Ghetto Nathalie Handal

Ghetto
Nathalie Handal

Why didn’t I say: Take the leaves, the fork, the photos, take the jars, the albums, the postcards, take the doors, the windows, the floors, the ceilings, take the house, take the breaths, take every magic and empty hand, take the bad news and good news. Son, take it all. Take the grief of evenings. Take the high waters.

Take nothing.

Everything will remember us. Even the water from the jar and the world inside of it. Look at what will happen to happiness, to dream, to the spirits, the shadows, the voices, the wings. Heaven is not high enough for our hearts, this is the peak, this is the place, this is where love will—

Who separated me from my father, who stole my god, who expanded me from my heart, who told my body it wasn’t allowed to weep or love, who cuts pride to empty shame, who shames to empty denial?

When will we really rid ourselves of these ghetto-skyscrapers?
When?
When will we not have to pray only in confined spaces,
only to the left or to the right?
When will the gates not close at night?
When?

Where is the song? Where is yesterday, and the cries, and silence? Where is the world? Where are the damned? Where are our stares? Where are our yearnings? Where are our minds? Where is our fall?

Where are we?

Where?

And here we are again. Here, with the windows open and the windows shut. I don’t know what to choose the rooftop or the sky. When it’s only the sea I long for, and all the names I can’t find.

Play it again. Play it. That last tune. Play it. Am I still beautiful to you? Do you still long for me, for all the stories that fill me like every lost hill and every wave we couldn’t count? When will we know if we made it, when will we be able to say all that we thought we didn’t need to say? When will we be face to face?

What are you singing? Louder please.

Louder.

Louder—so we can march.

Because the only way out of the ghetto—is to march.

To march out of the ghetto—together.

Nathalie Handal’s most recent books include the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the bestselling bilingual collection La estrella invisible / The Invisible Star; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times says is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.

Khatleen Minerve was born and lives in Mauritius. She’s a passionate portrait photographer who started taking shots six years ago and has been working as a freelancer for the past two. On the way, she earned a Law and Management degree. She loves to enjoy a cup of tea every hour or so.