An Ode to Loss

“I'm scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death… we mustn't see ourselves in their mirror, for they're prisoners of one story, as through the story had abbreviated and ossified them… Please, father -you mustn't become just one story… You're dying but you're free. Free of everything and of your story.”

How do I find the precise words to describe a moment that has just vanished? Then again, what linguistic precision can capture the impact of two-thousand-pound bombs killing and maiming with such depravity that Gazan healthcare workers must estimate the death toll by weighing human remains in plastic bags and dividing them by an average weight by age metric? Can we get the weight by age metric for a three-year-old, please? What exact words can describe the brutality of technology that turns Palestinian bodies into the earth that fills craters 30 feet deep and 15 feet wide?

Who am I, the speaker, tasked with finding such precision? Who am I in a future already past? Who am I in noncoloniality, outside the mythosymbolic of Zionism? In the now-now, I am an Arab immigrant from Lebanon. My father was Assyrian, the son of a man who, as an infant, fled genocide in Southeast Turkey for the safety of Beirut. My mother is from the South of Lebanon. So was her mother and her mother's mother. It was not the South of Lebanon, then. It was a part of Greater Syria, which Europeans thought to delineate differently in service of extending Mount Lebanon and constructing a modern Lebanon in the aftermath of WWI and the decline of the Ottoman Empire. It is the same land that twenty-four years ago was liberated from decades of illegal Israeli occupation. It is the place where Edward Said, a Palestinian, hurled a stone at an abandoned Israeli watchtower in 2000, an act which would place him within the collective moment of liberation, within a temporality that brings together the