Malinda Words: Let's plant words in cracks and craters

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 250th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

Rain, sun and wind, all on their own, can bring down mountains. Takes time, but can happen. Has happened. Sometimes the creatures of the world help. Birds drop a seed on dust that the wind carries to the face of a rock and has got lodged in a crack. Civilizations disappear only to reappear, perhaps in different forms.

It is the same with lands made desolate by drought. It is the same with territories whose human signatures are wiped out by razing buildings to the ground with incessant bombing and by evicting populations at gunpoint, threat of assassination or simply cutting off all sources of water, electricity, fuel, food and medicine. Armoured vehicles, jackboots and, simply, bombs can bury hope. Cities can be condemned to nothing more than a point in maps that have lost relevance and memories relegated to footnotes by the more immediate concerns of living from moment to moment.

There will be cracks. There will be craters. Someone may or may not have read some lines written by an anonymous Vietnamese poet, or indeed may or may not remember at all. Years ago, Gioconda Belli, Nicaraguan poet and revolutionary remembered:

We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders.

And today, my thoughts went to the Nicaragua of that other time and the Palestine of today when I read some quotes from a statement issued by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) on October 16, 2023 under the signature of Subcommandante Galeano, the name decided upon by the EZLN to sign off communiques following the brutal murder of Jose Luis Solis Lopez (May 2, 2014) who had selected for himself the nickname ‘Galeano.’

The EZLN, commenting on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, observed, ‘There are those who were responsible for sowing what is reaped today, and there are those who, with impunity, repeat the sowing.’

And adds:

‘[The Zapatistas] know how important it is, in the midst of destruction and death, to hear some words of encouragement. I don’t know how to explain it, but it turns out that yes, words from afar may not be able to stop a bomb, but they are as if a crack opened in the black room of death and a little light slipped in.’

Long before the world heard of Chiapas, the Zapatistas and Galeano’s ‘predecessor’ Subcommandante Marcos (who announced after Galeano died, ‘We think one of us must die so Galeano can live; so death does not take a life but a name,’ and therefore ‘assassinated’ Marcos in order to resurrect Galeano), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote, ‘Ah! If only we could with a drop of poetry or love placate the anger of the world! But that can only be done with resolute hearts.’

In the long years, decades and centuries that regeneration could take resolute hearts are necessary, but for hope and resolve to take root across desolate landscapes, it does help when drops of poetry and love seek out cracks and craters.

When there’s no water, fuel, electricity, medicine or hope, when instead there are armed ‘settlers’ who are moving among unarmed ‘enemies’ who are summarily killed, when bombs rain in the hundreds, accompanied by white phosphorous and lies, when hospitals and babies are considered legitimate targets, when there’s foot dragging if not outright refusal with regard to allowing relief to reach those condemned to a slow and horrible extermination by denial, it is absolutely uncivilised to let only a few trucks through and strut around as though applauding it makes you the greatest benefactors of all humankind. That’s like tossing a loaf of bread to an entire population the conditions of whose besieging have been exacerbated a thousand times.

What can words do, then?

I don’t know.

We can, however, urge them with caress and the softest gaze to turn into topsoil in which something green without envy can take root. Love and poetry can and must fill each and every crack, each and every crater, each and every bullet hole that pockmarked each and every wall still standing. Love and poetry can and must fertilise the rubble so hope can take root and beautiful narratives can one day be harvested.

Life never surrenders -- not as long as there is word of solidarity and empathy. We know, we know, we know — we say softly. We know, we know, we know — we moisten the words with tears. And we write and we write and we write.

22 October 2023

Let's plant words in cracks and craters

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