( via / me )

What to the Arab American Is Election Day? (via @fadyjoudah)

"How I am living:
▪️I am sleeping with my remaining siblings in an old dilapidated house.
▪️The house has broken windows and doors!
▪️There is no electricity, no water and even no kitchen or bathroom.
▪️There is a toilet used by four families —about 45 people!
▪️We do not have beds or even mattresses.
▪️We sleep on the ground.
▪️Each one has a very thin blanket, which started to be useless by the start of winter’s cold spells!
▪️We do not have billows!
▪️Some of my children have to carry water for a long distance and some go outdoors to look for food!

I wrote this because many people have asked how and where I am living!
⚫️We have no slippers!

The dilapidated house is the fifth place I have, along with my family, lived in since the start of the ongoing genocide!" --@abujomaagaza

"...Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, who graces our pages still today, used the term SWANA in our first issue, decades before it became popularized as a less Eurocentric term for the region..."

"Some blows in life, they’re so heavy . . . I don’t know.
Blows as if dealt by God’s own wrath, as if, ahead,
the rip of every single thing we’d ever suffered
had pooled inside our souls . . . I don’t know.

These are few, but there they are . . . They carve
dark trenches in the toughest faces, the fiercest backs.
Perhaps they’re the racks of barbarous Attilas,
or else the black heralds that Death has sent us.

They’re the steep fall of some Christ from the soul,
of the laudable faith that Fate can make foul of.
Those bloodied blows are the sounds of bread
crackling in oven doors, turning to charcoal.

As for man . . . woe is he. . . woe. He turns his gaze,
as if answering the call of a slap on the shoulder:
his expression is wild and all that he’s lived through
is settled, like penitent pools, in his eyes.

Some blows in life, they’re so heavy. . . I don’t know."

--Vallejo (tr Yvette Siegert)

Waiting for the Barbarians.