The first time I laid my pen down on paper I don’t much remember except for my mother’s gaze as it fell on the scribbled lines and the softness in her eyes as she looked up at me as if seeing me for the very first time.
To be an orphan when your mother lives, breathes still, somewhere across a continent in a land called Afghanistan, the land of your longings, holding the silence of a disappearance fills you with a definite lack of mother, a dull ache, a running thread in the labyrinth, wrapped in the cloak of an abandoned eight-year-old, searching for the motherland.
Feeling my body around me as I breathe, I summon my molecules to stay here in this present now. I am scared of the stillness, knowing the best you can do is just Be, your truest self, at any given moment. That hadn’t been enough for me. I should earn my keep for the privilege of being alive still, when so many I love are gone.
I am sorry for the cluster bombs that are being dropped on Afghanistan, the food, the transistor radios dumped on women, on children, scrambling in fields pockmarked with landmines, through hundreds of sorties, with prospects of more to come, we’re told. The face of a kinder, gentler warfare, no doubt.
I am sorry for all those souls who beamed up and out like flickering lights on September 11th, leaving in their wake the rubble, the devastation of the pain and suffering of us all hijacked and held hostage to bottom line imperatives.
September 11th is the journey back that brought me to Santa Fe over a decade ago following a stay in D.C. to attempt to deal with the losses of my family and of my country by looking at our policy towards Afghanistan. Such amazing continuity within this presidential dynasty. And we, Americans, flatter ourselves of our freedoms, like frogs unaware of the rising temperature in our aquariums.
My body is an open hand cupping the moods and inflections of my experience. My body is the sweetest cradle communicating its wishes and dreams and dis-ease. My body carries within it the wind of the outside I ingest through my breath, fanning out its medicine within me and re-emerging through the vibrations of my vocal cords as I speak. My body heals the past and seeds the future in this present Now.
What blood runs through me? Whose blood meanders through my veins subject to the syncopated pulses of the heart pump gorging and meting out the flow. The blood I have chosen to mix and transmit into the future through my son holds but one part of the story. There is an ebbing and a flowing that merges and moves within me as a liquid body. One of its vacillations is love and the other is fear.
My country’s flag flaps blessings of love in its every flutter carrying within it the multitude of the ways in which we divide ourselves. My country is the one I carry in my genes and the one I chose when I became a citizen here. My country…
On this land I have planted new seeds from the old, which sprouted and grew. On this land I gave birth to Alexi who carries within him the genetic encoding of Moslems and Jews, of Afghans and Russians – all under one heading, for him: American. I remember his five-year-old illuminated face in the dawning realization: “You mean, I’m an enemy of myself?”
My country a struggle to continue Is this my country? What have I chosen? But I think I trust… I know I trust in something bigger than national boundaries. No easy answers anywhere. Nothing to grasp at.
Just the rhythmic staccato of Hind helicopters pincers out, punctuated automatic rifles, cries of men in elation or glory, misled and misleading.
Just a hiccup, the contained sorrow of a child’s monumental grief.
And I am angry that my country has betrayed me. I am angry at myself for believing in what it promised… and the dream crumbled into dust, pulverized.
I have gleaned the possibilities in dreams of a landscape I have obscured for too long, covered up in a shroud to reduce the spectrum of motions and e-motions so that things be more manageably dulled. The social control of the editor, or the dictator… The power-over mentality that is so pervasive, I feel a black tar clot gobbing in my throat: Eat crow. Something is stuck there I can no longer swallow.
Something impatient stirs within me, like fire… like a vengeance not stopping its course, devouring what it covers, and I am totally disheveled now. Something desperate, disparate, separate. What is it?
The Los Alamos fires of last year enveloped us here, turning us into parched fishbones… The kind you can find in the Galisteo basin off the humpback rocks with petroglyphs where you can see the veins of underground streams and you witness the vanished ocean through its imprint in the sands. Is this our fate?
I am angry as hell, the fires of hell now burning my entrails. Blood Heat Raging Roiling WAAR.
My country spans the Universe. I come from a star flicker coursing through a vast, breathing darkness. My spirit solidified a while here on Earth and for as long as is fit, I will make the best of it. Cherishing what I can and bearing witness to the rest with all the love I can muster.
Home are the voices of my ancestors coursing through my genes. Those whose lineage is captured in books on genealogy. Men, mostly, reverberating from deeds of violence. History, after all, is written by the conquerors. As for the grandmothers of my ancestry, the aunts, the sisters, the daughters, a resounding silence. Just an absence, perhaps. A faint pulse, but beating still through my blood, though the pressure is low. Through my words I seek to ingest my bloodline, those ghostly voices coursing through me unspoken.
Home is the beating of the hearts of the unseen – the old, the dead, the infirm, the children- beating in unison to a collective fear that has become a habit. Home is my heart and the soles of my breathing feet resting lightly anywhere they might. Home is the hospitality of a stranger’s kindness.
Home is the heart of a terrorist who once was an orphan plucking for food through the rubble of the last invasion -Soviet, this time. Such a zealously executed plan this policy of scorched earth and booby-trapped toys for the children, of poisoned aquifers and decimated fruit trees.
The heart of a terrorist hijacking religion to connect to something bigger than himself for never having known the cradling of a mother or a human touch. A refugee of 6 or 7 taken in for religious indoctrinating, as was done here to the Native Americans in boarding schools, to dislodge them from their own mother tongue.
Home is the place of my discombobulated body in grief and anger and despair and hope, combined. Home is the land of my dreams that have seen the beauty that is yet to come.
Home is the very center of my heart, listening for the breath that is breathing us all.
No, none of this is my country. Neither Afghanistan, the land of my ancestry nor America, the land of my citizenry. I am only journeying through here and on my way home