murder is unholy. Like American soldier-poet Brian Turner tells us in his devastating report from Iraq, Here, Bullet: “it should break your heart to kill. . . nightmare you.”
If we do choose to turn our back to the wailing of our mutilated world, and carry on amusing ourselves to death, violence like a karmic serpent will wind its way to our doorstep. If we wonder, cynically, What is Aleppo, Palestine or Ukraine and why should we care?” how can we avoid finding ourselves confronted with gun violence in our schools? Or police brutality in our communities and the unhealed horrors of race relations in America? Or the unstoppable plaintive cry as old as the creation of a nation of American Indians at Standing Rock? Or physically and psychologically damaged war vets who, we tell ourselves “fought for our freedom”? Or the problems of homelessness and uprootedness? Or the growing numbers of refugees seeking—like our ancestors, wherever they came from—peace and freedom? Or terrorists of all sorts who have taken the shape of our shadows? What are these but the unsettling side-effects of our pandemic of indifference?
Not in Our Name!
If all this does not wake the sleepwalker, they are confronted with another type of violence: the eruption of hateful reactionary politics at the voting booths in the US and across Europe, driven by leaders without vision or integrity who don’t reflect our nobler longings and disregard the better angels of our nature. If we don’t speak in unison and declare: Not in our name, we will find ourselves cutting off our nose to spite our face, shooting ourselves in one foot and chewing on the other…while waiting for the world to change. But here’s the truth: we can’t bury pain and not expect it to grow roots. What we can do is try to attend, tenderly, to its bittersweet fruits.
I learned this lesson and it led me to become an artist—just as I was becoming an adult. “The creative adult is the child who has survived,” as Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us. That wisdom encouraged me to understand my personal pain as a gift. As a result, I’ve come to see myself as having been lavishly gifted with pain, as thick and rich as oil paint. By pushing that pain round the page, I’ve learned to make art. Over time, I’ve also come to be fascinated by moral or spiritual wounds (beyond merely being a student of my own condition) and how best to put them to use for the betterment of those suffering in this world.
What if we were to view our wounds as peepholes through which to view the world and open us up to the wounds of others—and our planet—as an extension of our larger body? These words by Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” became my own when he called us to “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
Long before him, another virtuoso of suffering, another Global Citizen, Sufi mystic Rumi, voiced this timeless insight: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” If the wound is where the light enters us, then how can we keep our wounds clean? One way is to recognize that we are all wounded—and wounding. And to remember that exceptionalism is a dangerous nonsense that enables us to inflict pain on others, knowingly and unknowingly. If this is so, we may try to forgive damaged people (including ourselves) since they can hardly imagine the pain they inflict on others.
Another human perversion comes to mind when we see how bullies seek to the play the role of victims. And I look at the dangerous folly of the Middle East, and I look at the self-defeating arrogance and self-congratulatory ignorance of the United States, and what I see is this: the same gaping world-wound, bleeding because it is not being compassionately tended to. We need a different way than this, one rooted in a deeper wisdom that enables us to begin to connect with one another at the place of our wounds and heal, together. As the American psychiatrist Morgan Scott Peck put it,
How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others . . . But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.
Even if we cannot always say that we live to forgive, we must begin to learn what it means to forgive to live. Because, as that Arab-American bridge-builder named Gibran reminds us: “Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?”
This collection offers an answer to that haunting question. The voice of these poems moves across the long and pained arc from bursts of anguish, anger, and despair towards resilient hope. From noisy political entanglement towards a quieter spiritual surrender—in recognition of the inescapable truth that we are One and suffer when we forget this. For the future we all long for is far more than mere cessation of violence (though surely this, is a needed first step). It has to do with becoming those who commit themselves, “in the midst of darkness / and ugliness” to be among the ones who “hungered / for light and beauty.”
In the poems that follow, I wonder how it is that we readily accept that we are governed by physical laws like gravity, yet believe that we can turn our backs on age-old spiritual laws like Love, Compassion, Forgiveness, Mercy, Trust, Hope without paying a high and deadly price. What if we were to consider that each time we betray the truths of our conscience, each time we ignore or dismiss the wounds that others bear, we strangle an angel? And what does such denial mean when it is not at all certain that we are allotted an infinite supply of winged pardons?
When the encroaching darkness proved too great and words failed to offer solace, I turned to the visual arts for consolation, such as the elegiac elegance of Palestinian painter and national treasure, Sliman Mansour. More than a few times, in the waking nightmare of these nearly unbearable times, I’ve revisited the iconic cover art by Mansour depicting a Palestinian mother surrounded by her small children in the tranquil setting of their village. The woman is gazing up with longing at the star-festooned night sky, which some children seem to be reaching out for. The painting is three-fourths glowing sky, one-fourth muted land, and hovering above the maternal figure, luminous like a moon, is a giant dove carrying an olive branch. Mansour’s serene painting is fittingly titled “Symbol of Hope,” a reminder that, even amid death, destruction and deprivation, there is Indestructible Beauty. Hope, after all, is more natural, resilient, and patient than despair, and so outlasts it.
HOPEby Yahia Lababidi
Hope’s not quite as it seems,
it’s slimmer than you’d think
and less steady on its feet.
Sometimes, it’s out of breath
can hardly see ahead
and cries itself to sleep.
It may not tell you all this
or the times it cheated death
but, if you knew it, you’d know
how Hope can keep a secret.
Palestine Wail by Yahia Lababidi is available here.
