Overcoming Speechlessness by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

14. ROLLING INTO GAZA

Rolling into Gaza City I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the “rez.” To the “colored section.” In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase.

When I lived in segregated Eatonton, Georgia, I used to breathe normally only in my own neighborhood, only in the black section of town. Everywhere else was too dangerous. A friend was beaten and thrown in prison for helping a white girl, in broad daylight, fix her bicycle chain.

But even this sliver of a neighborhood, so rightly named the Gaza Strip, was not safe. It had been bombed for twenty-two days. I thought of how in the US the first and perhaps only bombing of US soil from the air prior to 9/11 was the bombing of a black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1920s. The black people who created it were considered, by white racists, too prosperous and therefore “uppity.” Everything they created was destroyed. This was followed by the charge already rampant in white American culture, that black people never tried to “better” themselves. There is ample evidence in Gaza that the Palestinians never stop trying to “better” themselves. What started as a refugee camp with tents has evolved into a city with buildings rivaling those in almost any other city in the “developing” world. There are houses, apartment buildings, schools, mosques, churches, libraries, hospitals. Driving along the streets we could see right away that many of these were in ruins. I realized I had never understood the true meaning of “rubble.” Such and such was “reduced to rubble” is a phrase we hear. It is different seeing what demolished buildings actually look like. Buildings in which people were living. Buildings from which hundreds of broken bodies have been removed. So thorough a job have the Palestinians done in removing the dead from squashed dwellings that no scent of death remains.

What this task must have been like, both physically and psychologically, staggers the mind. We pass police stations that were simply flattened, and all the young (most Palestinians are young) officers in them killed, hundreds of them. We pass ministries, bombed into fragments. We pass a hospital, bombed and gutted by fire.

If one is not safe in a hospital, when one is already sick and afraid, where is one safe? If children are not safe playing in their schoolyards, where are they safe?

Where are

The World Parents of All Children?

The World Caretakers of All the Sick?

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