Massacre

by Isra Abdalla

etymologically the term massacre finds its roots in what defines a butchery in french mostly it is about the physicality of a body that is dismembered which is to say that if you have been massacred your body has undergone a stripping down beyond death if you have been massacred your body will not be laid to rest if you have been massacred your body has undergone the violence of being pulled from your mother but it will be dissected in its end if you have been massacred your body is no longer a body but a vessel & the bodies of my people are dismembered their bodies pulled apart in a slaughter that turns them to particles to bloodied soil i think about the moments in which my forehead touches the soil & i think about prayer i think about bodies being killed & killed & killed & killed & killed & so i think about how in islam sujood or prostration is performed on the forehead the nose your two hands your two knees & two sets of toes & it is said that you are the closest to God when you are on these seven points & so i think about how the bruise on my baba’s forehead is only darkening & so i wonder what to make of digging dismembered bodies out of the rubble because it is certainly not a poetry it is just these seven sites of worship scattered on the strikingly fertile soil of sudan & i wonder what to make of holding the flesh of a hand that is untethered but still warm from where God has shaped each finger where the forehead meets the earth in a plea for mercy & the flesh of your body might be used as fertilizer for a country that was ripped from your baba’s hands & his baba’s hands & his baba’s hands & i think about a cousin’s body mangled with my mother’s relative’s body & really i am ashamed to say that i am not sure where each body begins & the other ends or if it ends only that they bleed & bleed & bleed