A hybrid essay, accompanied by stills from the artist’s recent works (Kaddish, One Drop + One Drop, and Shetah Esh), considers the permutations of home and returning.
My father always says,
“You can’t build on ruins. You need a clean slate.”
We’ve had so many of those in the last hundred years. We never really managed to finish the walls.
Myriam Cohenca
In theory, in theory, I know where home is.
It used to be Jaffa. Then Safed and Haifa.
Then nowhere (and everywhere) at the same time.
It became a pink building with purple shutters. A bougainvillea so wild it spills fluorescent flowers across the terrace all year long.
It looks like home. But it isn’t.
We’ve been moving for at least three generations before me.
Home has always been moving. And whether we wanted to or not, we always came back.
But never exactly to where we came from.
And never, never to what we had.
Never to who we were, or who we had become.
What if my father had taught me Arabic?
What if we’d kept the houses in Egypt?
What if my family had been able to tell their stories?
What if they didn’t leave Palestine in the 1920s?
There’s the sea in my name.
I belong to the water, and it belongs to me.
When land is taken, water is the only thing left that can’t be owned,
no matter what they tell themselves.
Once, a kabbalist rabbi told me my obsession with the sea made sense.
He said it was my destiny.
Yam.
A few days ago, I dreamt the sea was on fire.
I don’t even wonder what would’ve happened if we hadn’t been displaced.
That story is carved too deep.
It’s not a fantasy I’m allowed to have. In no parallel universe did we stay home, I’m sure of it.
To exist in a society, or even a world, that doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of you eventually makes you an anomaly. A bug in the system.
We became the corrupted file. Too many hands. Too many rewrites.
And yet, the thing about humans is, no matter how many times you try to erase their stories, they find ways to survive.
They hide inside language.
Inside objects. Inside rituals, gestures, the body. They pass themselves on.
Somewhere in the need to survive, we became transmission.
In the refusal to disappear, we became the memory.
More like pieces of memory.
Partial. Corrupted. Silences to be deciphered. Stories that were maybe in ’44, or perhaps in ’45, I can’t tell anymore.
Lost addresses.
What would we even do with a key?
To return, you need to know where you came from. And to know where you came from, you need to know who you came from. Not just know it, acknowledge it.
And that’s terrifying.
Because it’s like discarding the old hard drive, plugging in a new one, and starting from scratch. No inherited narrative. No map. No guidance.
Zionism gave a kind of guidance. Like a mad editor, tearing apart the original story and replacing it with an instruction manual on how to be a Jew.
Pick your side. Arab or Jew. Israeli or Palestinian. Community or enemy. Us or them.
“If I am because I am I, and you are because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you.”
—Menachem Mendel de Kotzk
My identity isn’t built on flags,
or fire,
or the sound of explosions and metal.
It’s made of dates, of grapes,
of olives and pomegranates that stain,
and figs that split open,
just because the sun asked them to.
My father always says,
“You can’t build on ruins. You need a clean slate.”
We’ve had so many of those in the last hundred years. We never really managed to finish the walls.
Always a new page, a new beginning.
And always back to square one.
Except when I say square one, I mean square minus one hundred because the ruins are accumulating and we can’t keep up.
We’ll never return home. But we carry it within.
And I will keep excavating the foundations, centimeter by centimeter,
so that we can be us because we are us,
and not us because they are they.
This time, the blueprint is ours.
