Speak, Memory

To walk around with your conquerors ever present, and in your face
Forever mindful that their whims are fickle and were previously unrestrained
The mask of civility, if not servility, renders you knowingly abject
For when survival is all, the imperative is to protect your neck

But life is not static, and these things have an eventual reckoning
The arc of justice, even if delayed, affects the event horizon
But in the interim we see the mobs with their brand of injustice and pogroms
Purity tests and shibboleths, the taunts chanted, the blows bestowed with no qualms

Settler colonialism leaves its mark, the imprint might even be genetic
The bloodstains that resound from walking through crimson soaked streets
Shame will out, humans love storytelling too much to forgo living testimonies
Truth and reconciliation rendered even as inconvenient flesh. Speak, memory.

"The past is past. I've accepted it. I don't want to remember. It's just asking for trouble."

— survivor of the Snake River massacres in Indonesia interviewed in The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary about the ghosts of the Indonesian slaughter of a million so-called communists.

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

File under: memory, reconciliation, history, blood, legacy, culture, politics, observation, perception, Israel, Palestine, Indonesia, violence, outrage, justice, conqueror, colonialism, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log: May 15, 2021