But that’s how I know, fam. I’m special. Like, that happen and so many other things. Like this.
I still don’t know how this started or how exactly your letter got to me here. I swear, one second I’m takin my shit, then there’s this piece of paper lyin in the dookie water and I’m so sick from bein in solitary without hearin or seein or talkin to nobody that I’m like “is this for real?” and I get the letter out right before I flush, and I look at it and it’s all in these letters I ain’t never seen before, like backwards cursive. And I don’t know how you write like that, all the letters connected. Least, I think they’re letters.
If this were happening to anybody else, they’d have all these questions. But not me. I know exactly why this is happening to me. Same reason we ain’t get the whoop-dee-whoop from those Bloods. Same reason I ain’t never been shot. And you gotta know this before I eat this letter and send it to you.
I’m special. They ain’t gon kill me here. They can’t.
Quincy—
I think I know what you speak of. That feeling that you are special. That Allah has wrapped His blanket over your shoulders. I saw it once. Outside. In Gaza. It is hard to imagine Gaza City if you have not already been there. Everything is close. We live on top of each other. There is garbage in the streets and it is tough to escape the smell even if you go all the way to the sea. And when you’re young and you get to the sea, you might think you’ve found a moment of freedom, of peace. But there are Israeli ships in the distance—you learn to notice them from an early age—and there are people arrayed on the water to shoot you if you go too far out.
That happened to some fishermen I knew. The tide was receding and it had been a bad day for them. Everywhere they went, the fish fled. As quiet as they tried to be, as much as they’d tried to still themselves, to vanish and be like the air around them and the sea beneath them, they were always too clumsy. Their bodies would get in the way of their mission. So, frustrated, their boat kept moving further and further away from shore. Normally, it is an easy thing to keep track of. You don’t need the buoys, you just learn early on, first from your parents, then from your friends who disobey and are punished, until the lesson lives in your bones. But some days, if you haven’t caught the fish you need to cook to feed your family for that night and if you’ve had several days like this now that build up and cloud your mind and bring fog between your ears and behind your eyes, sometimes you forget the lessons in your bones and you drift far out and you don’t even hear the gunshot.
Your friend collapses. Their legs just fold beneath them. And a part of you is angry that they’ve fallen so gracelessly, because maybe some of your supplies have now slipped into the water and these are things that you paid very hard and dear money for that you will now never have back. And maybe you’re angry because your friend falling the way they did threatens to capsize your boat, tossing you all overboard. And the water is clean enough to swim in if you needed to, but then it would be easy for the snipers to say you and the others abandoned your boat simply to swim further out, as though that were a thing we would ever want to do.
Your friend doesn’t capsize the boat. You don’t tilt over. But you know from the way that red blossoms on their chest that they’re dead. A sniper has shot them.
But that’s not what I was talking about when I said I knew what you meant. There was one time, by a border crossing with Israel, several of us were protesting. It is often a family affair. People bring their instruments and we have signs and, because so many of us live together, we make the trip together.
We get to the beaches and there they are waiting for us. Soldiers. Some of them sit in armored personnel carriers and other huge vehicles. They have put up towers from whence they can snipe us. And soon, after a few warnings in Hebrew, they fire the first tear gas canisters at us. And the smoke, thick and white, swells towards us. The wind did not like us that morning and swept the tear gas right in our direction and soon we were all choking and crying out for milk.
It looked as though we would end our march as soon as we began. But then wind came and whisked the tear gas away. Someone had set fires nearby, or maybe the soldiers had shot at our electricity generators, setting them on fire, but large columns of black smoke seemed to rumble along the horizon on the beach. They made a sort of fence, as though this portion of beach were all that was left of Gaza.
And I look, as the tear gas clears away and a friend is pouring milk on my face and my eyes to stop the burning, and there, in the center of the fence, with smoke billowing around her, is my sister in her denim overalls. She’s with several of her friends. All of them wear keffiyeh around their necks. And in their hands are strings of beads, and they swing them as they dance the dabke.
It is a joyful thing to watch the dabke. It is danced at weddings and other joyous occasions. It is a sort of line dance, led by one person in particular who is supposed to be like a tree but with legs that stomp into the ground like roots, and arms that wave like tree branches caught in autumn wind. There’s chanting and the leader drives all of it, kicking and hopping and flaring their legs and skipping and spinning. And there is my sister, kicking and hopping and skipping and spinning, and she twirls her string of beads and leads the chanting. She is a warrior, the bravest thing I have ever seen.
Then I hear the thwip sound that rubber bullets make when they buzz by you. Sometimes they make a crackling sound when they hit rock or a thudding sound when they hit your chest or your stomach or your shoulder. But around her, all there is is thwip thwip thwip. As though she is dancing around them. As though she is dancing through them.
Do you think it ever stops? The protection? The thing that kept bullets from hitting you and that shielded her that day? Do you think a day comes when you wake up and suddenly you’re no longer protected? Do you even know it? What would it feel like?
Would it feel like going to sleep, thinking that you can control what you see and hear and think in this nightmare, and hoping that you might finally wake up somewhere familiar where you are loved, somewhere filled with the sweet smell of kanafeh, somewhere busy with the voices of your siblings and your cousins, where everyone is alive and loud and happy to see you…then waking up to see that nothing has changed?
You are still here. In this cell. Alone. So alone that the magic of this letter, which I will eat and chew up and swallow and which I will somehow pass to you, feels hollow. Morning comes when I wake up and chastise myself for having spent so much time talking to a ghost.
Please write me back.
Even if you aren’t real.
Omar—
I’m real, bro. I’m here. And whatever it is that’s going on, it’s real too. And if it ain’t, then that means we got the same dream going on at the same time, and that’s gotta be its own type of magic.
But, bro, so much of this is mental, you feel me? It’s like say I’m a ballplayer in the NBA and my pops manages me and he says I’m better than everybody. You ask him, “is your son better than Steph Curry?” and Dad’s like “he could be.” “Is your son better than LeBron?” “Well, he could be.” And you know for a fact that all those kids that play ball in college maybe 50 percent of them make it to the League, so it’s all mental. Mad people got talent and can learn skills and all that, but to get to the next level, yo? You need to be gassed up. Let me find out my dad’s gettin asked if I’m better than people and he’s like “oh man I don’t know.” Get outta here, for real? You my dad and you not gonna call me the best ballplayer that ever lived? But I hope you get what I’m tryna say.
I guess what I’m tryna say is that you gotta keep your mental straight, you feel me? Becuz sometimes when that shit gets broke you can’t put it back together.
I seen some shit the other day, they was walkin me out of my cell for my hour of rec time in the yard, and on the way out, we passed by this other cell in solitary a
nd there was a bunch of guards outside this one door and they had the door open and they were talkin all quiet and whispering and you could tell they was tryna frame someone or build a lie around whatever it was that had happened. And that’s when I seen the nigga foot like stickin out past the door. You can’t see all his body because of the way the guards are standing, but you can see some of it, and he’s lyin face-up on the floor, with his head and upper back propped up aginst something and there’s just that shiny stickiness ALL over the floor. It come back that he slit his wrists while he was in there, and you’re not supposed to be able to do that. They give you the suicide blanket for that reason, and it’s not even a blanket thing, it’s like this thing they just basically wrap you in and zip up to your neck. It’s like nylon or something and they basically trap you in it. You can’t mov for shit. And they call it a suicide blanket becuz you’re not supposed to be able to tear it open and make a noose like how you would normally do if you were gonna do yourself like that.
But I guess the guards thought that he was better. He looked like he could be about my age. I don’t know if I ever seen him around on the outside. He coulda been from any block really. But I’m glad it wasn’t me. Coulda been. He and I got the same setup. A bunk. A toilet. And a mesh window. There’s a slot they slide your food in and that’s how the roaches and all that get in to your cell and sometimes they make so much noise it gets hard to sleep. It don’t feel like you have company, tho. The Box could be fulla bugs, but you still feel alone.
Sometimes I cry and that helps. Not loud or nothin, but real quiet. You know the type where your shoulders heave and it feels like the sadness is tryna bust right outta your body. Just like that.
Dear Quincy—
I am sorry to hear about your fellow prisoner. May his soul be blessed. May Allah guide him. Suicide is sin here. But I know many who have taken their own lives, and I do not blame them.
There was a boy in our neighborhood, Mohanned. He was a writer. He was older than me; thus, we all looked up to him as an older brother. When he wrote, you could feel the despair that moved through him and see that it was the same despair that moved through the rest of us. By the time I was 7 years old, my home had been bombed by the Israelis three times. Three times our memories had been reduced to rubble. And three times we had to rebuild. For some, it was like starting from scratch. Like the whole of your life until that moment had been wiped away and was nothing more than broken stones and metal and dust. But some of us could still recover the toys we had played with or the shoes our parents had purchased for us when we were children.
Mohanned used to write and write and write. He would shut himself up in his room for entire days, just reading and writing. We all thought he was a sort of prophet and that he simply lived differently than the rest of us. He had a direct line to Allah that the rest of us could only hope one day to have. He would post his stories on Facebook, and as soon as they went online they would get hundreds of likes that would then turn to thousands of likes. We loved him. So when his mother found him in his room, no longer breathing, it was not just she who grieved. It was all of us. Then, on the heels of that grief was fear. Because he was suffering just like the rest of us. And now we knew that what took him could take us as well.
You see it sometimes in the way that we practically throw ourselves in front of their bullets. Everybody protests, no matter your age or whether you are a man or a woman. But often you will see the young boys in the buffer zone, and if you ask them, they would say that they didn’t care if they died. During the siege, we live without electricity, without running water, and without any sign that things will change. So hopelessness is logical. But we are taught to be stronger. There is always a family member or a member of someone else’s family who would feel a loss too great for you to ever want to inflict on them. And we have been suffering for over 70 years, so what is another month of this sort of life?
Even if I wanted to, there is nothing for me to do it with here. We had our blankets taken away when it was announced that several of the prisoners had begun a hunger strike. They are protesting their conditions. There is nothing in our cells to regulate the temperature. The food is crawling with insects. Occasionally, we are taken out and beaten for no reason. There is no interrogation, only the beating. And we are not given prayer mats for salat. All of this because I once threw a stone at a settler’s car.
But maybe I am safer in here than I am out there.
Still, I dream of the Rimal district and all of its leaves. It is like an oasis in this desert of misery. It is where the wealthy in Gaza congregate. It contains the Governor’s Palace and the Presidential Palace, but it also has the school for refugees, maintained by the UN. The Gaza Mall is there. But also there is coastline. Mohanned went there often to write. Also, foreigners who came to Gaza would bring books. And we would sometimes fight over them. They were portals to different worlds. And in them you could sometimes see yourself. Even though they were rarely about Arabs, and rarely about young Arab boys like me, if I squinted, I could see in the contours of their heroes something of my shoulders and my hair and my hands and feet. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine myself as the main character. And I was a hero who did not destroy things but saved them.
You are right. We are special. Because when I hear of other prisoners, I always feel as if their loneliness is bottomless. But, because I have you, that is not the case for me. We have this gift. And you give me courage.
I think I will join the hunger strike. It is an opportunity to build something. I do not see it as destroying my body. I see it as transcending it. I am preparing myself to live on a higher level of existence. I am flower petals being whisked on a breeze ever upward. Heroes take control of their destinies.
I will be a hero.
Dear Omar—
We heroes?
I like thinkin I’m a hero, but do kids like us get to be heroes? My homie got shot like 8 times over some bullshit and he ain’t stop no bullets. He still alive tho, so maybe he is. But like we just kids. We beef with other sets and stomp kids out and get stomped out and laugh and sometimes I go to Cee’s house to listen to the music he makin with Mac and them but I gotta leave the hammer in a locker cuz he don’t like guns in the studio and I can’t forget it on the way out cuz I have to cross the way to get back to Artesia and that’s Bloods over there.
There’s lots of empty houses in the hood, and when I was little, we didn’t think nothin of it. Maybe ghosts was in them, but couldn’t be nothin scarier than what was out on the streets. Still it was fun. We was havin fun. I mean, that’s Long Beach. Everybody from everywhere so really we don’t do that whole “where you from, cuh?” and all that stuff. But that’s the thing is like heroes gotta have origin stories, right? Like Superman is from Krypton, he some undocumented immigrant or whatever. And Batman’s from Gotham. Spider-Man’s from somewhere in New York or whatever. But Long Beach, do you even have history before you get to Long Beach? Our parents and grandparents, they came back from the wars way back when and it was like ownin a home was the most important thing in the world so they bought up all these houses and you get these families movin in but then the houses get foreclosed on and the government snatch them right back up and ain’t nobody livin in em no more so all you got is ghosts maybe. I don’t know why I’m so hung up on needin to know where heroes is from.
Maybe it has somethin to do with order, you know? Heroes are all about restorin order or bringing balance back to things. There’s a bad guy who’s messin everything up and the hero’s gotta get rid of the bad guy, but it’s like, what does a bad guy look like here?
Before I got put in solitary, there was a couple East Coast cats who wound up here (everybody’s from everywhere) and they was talkin about street justice. And I ain’t really know what that meant and they was talkin bout how if somebody did something wrong they’d have somethin happen to them. Everyb
ody was talkin about some kid or another who got boo-bopped by the cops and street justice meant that “aight, you goin after the kids, you gon get got” and one of them was in here and is actually servin life becuz he capped a cop who he said had killed a little black kid and gotten away with it. And it’s like, over here anybody could get it. It just happen here. Like “Oh that cop boo-bopped cuz? That’s craaaazy. Oh they robbed the bank and the little girl AND her mama got boo-bopped? That’s craaaazy.” And you just go about your day. Street justice? They talkin bout some dude from the streets puttin all they beef to the side to go down to Florida to pop George Zimmerman. Niggas in the streets got bigger things to worry about, feel me?
But I been thinkin that when I get out, I might try to learn, you know? Cuz kids out here is smart! My ex-girlfriend’s son autistic, but you give that kid a math problem? He a genius. Long division. Algebra. Three seconds, he got the whole thing figured out. And they got a Youth Program at the YMCA in Long Beach. You can learn the piano, play pool, do gymnastics stuff. Get strong and smart.
A Universe of Wishes Page 28
