Apologies to All the People in Lebanon

Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.

For the month of August I’ll be participating in The Sealey Challenge and attempting to read a book of poetry every day (or at least a poem or two), and every day I’ll be sharing a poem with you. If poetry isn’t your thing, a month isn’t too long a time, I promise. But if it is, I hope this series affords you an opportunity to discover some new favourites or revisit some old ones.

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The 17th of August’s offering is ‘Apologies to All the People in Lebanon’ by June Jordan (1936-2002), which was first published in her 1985 collection, Living Room and republished in Lyrical Campaigns: Selected. Poems (Virago Press, 1989).

Apologies to All the People in Lebanon
Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children
who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.

I didn't know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn't true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of. mankind isn't that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children

But I didn't know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs
They called       your apartments and gardens       guerilla
strongholds
They called       the screaming devastation
that they created       the rubble
Then they told you to leave, didn't they?

Didn't you read the leaflets they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn't you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?

I didn't know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family

But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad

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It all sounds so familiar, doesn’t it? So unbearably repetitive is the nature of this brutality and destruction and yet here we are. Still.

This is the second June Jordan poem I’ve shared this month and I don’t think it’s hard to see why. Her support of the Palestinian people and her anti-Zionist stance was well-established right up until her death in 2002, and so I think of all the people who have stood firm, whose words and actions live on long after they do, who didn’t live to see a free Palestine but who made it their business to do what they could while they could.

All empires must fall and freedom for the Palestinian people is coming. Until then, our job really is quite simple:

See you on day eighteen,

Tasnim