I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones who
change the rocket’s course
before it lands
with their smiles.
–Hiba Abu Nada, ‘I Grant You Refuge’ (translated by Huda Fakhreddine)
*Hiba wrote this poem on October 10th, 2023. Ten days later, she was killed in an Israeli raid on her home in south Gaza.*
A few hundred of us were standing in the park at night, under a large marble arch that reached several stories up. It was early in the evening — 7pm — but already pitch black. We had all come here on a Friday night, from our jobs, from our lives, because we had seen the flyers on our phones that afternoon. In the beginning, I stood at the very edge of the crowd. Bodies were wrapped in keffiyehs, hand-knit hats, fingerless gloves. When people spoke, steam rose from their lips. People looked around, trying to find others they knew. The organizers spoke quietly into a microphone, trying to begin. When many people in the crowd couldn’t hear the speeches well, they would slow their breathing, and tilt their head forward, as if every additional millimeter of space could bring them closer to understanding. A loud few, when they couldn’t make out what was being said, would cup their lips and yell out over everyone else ‘Louder!’, or, ‘We can’t hear you!‘
People gave their speeches, though. We clapped. Quietly. Others snapped their fingers when especially resonant lines of poetry were said.
From the park we were at, one of the city’s biggest avenues begins. It goes north for several miles, 100-plus blocks until it fades into a road that skirts the river. There were miles of red and yellow lights, of thousands of people and cars stuck in traffic. Where the road began, just behind the speakers, was a thirty or forty-foot fir tree decorated in sparkly white lights. In the background were dozens of skyscrapers, with big windows and smaller trees behind the windows, most of them plastic. I looked up at them a few times. In one of the buildings was a man, pressed up and leaning against the glass, watching the arch. He was holding a drink. It was Friday night. People in the city were drinking, and dancing.
In the beginning, when the voices were quiet and uncertain still, a large group of Christmas carolers walked into the park. They began to sing songs a few hundred feet behind us, loudly.
“Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmaaaanuel,” and then
“Shall come to thee, o Issssraael.”
There would be moments, when a poem ended, where silence would stretch out across the crowd. We were standing, swaying, pondering. Sitting with the thoughts. But the carolers would still be singing.
“O Little town of bethlehem…” It was so joyous, and cheery, how they sang about Bethlehem.
“How can the world really celebrate Christmas and celebrate the birth of the prince of peace, when in the very homeland and the very place that he was born, there’s such atrocious crimes against humanity taking place and nothing is being done to stop it?” – Arraf, in Detroit.
“Yet in thy dark streets shineth, the everlasting light,
the hopes and fears, of all the years, are met in thee tonight…”
“If Christ were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble and Israeli shelling.” – Reverend Munther Isaac, Bethlehem Bible College
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones now asleep like chicks in a nest.
They don’t walk in their sleep toward dreams.
They know death lurks outside the house.
Their mothers’ tears are now doves
following them, trailing behind
every coffin.
– Hiba Abu Nada, ‘I Grant You Refuge’, (translated by Huda Fakhreddine)
Some of the people waved flags. But mostly, people stood quietly. Occasional chants would be led by the organizers: ‘Free-free-free Palestine,’ and others. The words did not always come out easily. They were words that I agreed with. Yet the words that night felt heavy, made of lead. There were other words, other things people said: stories about Refaat, lyrical lines from Palestinian poets like Hiba Abu Nada, and others. These were the opposite of metal: they were airy, light, and soft. They seemed to flow and wrap all around us.
There were poems, using Shakespeare, with the question; ‘What would Hamlet do?‘ One speaker said; ‘Something is rotten in the state of Israel‘. And there was another poem, about an old woman in Palestine whose skin is like the dark rich soil glittering in the rain, who remembers all the wars.
Cops were standing around the perimeter of the vigil. They had their arms crossed. They were smiling, laughing, talking to each other under their breaths, while under the arch hundreds of people silently felt the crushing weight of the times that we were living in. But the men in the large vests were laughing, smiling, and guarding empty statues barricaded by perimeters of metal bars.
This is the kind of thing that I will have to explain to children, and grandchildren, someday:
‘In our time, while a genocide was happening with bombs built with our taxes, cops stood around guarding statues.’
I grant the father refuge,
the little ones’ father who holds the house upright
when it tilts after the bombs.
He implores the moment of death:
“Have mercy. Spare me a little while.
For their sake, I’ve learned to love my life.
Grant them a death
as beautiful as they are.”
–Hiba Abu Nada, ‘I Grant You Refuge’, (translated by Huda Fakhreddine)
When the night was growing longer, and darker, the vigil began to slow. They ended with Refaat’s poem — the one he had written in case this happened. For a long stretch, everyone held a moment of silence. At the front of the vigil, they told us that someone had donated things in Refaat’s memory. We could go up there and grab some things for ourselves. Parts of the crowd peeled away. I shuffled forward, a few inches or so at a time. A few of us, including the person next to me, had our heads bowed as we moved forward. We stepped up to a spot under the arch, where the microphones and speakers had all been arranged. On the ground were a few framed pictures and tea candles. Refaat Alareer was smiling in the photographs. The glow from the candles washed over everyone. People’s shadows were reflected on the marble face of the arch. It looked like we were ghosts, dancing on cave walls, like it was somehow both now and twenty-five thousand years ago. The organizers laid down a dish of food — roasted vegetables, for those who wanted to eat. The air smelled like fire, and yams, and winter, and burning wax. The shadows of the flame and the light were flickering in the glass of the frames, across his smile. Surrounding the votives of candlelight were tall glass vases, with bouquets of white roses. A woman from the crowd kneeled next to the flowers, pulled a water bottle from her bag, and filled the vases until the stems of the roses were covered. One vase at a time. If we were all like that, silently filling the empty flower vases in our lives with water, then there would be no need for vigils, because there would be no more war and no more genocides.
I looked up at the tree. There was a garland and string of flags descending from the branches: the green, the red, the black, and the white, intertwined with the thousands of little bulbs.
I thought then of a moment in the novel Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti, when the main character is walking the streets not long after her father’s death. It is winter, around the holidays, and while she looks around at the Christmas lights, she thinks
… they shimmered like the souls of a million long-dead people… She walked through her neighbourhood, choked up with gratitude over all those tiny shining souls that adorned the trees and the falling-down porches. Humans knew! They remembered… Humans hadn’t lost what was most beautiful; our very small and tentative sense of the hidden, magnificent, divine… We knew so little about who we were, or what we were doing here, but this little gesture spoke so gently of our not-knowing, our hope, our sense of connection to something universally shared… We strung these symbols of them across our own houses in our knowledge of their living and dying, relieved to have them twinkling near, with us here forever.
In a pile, by the shrine, were hundreds of expo markers. It was an expo marker that Refaat Alareer had said that he would have used in a last moment of desperate defense. People were passing around the boxes of markers in a circle. I took one, pocketed it, and dispersed slowly away, away back to my life: to the subway station, and the loud trains. I got onto the car, and saw two people that I had vaguely recognized in the crowd. They sat next to me, silently. One of them pulled out a phone. On the screen was a Prime Minister from another nation. This man was leading the war. He wanted the war and the genocide to continue. In the looping video, he was sternly speaking to the camera. She was watching, intently, and I was now too. The badness was a vortex, a black hole: it sucked you into it. The whole point of its existence was that it pulled you away from everything else. It seemed to blot out all of the light in the world. But then I thought of the park, of the vigil — of the poetry and the solidarity. It was not loud. It was not backed by threats and weapons. It was quiet, but strong: stronger than the man on the phone, with his fear and despair.
I got home, later. Nothing felt right. I wanted to retreat again, turn away, and return to plain life. But then I touched my pocket and felt it there. I took out the marker, the one for Refaat. And I did all that there was to do. I stood up, unscrewed the cap, and went through the motions, letter by letter. Until there were words.
With words of sacred scripture
I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous
and the shades of cloud from the smog.
I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.
-Hiba Abu Nada, ‘I Grant You Refuge’, (translated by Huda Fakhreddine)
O little light in me, don’t die,
even if all the galaxies of the world
close in.
-Hiba Abu Nada, ‘Not Just Passing’, (translated by Huda Fakhreddine)