The Palestinian Dies
Field Notes on Terror & Beginnings
by George Abraham
In the image — any image — the Palestinian is dead. In the background, a field of rocks that once were homes, field of fallen flowers. Beyond the image, the Palestinian dies. And elsewhere, dies again. The Palestinian is witnessed dead. That witnessing, a kind of death. Of someone's child, of someone's sibling, of someone's someone. The ownership of the Palestinian body, and after-image of, as another kind of death. The circulation of the image as anti anti/ownership. Ours, in some disembodied landsense which, presuming we are living, can't be ours. The ours implicated as a kind of death. The anti/ownership constituted by our living as another death. The circulation of the image as a motion with a void at its center, beating. Void which says look into me, and festers in the un-looking. Void which is opposite of image, after of sounds's after. Not dis/embodied but the / between. The Palestinian dies in, and against, the image, any image. The Palestinian dies in the image, stone in hand. The Palestinian dies in the image, roof ablaze. The Palestinian dies in the landscape's impossible green. The Palestinian dies in, and as, rubble. In the image, a politics of verticality. Beneath settler's acid. Beneath settler's rain. Any image. The Palestinian dies on screen. The smartphone powered by dying acid. In the background of an image, a teenager, 3-lettered badge on their chest, machine gun pitched towards god, smiles into the sun, setting over the horizon of a Palestinian corpse. In the image, a reddening sea. The american, believing we are all fragments of fragments of the same dismembered starlight, rubs their face with our dead & oceanic, to perform an image they name Birthright. A european digs and. A country. The west shares the image. After which, there is no after. It is 2022. Westward, the image is shared. The image, mistaken for an imperial siege on Ukraine, draws outrage beyond nation. The image is a Palestinian image, clarifies the Associated Press. The image dies again in dis-recognition. The living Palestinians die in the anti-mirror of the image's rot cycle. The Palestinians die in their living. The failure of these visual archives as a kind of death. Eye of camera, I of state. Death by which the west sanitizes our deaths with their empathy. Digestible until desensitized. Owned, dis-imagined, eventually. The border becween I and arch(i)ve as a line drawn in terror. The void at the center of the image's circulation, calling my every name. To stand at the event horizon of terror itself, and say my gazing, because of my living, is not enough. To call it razing. To move beyond w(h)it(e)ness of space itself, so that we may search for the return of our selves amidst the chaos of fallen stars. To name my spiraling origin an america of. To know what I'm searching for will require, of my body, of the many selves beyond it, an unknowable number of uncountable deaths.
from the journal POETRY LONDON
