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
—La 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 Zurita’s La Vida Nueva subsequently 🍃appeared as photographs of that sky-writing in Anteparaíso in 1982.
“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Was I a fruit that had itself pierced by violence? Was I born from war?
You have now come to b🌊elieve 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 can’t 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 parಞapet 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 i💟n Israeli airstrikes in 2024. 💦His house was destroyed.
“Don’t come to Gaza,” he said. “It is dangerous.”
There was a pause. More drones. Like the buzzing of bees. His voice was getting drowned💜.
“You can’t come to Gaza,” he said. “Nobody can.”
You know you can’t make it to Gaza.
T🅰here is a wall. An iron wall. You are just a journaliꦚst.
There are too many walls in this world.
There are too many wars.
You remember that last line from John Milton’s Sonnet 19: When I Consider How My Light is Spent: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
How does one give a word count to someone in a war zone? Or even a deadli🐻ne.
“Write everything,” you had said to him. “Send it whe🅰n you𝓡 can.”
He sent𒉰 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.
Yo♊u 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 mac🃏hete, more piercing than a bullet.
Dalloul lost his𒁃 two young sons and wife in 2024 in the war in Gaza that has unleashedꦯ 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 can’t 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 rememb🌼er that she was wearing a pink dress that afternoon.
She was at Syracuse U🔥niversity 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, Valentina’s 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 that’s 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 wo꧒unds 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 hap﷽pened.
Violence hadn’t spoilt her.
She is here to live out loud.
***
Z🐲urita ☂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 deserܫt with him.
The poet recited these lines from his poem 1973.
“What matters is that
I need love and I’m alone. It doesn’t matter
that men have taken off like rats. That’s
life. I know a lot about it. Or at least, as
much. It had caught up with me, life, that
is.”
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. Alan’s body washed up on a Turkish shore.
Galip, his elder brother who was five at the time, and his mother, R♎ihanna, all drowned.
Zurita called his installation The Sea of Pain. At the end, you were confronted with a poem.
“I am not his father, but Galip Kurdi is my son,” Zuꦏrita w💦rote in the poem.
You have walked in The Sea of Pain with Zurita.
He had held your hand then.
You haven’t been to Gaza or Syria or anywhere where there are continuous warsꦚ, 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 termit꧅es, 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♊ p🥀unctured with peace or a pause. These places suffer from neglect and we only hear about them when they are at their extreme.
Outlook’s 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 democra🐭cies.
We have b✅een spectators and consumers of war. Few have gone in and told the stories that are h𒈔ard to cover and to report. Here, we have tried to listen.
Stories take a lot out of you. To listen to someone narrate the horrorsꩵ is difficult. You don’t come out unscathed.
In the😼se two issu🔯es, we have tried to tell the biggest story of our times. The story of wartime…in fragments, because all wars leave us fragmented.
(This appeared in the print as 'Song For His Disappeared Love')
