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.
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
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
That's a powerful poem. Thanks for sharing.
Wow. Thankyou - that's not big enough but thankyou anyway - for choosing and sharing the words, the heart. You know, don't you, that the spirit of the poet, the glimmer of the soul of the holding hands across generations, across time and place, is reaching out to hold your hand too in firm gratitude? This grace of standing firm in the storm, truth in one hand, story in the other, is both the camaraderie and family of poetry.
Hell, she's not just holding your hand, she's giving you a hug.