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Symbol of indigeniety
Contributed by Satchel Forrester

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

We gratefully acknowledge that this seder, where we recall and celebrate our liberation, is happening on Kizh, Wampanoag, and Suquamish + Duwamish lands. 

To bring some perspective to our conversation about a land we stake some claim to, a land that, even if we disavow our claim to, still grants us the legal right to return to it, and a land that monetarily benefits from our US tax dollars, here is a poem about that land by an indigenous refugee.

In Jerusalem

By Mahmoud Darwish

Translated by Fady Joudah

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,

I walk from one epoch to another without a memory

to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing

the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven

and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love

and peace are holy and are coming to town.

I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How

do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?

Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?

I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see

no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.

All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly

then I become another. Transfigured. Words

sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger

mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”

I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white

biblical rose. And my hands like two doves

on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.

I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,

transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?

I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I

think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad

spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”

Then what? A woman soldier shouted:

Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?

I said: You killed me ... and I forgot, like you, to die.


 
haggadah Section: Introduction

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