it's about time I mentioned burkas

Good morrow, fair humans and sentient Internets,

While I was perusing through my Summer School in the Holy Land documents a few days ago, I stumbled across a couple of poetical journal entries that I wrote during the trip's early days in Syria and Jordan. Since returning, I've been pretty much obsessed with Israel, and so I've not given too much thought to our first two destinations. But upon reading these entries, I was powerfully reminded of the emotional and mental state I was in for the first eight days or so of travel, before I fell so powerfully in love with the Hashemite Kingdom that I couldn't bear to think or feel anything negative towards it or its neighbour anymore. My own words brought me back to the overwhelming discomfort I experienced when I witnessed the strange and numerous double standards of Arab Muslim culture, a discomfort that all the mental preparedness in the world could not rid me of. I felt a great deal of animosity most of the time. Now when I speak of Arab culture, I do so with a heavy dose of nostalgia and a beaming smile. (In fact, as I write this, I'm wearing an Arab kaftan.) But it would be naive and short-sighted of me to ignore my initial strong feelings, because even though they were influenced by my ignorance, they had their origins in reality and experience. So now I share with you a nice feminist musing on Syria, written the day we visited the crusader fortress Krak des Chevaliers. I hope the Syrian government doesn't read my blog...

this cavalier's crack

hides kids with elephantitis

while drive-by hair salons lurk in the shadow

of the ever-present, all-seeing, ever-phallic minaret

and don't get me started on those domes, my brothers,

that float atop your halls of prayer

serene in pastoral green

while you disguise the real ones behind reams of cloth

in an attempt to stifle their owners

with the necessities of meticulous propriety

if you really wish to own them

to sport their bits as well as yours on your edifice of patriarchy

in a proud display of biological divisiveness

consider the implications of your real estate desires

since there's no such category as trannie adjacent

you scholars of man and God

who rage your voices to the heavens

(whether or not the heavens listen)

you know nothing of woman, your constant listener

hide her eyes behind a veil

and her thoughts-

which are wont

to edify your unfinished polemic

of a life-

will be veiled from you

I'm beginning to understand your disaster

Sitting in the Ambrose library today, I felt my emotional state slip back to where it idled during my years as a university student. It struck me that my defining characteristic was jealousy, and that that jealousy usually sprang from that which I had no power to know: relationships I couldn't categorize, personal histories I couldn't read, those things left unsaid that tantalized me with their endless unrealized possibilities... I had just been reading essays on the formation of Israel, the first Arab-Israeli war, propagandistic early Israeli history, and the class struggles between Ashkenazim and Sephardim/Mizrahim, and everything synthesized under the green glow of my experientially remembered consuming jealousy. This came to me, and since I've been such a delinquent in my blogging of late (big surprise), I decided to share it with you, my dear Internet and friends.

Folklore is tenderizing my brain

with the incessancy of envy

Eretz

you are and have ever been

a beautiful, mysterious woman

the Levantine Helen of Troy-

and imperishable

The possessive man is consumed

obsessed

driven mad when he considers

who had you first

and so your twin lovers

your conqueror, your conquered

rally armies in the night

in the name of monopoly

since

first love is the only poetic choice, after all

I have been cognizant of their struggles

illuminated the points

where their arguments from entitlement fell apart

I was your dispassionate reporter

but now I feel it

feel the pull

as green as Jezreel

I wrestle with Iago and feel myself renamed

as

Israel the primeval wrestler

beckons to me from shared identity

and I insinuate myself

into the split

personalities of your sinful

suitors

my jealousy brings clarity

You are the righteous temptress

the siren song that pulls

these thousand ships

from every direction

to a shared shipwreck

at the altar of paradise