Survival in The Valley Homesick انه Homesick كانه

Rand Khatib is lost between homeland and diaspora.

Where is my home?

Is it the land, ضرلأا, my ancestors lived, loved, gave birth and died?

The home my grandparents built with their calloused hands under the sweltering سمش ?

Is it the بارت that is nourished by my ancestors’ decomposed flesh?

The question of home itches my skin. انك رفك feels like home. نيطسلف is my ancestral homeland.

And yet the souls which shepherd the town are darkened. Hurt. Hurting.

Can we blame them?

They are intergenerational victims of one للاتحإ or another.

They are victims of one institutionalised religion or another.

They are victims of state-sponsored ghetto violence, nationalistic tendencies and pervasive ideologies.

And yet so too, are they perpetrators of these things.

The cycle is never ending.

The politician who campaigned to end corruption takes bribes under the table.

The rebellious teenage girl has grown into a mother who imposes stricter rules.

There is no greater tragedy.

There is a reason the genre of our films are some variation of tragedies:

= here

= there

= the land

= sun

= occupation

= culture

= always

Tragic dramas, tragic comedies, tragic thrillers.

We are a tragic people; We are a tragedy

And yet- Australia is sterile in comparison.

There is a lack; and those who have never experienced it surely do not miss it.

A lack of ةفاقث; A lack of community;

A lack of art, history, philosophy.

In its place you will find goal-setting and productivity.

In its place you will find small talk and distance. Networking. Traffic.

Busy. امئاد busy.

In searching for connection and community you may lose yourself.

And in finding it, you will find yourself again.

It’s a cycle that makes you ill.

And the thread of a constellation hidden behind a sweet morning came when my eyes were full of last night’s dream beyond the mountains, what did I see like belonging and exile?

These sweet stars put me to death between nocturnal peaks; a corpse in liminal space.

That existence is violent like this flower here, in my grandmother’s rolling fields, rolling rolling fields ..

That survival bloomed like a gasp in the shadows of these peaks under the triple gem, under the triple gem ..

The undying have liberated me, undeserving— like an apricot bloom that asked me to find its first petal ..

I’ve stumbled on yesterday where at the foot of this mountain I was born in a cradle of stones,

I’ve died so crisply at the peak of this exile on a bed of glacial non-belonging, here I live for ever more with every gentle stream, every gentle scream I, every shade of sacred green, here, survival sounds like thunder and tastes like butter and looks like my grandmother as she counts zodiacs, she, who stretched from sunburnt earth, to become this dream I had of a thousand constellations.