a letter —

Jolani,

Your rosary is a woman swimming towards you. She is sin — yours, and all your mens.’ The carnal fall that would you save you and relieve you of your lie.

You are not above us Jolani. You are of us, of our clay and dirt and sweat. Of the same desire, of earth and errors.

Our forgiveness is a tangled branch in the wet hair of a swimmer, you would have to swim towards her to have it, to do the delicate, sincere work of untangling it from her strands…

Our god is a river inviting you to enter. To stain your white dress, to spill the memory of who you believed yourself to be. You will lose your beard in the swim. You will forget god’s name and remember yours. You will find your man in the distance from the shore of your certainties.

Touch the wet soil Jolani. Touch it with the hands of a man who no longer believes that clean hands are permission for prayer. We are dirt. We make our prayers with the mud of our lives: the regrets, the desires unanswered, the losses. Bring yours into the river, where lies at the bottom the brown mess of all of us. Let it settle, let it merge. Enter the congregation you’ve dragged by harness. How would you know the right way to pull a crowd you’ve never entered?

Your minaret is a tree calling you to see who you’ve become. You, whose presence I read in the eyes of the children in the camps, who told me what your men had done. Perhaps the world’s amnesia has spared you. But you are not spared from me.

I remember —the boy who could no longer speak because he’d seen what no boy should ever see. The girl who couldn’t stop drawing on papers and papers what your men had done. The women who ran because their blood carried a scent that gave your men permission...

Jolani — there is a red stain on your cheek. Despising you, I kiss it.  I kiss it for Syria, so that she may spared from you. I do it to touch you back into the body you forgot you were. You are skin and hunger Jolani. You are man and wound, in your body: a stolen revolution.

Give me all your holy papers, I’ll give you the truth.

Like all the men who came before you, you took our woman by force. Your intention was not to love her, but to possess her, to make her yours. You chose to conquer her, to have her through deception and disguise.

Did it ever occur to you, you could have had her through love? That the mud of you could deliver a part of her you’ll never know with force.

But you don’t care to know her, do you?

You’ve always hated water. You prefer the dry walk of desert concrete — the delicate lie of you needs its stable ground. You understand this.

But I need the river to come towards you — I don’t trust these legs to hold me before the weight of what I’ll find.

I return it to you, this death. Your god promises balance — an eye for an eye:I give you this truth to balance my exile.

Look at me, look at Syria — conquered by the same men. In a battle to free ourselves from the same poison: from the swaying black fabric and the shadow eyes promising punishment.

Your first laws were to cover the body of a woman by the sea, to make sure she wouldn’t drag you back to your man were you to pass her. But there is much our skin offers if you can see beyond the shape. Can you?

All that you need to know is a passage written on a woman’s back, but there is never enough time to read, is there?

To hold you. To hold the weight of your head above the grass. For Syria I would do it — I would undo you through these hands. Force remembrance. Force touch. Force this swim.

There is nothing cleaner than the mud that leads you into the water. The mud that sinks your body into the earth deeper with each step. Do you remember? We are all going down. Let us soften the descent with truth.

Your last chance is this last swim, waiting for you. Your new laws haven’t arrived here yet, and there’s no one to see. I understand your desire for god. It is mine too. Perhaps in this swim you can begin to understand. Before the banned breasts of Syria under this water — you will catch a reflection of yourself, the self you were, who began a search long ago and stumbled on the wrong answer.

Jolani

Syria is not your paper. Not for the drafts of your murderous short stories. She is body and bones, water and mud. She is me, and she could be you, if you could stand to undress.

Could you?

— With truth, Syria and I

A pack of wolves had come for the sheep.

There were only two dogs to protect them. One stood in the middle of the sheep, and together they faced the pack of wolves. The other dog stood alone at the front, holding the wolves in his eyes.

Much time passed, and there was stillness.

An entire war was being fought without movement.

A woundless revolution was living its beginning and its end through the eyes.

Not a single drop of blood was shed. A gaze, steady and firm — possessing a protective love, a selfless devotion, performed the work of an army. A gaze that howled in the silence, that warned, that begged, that held its own. The stillness of a body claiming its territory without the unnecessary loss. With dignified, unmoving eyes it says, simply and without weapon: This is mine.

And the wolves turned away. No life was lost.

Told by Martina, a divine artist and gardener from Italy.