Re: <nettime> Fwd: [thingist] The War Is Coming

[Thomas Keenan <keenan@bard.edu>]

Always good to include info like author, translator, place of
publication, date, etc:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/translation-tuesdays-by-asymptote-journal/2017/jan/10/translation-tuesday-the-war-is-coming-by-jazra-khaleed

On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 6:01 PM <sebastian@rolux.org> wrote:
>
> The War is Coming
>
> For Ghayath al-Madhoun and his million Arab poets
>
> 1.
> I decided to leave Syria the day a stray bullet passed in front of my eyes.
> That day I realized my homeland was not my homeland, my blood not my blood, and
> my freedom belonged to a freedom fighter who didn't think to ask my permission
> before he shot me: a lack of courtesy we encounter often in war time.
>
> 2.
> If they are going to kill me, better to kill me in a foreign language.
>
> 3.
> On the road from Damascus to Berlin I met an old soldier from Dara'a who
> couldn't carry his nightmares anymore. I wrapped them and put them in my
> suitcase; at the airport I paid the fine for excess baggage.
>
> 4.
> Whoever is not afraid to cross the border carries the war on his back.
>
> 5.
> Swap your best shirt for a bulletproof vest, your poems for the first chapter
> of the Koran and your house in Athens for a throne atop Mount Aigaleo so you
> can survey from on high the coming war.
>
> 6.
> This war is trite and pedestrian, filled with similes and ornate adjectives,
> its history is written in the font Comic Sans, violence so limitless the war
> doesn't know where to put it, one grave for every thousand corpses, one shadow
> for every thousand survivors, it's an indelicate war, barrels vomiting
> explosives, steel cylinders filled with accessories for washing machines and
> car parts, the death that disseminates is an earthy death, this war is
> rightfully ours because in it we have buried all our loved ones.
>
> 7.
> On the 7th of January 2014, the United Nations stopped counting Syria's dead.
> This decision certified mathematics as the science of quality, not quantity, of
> living labor, not shapes, of time, not space - in other words, mathematics is
> the science that studies the material relations among all countable objects.
>
> 8.
> By the end of 2015, according to Facebook, 311 friends of mine had died since
> the start of the war. I decided to shut down my account: death must have a
> beginning, middle, and end. I can't spend my life in its wake.
>
> 9.
> I, Ahmed, son of Aisha, although nothing more than a humble migrant, wish to
> apologize on behalf of the Syrians to Greek men and women for filling their
> televisions with our deaths as they eat their dinners and wait for their
> favorite shows, I wish to apologize to the municipal authorities for leaving
> our trash on their beaches and polluting their shores with tons of plastic, we
> are uncivilized and we have no environmental awareness, I wish to apologize to
> the hotel owners and tour operators for damaging the island tourist industry, I
> wish to apologize for shattering the stereotype of the miserable migrant with
> our mobile phones and clean clothes, I wish to apologize to the coast guard who
> have the thankless task of sinking our boats, to the police for standing in
> disorderly lines, to the bus drivers who have to wear surgical masks to protect
> themselves from the diseases we carry, I also wish to make a most humble
> apology to Greek society for exceeding the capacity of their detention camps
> and for sleeping in their squares and parks - finally, I wish to apologize to
> the Greek government who had to request additional funds from the European
> Union in order to pay the purveyors who stock the detention camps, as well as
> the bus drivers, the police, the coast guard, the tour operators, the hotel
> owners, the municipal authorities, and the television stations.
>
> 10.
> "Don't worry," said the bullet, "I'll go in and out." I explained to her that I
> couldn't allow it since when she left she was bound to take some of my memories
> - like the face of the girl I loved in the fifth grade, the voice of the imam
> the first time my father took me to pray, the smell of the freshly baked bread
> in my grandmother's house, the fingers of my teacher as she taught me to write
> the word الحرب and Van Basten's final goal in the Euro of '88.
>
> 11.
> It's well known that no organization can buy arms on the black market without
> American authorization. This is one of the reasons I never managed to
> understand the difference between enlightenment and genocide.
>
> 12.
> If you don't want to be canon fodder, if you don't want the war to catch you
> with your pants down, put on that thinking cap, double down the class struggle,
> get organized, triple down the class struggle, fight, fill your pockets with
> rocks, stick to your guns.
> Out with the Left!
> Bring back the Spartacists!
> Out with the NGO's!
> Bring back Garibaldi's brigades!
> Out with the Humanists!
> Bring back the Italian Autonomists!
> The slaughter is about to begin.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> thingist mailing list
> thingist@mailman.thing.net
> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/thingist
>
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: