by Aleeha Ali –
It is said that when Hussain’s infant son Ali Asghar was pierced with an arrow bigger than his frame, his neck gushed pools of blood into Hussain’s hands. It is said that these arrows were originally used against war-elephants, rather than months-old infants. In the midst of a losing battle, cradling a tiny corpse, Hussain cried to the elements in grief: would the parched sands of Karbala take this blood, this body? The land said no, for if it took the blood of a divine innocent, it would never again bear fruit. Would the sky take Ali Asghar? The sky thundered a refusal: if it met with this blood, it would never again rain. And so Hussain walked on, the blood and body of his infant forever suspended between earth and sky, forever an echoing elegy.
The earth rejected the blood of an innocent and the sky condemned it, both in protest- it wounded them to see life extinguished in such an untimely, undignified manner. Come to me intact, said the earthworms in the grave-soil. It is not your lot to be dismembered by wild dogs, or wild men.
I will take your ashes, said the wind, but you must honour them first.
I will carry your arrows and missiles, but I would rather carry pollen, sea-salt smells and lovers’ whispers.
A baby boy shivers uncontrollably in a stark white hospital, the air around him electrified with the looming terror/memory of invasion or airstrike. He is too stunned to cry, at an age when a human can only communicate through crying. His dark eyes are open wide in shock, his body grey with rubble-dust, blood streaked, and a strip of white tape across his tiny trembling belly. He is so small that he makes my arms hurt when I see him in; I have the strange urge to coo to a photo on my phone screen. His tremble is contagious, and it reaches me as well as everyone in the comments section:
“I have a baby the same age- this broke me”
“Any updates on the baby? Is he okay?”
“All we know is that he is in South Gaza”
The distance from Karbala to Gaza is 908 km, and none at all.
What is our grief, if it isn’t collective?
We bear a strange sort of eye-witness, a digital testimony, of a highly visible and widely broadcast genocide. A genocide that has gestated for nine months[1] into a many-limbed monster, a fully-formed ghoul scratching on our collective consciousness. We birthed this immortal thing. Now we have no choice but to write it into the history books, into our tear-ducts, into our coming generations.
Nasl-kashi. That is our word for genocide. Nasl-kashi is the erasure of all the lineages that humans are connected to: biological, relational, ecological. A murder that reaches across stretches of time- backwards to attempt to erase ancestors and roots, and forward in time to limit future progeny and growth. Murders that reach horizontally to destroy webs of connection: friendships, loves, tensions, stray animals, trees, shrubs, birds, cement-walls, tent-walls.
I do not intend to recap what we all know to be truths of Gaza, heartbreaks and horrors that no words can capture, really. I might have tried if I were a poet. But for now, let us hold in our hearts every bloodied and dust-covered face, every body- or parts, every name, every absurd statistic, every headline, every story we have witnessed over the last nine months and ask: how do we live with this? How do we make sure we do not forget? How do we make space for this trauma/grief in our lives, continuously?
What is the use of 1400 years of ritualised Shi’a grief, if it cannot be mobilised for a present-day Karbala? I do not speak here simply of the Shi’a as a religious group, or a political entity. I draw instead from a spiritual and cultural legacy of South-Asian Shi’ism, syncretic and amorphous. I speak of the ritualised lament that we have perfected for over a millennium- what does Shi’a mourning and a spirit of resistance have to offer to all those in solidarity with Palestine?
Read more on the author’s blog
Aleeha Ali is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
This excerpt was republished with permission from the author.