Dear Dear Lepa--your words find me as always, in these new ways, as they did in the old ways. Yes, in the middle of the night after I wrote that entry I thought of Olivera and you and that other forest, another geography of killing, where Muslim boys and men were disappeared. You see, they cannot blind us, not one from the other, not from each other's histories, not from saying in our women's voices, we know the cruelties in our bones, we know the excesses of power, we know in our queer bodies that we can so easily loose our human face in the vision of the state, we know how a rifle slung over a young shoulder and an anthem of supremacy humming in the soldier's head can lead to never ending silences, to life butted into despair because I am young and the state tells me that my glory lies in my brutality. But the years will come and soldiers and haters will grow old and pray in their deepest parts that the new soldier takes no notice of them.
So much is broiling in my head--Rosa Luxemburg's small figure, with her hat adding an inch or two to her tilting body surrounded by all those men at the early international conferences in the first years of the 20th century, her struggle to work to have a home with her lover Jogiches, to run her home in between running the party and away from the police, how she calls him by a woman's name when she writes to him from prison so her letters will not end up confiscated by the state who will take her life, the news of the seizure of The Spirit of Humanity, a boat filled with international peace activists trying to bring hope to the people of Gaza only to be attacked and confiscated by the Israeli Occupation Forces--they embargo the sea, the land and the air above--this is called withdrawal from occupied lands--see our Women in Black site, womeninblack.org.au--the news section for ways to help and more information. And then the pending imprisonment of Ezra Nowri, a gay Israeli peace activist who tries to intercede for Palestinians living outside of Hebron whose homes are bulldozed--all the smashing, the planned cruelty, all to make life harsh and unwanted, while like here, so many Israelis live their full lives, allowed to have their natural growth as the government calls it when defending the settlements, turning their heads away from the loss of life just beyond the wall that allows them to see nothing. Such a life cannot stand, there is too much pain under it and around it--the pain of Jewish suffering in the face of state certainties that we were not human, not seeable except to eradicate and now the new history of pain created by this Israeli state that will not relent in its right to punish an occupied people. All that will be left as Nawi says, will be hate.
And yet, La Professor, Cello and I saw a baby lamb drop from its mother's withers on our way to Adelaide, the grass newly green, the lamb all wet with life blood. We saw the wide sky, always the possibilities of another way where tenderness has its own power and the body of a lover reminds one of our divine fragilities.
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