Apolitical Memory #1
After spending the night at my cousin’s house in Israel¹, her grandmother makes us toast smeared with melted cheese and ketchup. They all drink a sugar-packed iced tea which I adore and smoke cigarettes without pause which I do not.² We are on the couch watching spongebob, which at home my parents adore as much as I do, we all watch it together in the evening, my father can do all the voices. Only here it is called “bopspog” which is amazingly funny. The silliness of “spongebob” is glossed over by repeated use like a brand, but “bobspog” is fresh and glistening with absurd hysteria. I am licking ketchup from the corners of my mouth and making a list of everyone back home who I will tell about bobspog and shivering a little in the air conditioning which rages on always with a fury, battling against the desert air.
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¹ Monopoly board in Hebrew horrible blur of newfound illiteracy dissolved into shrieking mad laughter joyous this fresh sort of vulnerability which somehow breaks open the seal between blushing stranger-cousins melting into family
² For months I inhaled the scent of my stuffed frog bubuluc who came along on the trip terrified he had absorbed irrevocably the smell of smoke, not considering he was first gifted to me by cousin Tanya (henna-orange hair, ceramic trolls), who refused to visit us in America because she could not tolerate all that time in a plane without a cigarette), I was too small and naive to consider his roots.
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Apolitical Memory #2
In Israel, I watched a mouse in a pet store give birth.³ I drifted in the oily Dead Sea till my skin burned and dodged monstrous jellyfish in the Mediterranean and tousled in the public pool. In Israel, I pronounced “Israel” the wrong way⁴ and was told by my mother that this was the way Israel was spoken by its enemies. I had not realized that we had flown so many hours to a place with enemies. In Israel I rode a bike that was too big for me and picked lemons from a tree on the street.
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³ The largest thing in the world I’d ever seen divide itself up like that, surpassed only years later by the two kittens born on my winter coat, one dead and one living, both blue-grey, unseeing things that left permanent patches of browning blood across my yellow jacket.
⁴ I could not, if I wished to, tell you how I’d said it, only that it was incorrect.
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Apolitical Memory #3
In Israel my cousin who I loved exuberantly for one week wrote my name in Hebrew on a napkin in a restaurant which I kept with me for a while until I did not.⁵ We did not speak a word after the plane grazed the American ground and I hardly thought about her until much later when I was thinking about those things, when I saw the picture in the olive green uniform, dark glossy hair and olive skin⁶ and the comment “you Israel girls are hot in your uniforms” from some guy in Mammoth, Arizona. My mother brought the picture to my attention after I’d already seen it and I tensed and hardened because this was a branch of a subject that had by now become one of the tightest knots between us. I said What do you want from me? Am I supposed to be happy about this? Like you would be happy if I told you I was going to join the military, to go blow people up in the Middle East and pose for pictures in camouflage? ⁷
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⁵ Although it is entirely possible that it exists still in the stacks and piles of detritus in my old bedroom, swollen trash and precious discards always on the cusp of bursting, it is equally possible that the matter and energy of that ink stained napkin is somewhere more obscure yet.
⁶ At the time it had seemed as though we’d swapped bodies from the time we had met, she’d lost her roundness and given it to me, none of which mattered except to the extent that it did, its mattering came at us both, probably, from all angles, oozing and zipping and percolating through the air we breathed.
⁷ Once I told my father of a rumor that we were going to have an army recruiter on my college campus and he blanched, made me promise not to say a word to them. I laughed at the notion that there was any chance at all of my being persuaded to join the army, I was neither ideologically inclined nor materially desperate enough to do such a thing, not to mention my defective mind and wholly unathletic body but he only shook his head. “Those people have their ways.”
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Apolitical Memory #4
A few weeks before leaving for college, that summer I felt uncontainably large, high on ignorance of my own ill-preparedness for the rest of my life.⁸ My mother made vague, airy comments about how important it was that I stay true to myself when I went away. She’d been reading about some of these liberal arts colleges and their support for BDS. I barely knew what she was saying, probably the acronym made me think of BDSM, which, frankly, I’d had far more thoughts about at this point than I had about divestments and sanctions and Israeli war crimes. I did not ask her to elaborate, I chewed on a silence of the same tone as the one back when I was small and she’d spoken of Israel’s enemies. Our enemies, effectively. And then I went away and a lot of things happened, one of which being that I fell madly in love with a group of older students who were more interesting to me than anyone else⁹, and I followed them around everywhere trying to soak up the essence of who they were until I followed them to a screening of a film called 5 Cameras, on the couch in the common room where we had our best parties, the carpet still smelling of spilled wine, watching a Palestinian farmer trying to film his son growing up and filming in addition all of the breakings—breakings of cameras and olive groves and houses and bodies and spirits. And I cannot honestly tell you whether my thoughts that night were anything like “is that what she’s doing now?” My cousin, beaming in her olive green suit. If I did not think it then I put the pieces together soon enough.
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⁸ High, also on whatever drugs I managed to get my hands on (I knew nothing, I’d show up in the park and ask a boy I’d seen selling the day before what sort of pills he had and how many of them I could get for $5).
⁹I loved them for their intellect and wild articulations and political convictions and raucous, reckless capacity for fun.
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Apolitical Memory #5
At six years old I marched with my mother and father against the war in Iraq, always with a sense of being ill at ease because I believed vaguely at the time that the idea of a march was to reach the finish line where the enemy awaited, ready for combat, that if we kept marching long enough we would run into George W. Bush or whoever it was we were marching against and then the real struggle would begin.¹⁰ It would later grow to seem irreconcilable to me, my mother’s condemnation of our country’s brutality and her defense of Israel’s. She told me once that this was a matter of blood, a word which fuzzed at the edges for me. My cousin wasn’t blood, she was a person. A person with whom I shared some DNA, loved for a week and then never spoke to again. Blood was the stuff from inside of the bony mother cat in Vermont that never came off of the yellow coat, which my mother stubbornly continued to wear, despite my protests that wearing clothing stained with placenta was simply too far beyond the pale. Blood is the stuff that moves with speedy efficiency through plastic tubes during the tests I undergo monthly since I’ve started taking a drug called Lithium, which relaxes my mind and muffles my own fixations with blood, on tearing the packaging of myself apart and bringing it out of me. Blood as my mother speaks of it is not meaningless to me, but it seems impossible that there could be enough of it to flood over 50+ years of occupation and all that it entails. Blood, like anything else, has its limits.
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¹⁰ It never happened, we always went home too early to my relief; home where I could play my computer games and read my books with only a vague wringing of borderline comprehensible chants about dead children and bombs resonating in my ears.
