Contemporânea

I killed the sun bird.

I will never, ever, try to tear my back apart, enduring the pain with eyes wide open to the world, waiting for wings to grow from my cracks. Wind to wind.

Perhaps it was an act of resistance. I ended the bird's life, steeped in its overwhelming faith. I killed the bird. Never had a crime flown so far, so far, so far from any adjective I could ever imagine. Since there are no missing words capable of emptying the writing, leaving it as hollow as the bird's death, here fall disproportionate phrases. Bags full of air, inadequate to the moment. In a life I never knew, it would be enough to say "I killed the bird" to drain the entire universe.

The first step was to find the right bird. A bird without death or crows. A bird with feathers made of metaphors and whose footprints would leave a trail of infinite freedom. A bird that could fly much further than a tale. To find it and kill it.

At first, the voice of Fairuz singing a Palestinian poem reached my ears. Everything around me suddenly became a nightingale, her voice, the poem, and the bird. Some nightingales stop singing when they are in captivity. What if it was Palestinian? We will return, the song answered me:

“We will return: the nightingale confided me

when at the bend in the road I met him

that, there beyond, all nightingales continue

to feed on our poems.”1

I gave up on the nightingale, I could not kill the “we will return”.

I looked straight up, even though I knew they had already occupied the last skies. While waiting for a sign that wasn't a rocket, I heard the poet's voice humming: “Dear sky, where were you when our homes were being bombed?”2  The celestial ceiling was wrought, full of machinery and many matches without heads were raining down. Despite everything, I could see the angel’s wings — from dreaming so much, it flew away while dying.

Look for a hoopoe in the poem. The angel seemed to have said.

A hoopoe may be my dead bird. I fantasized about shattering its pride and tearing apart the crest erected by its identity. An identity that it never lets go of, even when the colonizer declares the hoopoe as its national bird. It and all the Palestinian branches where it perches.

In my tale, it will not fly. It will be a dead hoopoe. Its black and white body that resembles a keffiyeh will be washed with bleach. Its chest is made of honey, deceased without sweetness. However, while I translated this bird with the name hud-hud in its native language, the hoopoe that was leaping to death refused to abandon the name and the poem. “There is a hud-hud in us.”3 The verse said. There is a hoopoe in us, and I did not want to kill us, only the poem.

My grandmother is a dead poem. I never met her, but she inhabits my words, always living in the same place, curiously in the Palestinian village from which she was expelled in 1948. She visited this text of mine and chose the bird that roamed her land. The perfect bird to kill. A bird that carries Palestine in its name: ʾasfur ash-shams al-filasṭīnī, the Sun Bird of Palestine.

Kill a male, she said.

It would make more sense for my father to appear in this story of mine rather than my grandmother. He wrote a novel whose title caresses this bird and talks about it. In this part of the tale that I did not write, my father, a dead poem like my grandmother, would appear in my dreams. We would talk about his book, while he perched naked on the railing of my bed as if a bird, just like Matthew Modine in the movie Birdy. Our conversation about literature would get heated. It always did. We would not agree. I would transform myself into one of Hitchcock's birds and attack my dear father.4

Fortunately, the dominance of female figures in my writing has evoked my grandmother’s ghost for this story, avoiding horror. The spirits of the dead are extremely selfish; they choose when they appear in dreams and stories. As I wrote this sentence, my heart raced and I began to sweat. Will the dead bird visit my nightmares and my words whenever it pleases? It is one thing to be visited by a grandmother I never knew, or a father crouched naked at the bottom of the bed, but quite another by a being I killed and whose beauty surpasses freedom. I turned my fear aside, deciding to celebrate the triumph: I captured my national bird.

Since I started writing, I knew the bird I wanted to kill, I just didn't know its name: Cinnyris osea. Despite being Palestinian, its scientific name lives in a prison in Latin. It has no strong root of three consonants, nor does it offer any resistance by guttural chants or linguistic stones. An extremely Arabic bird in Latin. 

A small bird and I have two hands. No wing.

Not knowing the size of the palm of my hand, I grabbed a measuring tape. I put one end in my mouth and the other in my left hand to measure it, while it was slightly open and extended like a beak in front of my face. I confirmed that the size of the bird that never exceeds 12 cm fits in the palm of my hand. I did not analyze my life lines that have been engraved on my body since the Nakba catastrophe. I assume that a dead bird lying down would look good there.

My bird is a nectarivore, sucking the sweetness of Palestinian flowers with its black, curved, long, and equally Palestinian beak. Its extensive tongue, a paintbrush. It was an acacia. Bougainvillea. Lavender. Hibiscus. Sage. The bird sucked their colors, turning itself into metallic tones. Green. Blue. Orange. I killed my hummingbird.

The bird was nothing more than a condition for a dream of freedom. Maybe no one will notice its absence. Absence always goes unnoticed. I tightened my grip on utopia, convinced that the death of the bird would be the door out of the cage. In a world trapped in the expectation of flying, desire is killed. Hope does not feed hunger; we must roll up the sleeves of life. Do it. After the death of the bird, allegories will never, ever, make sense.

It was an ethical and moral action, without aesthetics or elegance. However, it was nothing like the pigeons crushed in the middle of the streets of Lisbon, which always bring back images of the dismembered bodies of my people. A memory that I prefer never to share with anyone. However, I confirm that I killed the bird without beauty.

Death never looks good.

I don’t know how I killed it. I won’t push my murderous fantasies into the beyond, I’ll just leave the sentence simple and clear: I killed the bird. There’s no need to fly in the imagination. The Palestinian bird never stopped singing hopes in a high-pitched voice. Nauseated, I killed the bird. It was only to free myself from its metaphor and an attempt to understand the poem: “the birds are the shadows of the fields covering the heart and the words.”5 Maybe it was itself that was killed in me.

I painted its beak white and dyed the tip of my pencil the same color. And while with my left hand I slid the screen, showing in front of me a video of a girl walking on fire, with my right hand I was plucking by the feathers of my dead bird, writing through them. I whispered in its invisible ears: even insects have wings. Never trusting and knowing that my bird is not a cockroach whose wings do not serve freedom, I plucked them.

I opened the window and threw out all my pens along with the bird's arms.

Nothing flew away.

I stretched my neck out the window and saw pleasure eye to eye: a set of feather holders lying on the floor, next to some wings. I seemed to have heard a chant or a scribble. Drifting, I drowned. Calm. The bird is dead and I no longer believe in reincarnation. There will be no more imagination in me. Relief. I raised my head and looked ahead. Not a single bird stain marred the sea or the horizon. No bird melody necessarily followed the silence. I no longer needed to know if it was the music that invented the bird's chant or if it was it who imitated the music. I finally felt free. I flew, flew, flew as if there were no walls or clouds in the sky.

I looked down before closing the window. The bird stared at me, it seemed alive. I had learned something from my colonizer: to kill until there is no more death. I decided, one day, to kill it again in another story, if I have pens again. I laid down on the bed, without shedding my regret tear by tear, since I have no more feathers. I slept well for the first time since October 7th.

In the morning, I opened the window. Like every other day, daylight stared at me. I imagined a windowsill that I don’t have. There, an egg in the nest. From it, a poem began to fly. No bird. I retracted the wings and continued writing.6