In the summer of 1983, the summer after the War of Peace for Galilee in which the PLO was expelled from Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinian refugees took place in the Beirut camps of Sabra and Shatila, I was teaching in a kibbutz high school in northern Israel and paid a visit to an equivalent Palestinian school on the West Bank. Our courses in Math and Science were hardly any different from theirs. General Geography was identical, but local geography required local maps, and it was fascinating to see how much propaganda could be put into a map, on both sides of the ideological border. History was more obviously propaganda, while Language prioritised English in both camps, but switched the priority of Arabic and Hebrew. At one stage they took me to see their primary and nursery schools, and it was the assembly in the latter that finally drove me into poetry: the flag-waving and the anthem-singing and the expressions of disdain. Those malleable minds were not yet five years old, and already destined by training to be another generation of hatred - just like the nursery school kids back in Nahariya. Had circumstances been different, I could have written the same poem in Soweto or Johannesburg in 1978, and could write it today in Isfahan, in Lyon, in Tripoli, in Baltimore, in Liverpool, in Melbourne, almost anywhere in Africa or across the Middle East, including, sadly, still, in Palestine and Israel.
Nursery School
On
the wall a geography of bones
teaches
of mother earth and father land,
its
body prostrate, supine, an effigy
of
some dead patriarch or ancient hero
mummified
in time, embalmed in history,
preserved
relic of our shared identity.
The
tongue is silent that once spoke the roots
of
words we speak; the fleshless corpse is naked
that
once dressed as we still dress,
and
dreamed, and grew embittered
with
the self-same disappointments. This body
(its
wrist-tag bearing the wrong name)
a
rib-cage of grids and contours;
eyes
of lakes; breasts of hills;
limbs
and members severed by the surgery of war;
the
deep declension of the pelvis meaning valley;
the
splayed fingers surrendering a tattered flag,
the
mute lips on which an anthem died,
and
there (say nothing, pretend not to have seen,
leave
unexplained, except rhetorically,
in
metaphor) the love bite, the mons pubis,
the
future generations lying impotent between.
In
the barren fields beyond the school -
land
being once again reclaimed, reconquered -
the
cactuses are flowering,
whole
tracts of desert bloom and blossom
under
the falling manna of a night’s dull rain.
Dry
grass turns green as mould,
swamp
and river deepen into drowning pools:
life
and death eternally recycled,
the
one into the other, and then back again.
Here,
we look at earth and see its history,
growing
from the soil upwards and outwards:
bone
of tree, flesh of flower,
(human
degeneration, whether into corpse or killer)
the
great necropoloi, the tombstone cities we bedeck
with
flowers and inscriptions of ancestor-worship;
and
the new cities, rising out of bog or ruin,
plaster
white as calcified bones,
clay
brown as coagulated blood or poisoned liver,
growing
death out of a corpse of land,
grafting
history upon history, layer by layer
like
living archaeological remains -
but
the nursery children are clamouring for games.
In
school they teach us how to love selectively,
not
for who we are,
but
for which side we are on,
not
for good unless “our” good,
nor
evil unless “their” evil,
not
for human,
but
for race, class, nation, colour, gender,
learning
love by learning who to hate.
Thus
the map of our common greed and selfishness,
our
flag, our anthem, our tribe, our party,
our
collective alibi for xenophobia,
our
shared impunity in justifying cruelty,
our
connubial blanket of barbed wire,
our
walls, our guards, our laws, our customs -
walls
that keep us in and keep you out.
There
are, of course, atrocities on both sides,
breaches
of the civilised codes of killing,
the
humanitarian norms of genocide in war,
the
same rhetoric used to praise or to condemn.
There
are, on both sides, broken bones, exploding
bullets
- but this, this is the worst atrocity:
children
re-assembling matchstick flags,
designing
egg-box parliaments,
learning
by heart the nobility of the cause,
reciting
by rote the names of kings and martyrs,
creating
their Blue Peter liturgies of heroines
and
heroes, singing the anthem, saluting the flag,
in
all their four-year innocence.
This,
this is the worst atrocity,
this
process of indoctrination,
this
teaching of conflict, antagonism, hate,
this
idealism of the moderate middle-classes,
this
preaching of the moral libertarians,
this
all-justifying dream of peace, equality,
harmony,
democracy – teachers, nurses, parents
massaging
the unset foetal jelly
of
cerebral muscle, softening it up,
loosening
its sphincters, each thumbpress
bearing
down upon the nerve of inhumanity,
not
to heal, nor soothe, as masseuses do,
but
stretching the brain upon the rack of ideology
until
it is remoulded in the image of its own
destruction,
and growing to maturity it bears
forever
the
scar-tissue of imparted love-through-hate
that
dribbles from its lips like mother’s milk
all
in the name of truth and right and good.
This,
this is the worst atrocity.
Barren
fields will grow again, and die, and be reborn.
Corpses
will rot till flowers bloom in them.
Desert
will turn to bog and bog to desert.
Eternity
will tussle in the arms of death
and
give birth to eternity.
All
that is nothing - merely nothing.
But
this, this is the terrible something,
far
worse than broken bones, or ropes, or bombs,
this
disfiguring of a child’s heart and mind,
this
breaking of a child’s humanity,
this,
this process of indoctrination,
this
is the ultimate atrocity,
perpetrated
by each side
against
itself.
"Nursery School" is published in "Welcome To My World, Selected Poems 1973-2013", The Argaman Press. Click here to purchase the book.
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