mural by Juana Alicia / poem by Genny Lim
Not in Our Name
Everywhere in Gaza
People are gasping, dying of hunger
For there is nothing, not even
A tiny piece of bread in
The desert of ruins
Everywhere in Palestine
Mothers and children are dying of thirst
For there is nothing, not even
A drop of rain to eke from
The dark clouds of oppression
The length of a day to a dying child
is a thousand years
For childhood is buried
In a nameless white shroud
What lives in Palestine lives not
At the mercy of men
But in the courage of resistance
For what is the sound of the heart breaking?
It is the sound of a mother’s cry
For what is the sound of devastation?
It is the wind howling through the olive trees
It is weeping mothers mourning childhood
Lost in the shadow of bombs
Why?
History closes its eyes and does not answer
The thief has banned truth
And kept the world hostage
Keep going, what lives in memory
Lives in the unvanquished hope of return
What lives in the heart lives not
In form or memory, but in eternity
We will exist
And what lives in infamy
Lives not in our name!
By Genny Lim
CAMP is honored to house this powerful new work, “NOT IN OUR NAME / NO EN NUESTRO NOMBRE” by San Francisco artist Juana Alicia and San Francisco’s 9th poet laureate Genny Lim. The video is by Andi Wong, with poetry by San Francisco poet laureate Genny Lim and music by John Santos
By @juana_alicia with poem by San Francisco poet laureate @gennyeshe Genny Lim in solidarity with people of Gaza and the region on @clarionalleymuralproject in San Francisco with @ericmar415 @fone.ded @davidsolnit Catherine Cusic, Tirso González Araiza, and Andi Wong.
✨Smaller prints of this were pasted up around San Francisco and the East Bay.
Thank you Juana Alicia and Genny Lim for your tireless efforts of love and creativity to spread the word of what is happening in Palestine and to Palestinians under Israel’s reign of terror.
Over the past year, CAMP has been in mourning for the 45,000+ Palestinians whose deaths have been accounted for due to Israel’s bombing, and for the hundreds of thousands who have been buried in the rubble and not identified or who have died from disease and/or starvation as a result of Israel’s scorched earth campaign against the Palestinian peoples and the land and ecosystems supporting them, and for which Amnesty International has now publicly recognized as a Genocide, even though many of us knew in October 2023 that that is what was underway.
Because of Israel’s deep hatred for the existence of Palestine/Palestinians, the entire world has been turned upside down and is in peril as a result of the extreme environmental destruction and in combination with the environmental damage being released through other armed conflicts, including the Ukraine/Russia war, Sudan, Myanmar, and Haiti. Potentially more damaging is the mental/psychological impact Israel’s Genocide has had, individually, collectively, and globally.
The world is witnessing its first live-streamed Genocide, along with the refusal of the United States to end it, to the degree that the United States won’t even honor the ceasefire deal it had put on the table last May and which Hamas accepted within one day, including agreeing to revise its demands. Instead the United States is funding and arming Israel with the money and weapons to carry out its goal of doing away with “Hamas,” in other words, ALL GAZANS – the women are targets as the carriers and the life force of the children who could potentially become members of Hamas and the children are targets because of the same. The entire mission of Israel’s war on Gaza is to extinguish the lives of all peoples living there, no exceptions.
The extermination of Gazans is in addition to the rein of terror being unleashed on Palestinian families who have resided on the land in the West Bank, going back to ancient times, which are now illegally occupied by Israel and which at any moment innocent targets may be bombed, or illegal bands of Israeli settlers accompanied by illegal Israeli military forces can show up in Palestinian neighborhoods and begin forcefully assaulting and removing them from their homes, often times taking them hostage and imprisoning them without reason for years on end.
One only needs to watch Al Jazeera Live to receive hourly updates on the bombing and loss of lives, which are literally taking place around the clock. What we are witnessing is a contemporary parallel to Nazi Germany and the gassing of the Jewish peoples during World War II, and in some ways what we are seeing today is even more hideous because we are watching as the suffering is slowly drawn out as a form of torture, as well as the knowledge that there is no entity who can do anything to end this living hell other than the United States, who won’t, and which is not just taking place in the occupied territories of Palestine, but throughout the world as a hell that crushes the spirits and the hopes of anyone witnessing the extreme cruelty being taken out on innocent people who have done nothing except to be born and to defend their lives and the land which has rightfully been theirs since time immemorial.
On top of the direct and indirect pain and suffering that has resulted from Israel’s Genocide on the Palestinians, those of us, including many of us who are Jewish and who are doing exactly what we have been told to do throughout our lives as we’ve studied the Jewish Holocaust, watched hours of footage from the concentration camps filmed directly by the Nazis, and read numerous books on the subject, WE are now also the targets of Israel and its allies. WE are the Germans who sided with the Jews in World War II who were targeted and often extinguished by the Nazis, which in contemporary times, translates to being canceled, or losing our funding, losing our jobs, losing our housing, or just being discriminated against in a myriad of ways. Yet we continue to do so because, we can’t do anything else. We can’t sit silent and just wait for this to pass, WE MUST ACT IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY and STOP THIS GENOCIDE, or NAKBA, as it’s now become clear that what THIS is, is also BEYOND GENOCIDE.
Our wish for the New Year is LOVE & LIGHT, it’s CEASEFIRE, it’s a melting away of the need to shut people out as others. Only through letting go of past traumas and through finding unity with the Palestinians will Israelis ever be safe. EVER.
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE & FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA ISRAELIS WILL BE FREE
