#then my father would’ve had to flee from ethnic cleansing

[impulsivedecisionsat3am]

there’s a pro-israel article in my schools fucking newsletter

[roselungs]

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

I wasn’t around when death was for free

But I was there when my maternal grandfather paid the price of cotton labourers’ sweat that made his Ottoman suit

The price of bare miles to the women of Bosnia

The price of their tears on the chests of their men before the war

The price of God’s banners

The price of the emperor’s frivolousness and long-term sickness

Balkan blood dripped on my school shirt

The teachers found vows of vengeance in my backpack, and so fabricated chapters of history

I wasn’t around when death happened by chance, on the road

But I was there when my paternal grandfather paid the price of a signature at the bottom of a page, the price of surrendering his village at the bottom of the mountain, of taking the occupier’s hands off of it, the rebel’s taking his hands off of his waist. With the move of a pen, my grandfather’s ink numbed the slope. With the folding of a paper, the mountain folded history, with a handshake, he took the valley’s hand from the tank’s muzzle.

The almond trees died in the cardiac operation rooms, the wedding horses shrouded their eyes with henna and killed themselves.

No one cleansed my ethnicity. But the mountain’s spinal cord broke. And so broke my chance to ever ascend it together, to look at Christ’s footsteps on the lake and copy them.

I’m not the miracle

I didn’t walk on water and I didn’t heal myself of your love’s ailments

But it was my heart’s water which I learned to turn into asphalt whenever I remembered you

I learned to flee the lava that dripped from the mountains of your fear

And I didn’t learn death

I wasn’t there when death was a once and for all lesson

where the memory of the rocket betrayed it and so forgot the way

The bullet that never meant to cease being a pen

The massacre that passed by the main road and fired peace

When I was walking in the back road

Picking yellow daisies and watching wars drawn in cartoons

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

Until Beirut’s war drowned my mother’s lullaby in the well

The scent of invasions emanates from the cooking oven

The commando’s voice enters Um Kulthoum’s cassette

The skulls that paved the city road, they leave the poster hanging beside the bed and lull me, tapping my soft head like a long latmiya. So I stop crying, or they stop crying in it.

My heart grows in the well like a pomegranate tree, each time a branch is broken I climb another on my way to you. All of me breaks, so I become a nest. The birds look in the water and see the laughing face of a Bosnian, I look in it and see your face.

I am the child of tubes crossbred in a medical lab

I smelled the scent of dead horses in my father’s sperm

And I retreated

I was born in the seventh month

After I was beaten by Bosnians in my mother’s womb

And I retreated

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

Until the Hebron massacre was committed on the cake of my ninth birthday. I lit the candles on the carpets of Abraham’s house. They melted there alone and no one sang upon them. The birthday gifts fall into the well, the gifts fall, vows of vengeance, in my backpack

The vows would’ve dug my grave had they any hands

The almond trees would’ve stepped on it had they a spinal cord

The mountains would’ve praised it had they any poems

The Bosnian’s tears would’ve creviced its stones had they any beaks or claws

And I would’ve come out

To learn the first lesson

That the smashed skull in the poster is my skull

And that the blood on my shirt

Is my blood

— asmaa azaizeh, tr. yasmine haj

[xuongxam]

you know what? i’m gonna say it. the simplification of the vietnam war as well as vietnam’s current government today under the left and right is frustrating and harmful. the situation of vietnam is so much more complicated than “wow look at this amazing example of communism”.  also if you’re a right winger/moderate/anti-leftist of some kind, i don’t want you interacting with this fucking post at all. this isn’t for you. american involvement in vietnam is wrong, has always been wrong. the american military’s treatment of my country has always been disgusting. the viet cong, at the very least, liberated my country from your bloodstained, sinful hands. 

america completely razed and destroyed vietnam. an american win would have created literally another genocide (as if they didn’t already commit one during the war) against basically every north vietnamese in the name of...what, your shitty capitalist, imperialist, colonialist democracy? the viet cong liberated vietnam from western imperialism and that much the left gets right.

what the left gets wrong is everything that follows. the re-education camps were actually not that great. it wasn’t just for the re-education of arvn soldiers and the bourgeoisie (many of whom did actually die of illness and overwork. we are all one vietnam? no, everyone knew we weren’t), it was to re-educate the writers and artists (nha ca, her husband, the latter of whom served over fifteen years. he is a poet) and musicians (see trinh cong son and, to some extent, pham duy. pham duy didn’t serve time in the re-education camps, but a lot of his music is actually censored in vietnam because he became a dissident) of what was south vietnam. eventually, even originally viet cong soldiers who disagreed with the corruption of the later government would be sent there too (read up on the writer duong thu huong, a viet cong soldier turned dissident after she had seen the treatment of the south vietnamese under the viet cong government). the conditions were bad. don’t compare it to shit like “at least it wasn’t a gulag” or “the americans would’ve been worse” or something. it was what it was. it wasn’t just re-education, it was forced labor for men and for women, it was a place where they were regularly sexually assaulted by the guards (read duong thu huong’s memories of a pure spring). 

people who say that the vietnamese refugees who left vietnam after only because they lost land--sure, it’s true for some, but my parents owned no land. they were poor as shit and because my mother was related to soldiers in the arvn, she wasn’t allowed to attend finish school. my father was born in a nameless fishing village that the government didn’t care for. there was an influx of economic refugees into hong kong’s refugee camps in the eighties who weren’t just fleeing from the effects of the war. there were people who have always been poor and received little help from the government, at least, less help than they were promised. the viet cong performed literal ethnic cleansing on the chinese populations in cholon, which is where we get another influx of refugees as well. not every refugee that left vietnam was a landowner and saying this is overly simple, and disrespectful.

our government today regularly jails, tortures, and beats activists for peaceful protests (see a taiwan company dumped oil around vietnamese waters, ruining the fishing industry). the police and the government are some of the most corrupt in asia. there are poor people cannot receive medical treatment without bribing doctors. i don’t understand why it is the left praises vietnam’s government all while brushing these mistreatments under the rug. is it because every western capitalist + imperialist power is just as bad if not worse? but how does that make this any better? oh right, the left loves that vietnam passed some legislature better recognizing the rights of LGBT people in the country, but what of the internet activists in jail? what about mother mushroom? she isn’t even a fucking capitalist. she’s not bourgeoisie. none of them are. they are regular citizens just want people to recognize the corruption in the government but i never hear a peep about her from anyone as mother mushroom’s going on hunger strike in an unknown jail cell and other activists are being tortured.

i love my country but every time it is used as some kind of symbol of the left or the right’s selfish messages of their ideologies (”vietnam is a communist/socialist utopia, the refugees were landowners who left and made the country better” <=> “look at how shitty vietnam’s become if only us americans had won and made it better by literally killing all the commies”) , i can’t help but feel betrayed. 

vietnam is a country that liberated itself from the west’s imperialist powers

vietnam is a country that does not love all of its people

vietnam is a country that has lost and gained so much in the past century 

vietnam is a country with so many people and so many histories that surpass simple description

vietnam is not just some fun fact to throw around when you’re promoting your ideology. regardless if you’re right or left.