We know how language itself can wage war against us, by mimicking the same casual dehumanization of a bomb. Everyone you know and love: terrorists. Militants. Strategic targets. Collateral damage. The leveling of your neighborhood: an unfortunate mistake. The razing of your city: the birth pangs of a new Middle East. Seven dead, twenty wounded. Forty-one dead, ninety-three wounded. 1.2 million refugees. 2,000 migrants.

“I get on the mini-bus,” I write. “I emerge from the taxi,” and then it is I calling the neighbors, and I am nearly hysterical with worry as I wait for their response.

pack their whole lives into vans and cars,

All I can think of is my journal, with all the poems I have written over the years. Left behind in the rush to leave, I have mourned it every day since, cursing myself for forgetting it.

I have buried seven husbands, three fiancés, fifteen sons and a two-week old daughter I finally agreed to have at 42 for my husband’s sake, to bring life back to his tongue after we laid our two grown, handsome sons to rest, one after the other, and grief took all his words away. Our daughter did not die because of a bullet or mortar shell or carbomb, like my father, sister, brother, cousin, mother, neighbor, pharmacist, teacher. She died because the siege had cut off not only our food and electricity, but also our medicine and medical supplies.

scaffolding of language

exhausted but joyful in his relief.

We must support the creation of structures of inclusion that recognize and accommodate difference, rather than seek to erase it

At a minimum, there is evidence that markets do not do an effective job of promoting tolerance.58Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson, “Does Economic Freedom Foster Tolerance?” IFN Working Paper, no. 918 (2012): 177–207, accessed February 16, 2015, http://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/81340. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_4891_58").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_4891_58", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); This suggests that curbing discrimination is the provenance of policy rather than market forces.59

to separate and inferior schools, jobs, train cars, restaurants theatres, public bathrooms, parks, and even water fountains.

As harmful as discrimination, conscious or unconscious, may be on shaping group outcomes, it is the institutionalization and structural features of othering that perhaps most explain group-based inequalities.51See Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Charles Tilly identifies exploitation and opportunity hoarding as two of the critical mechanisms for institutionalizing group-based difference. The most extreme mechanism of othering is outright exploitation of marginalized groups. Exploitation allows one social group to expropriate resources produced or held by another social group, as was the case during antebellum slavery or European colonialism. See also Ali Jarbawi, “Israel’s Colonialism Must End,” New York Times, August 4, 2014, accessed February 16, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/opinion/ali-jarbawi-israels-colonialism-must-end.html. Centuries of European colonialism have provided the world with certain basic lessons about subjugating colonized peoples: the longer any colonial occupation endures, the greater the settlers’ racism and extremism tends to grow. This is especially true if the occupiers encounter resistance; at that point, the occupied population becomes an obstacle that must either be forced to submit or removed through expulsion or murder. In the eyes of an occupying power, the humanity of those under its thumb depends on the degree of their submission to, or collaboration with, the occupation. If the occupied population chooses to stand in the way of the occupier’s goals, then they are demonized, which allows the occupier the supposed moral excuse of confronting them with all possible means, no matter how harsh. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_4891_51").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_4891_51", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Today, the most common mechanism for instituti

not prepared to address the intersections of healing, politics, and emotion in classrooms.

All this I have watched from my living room in Beirut. Sitting on a worn gray couch with earplugs in, trying to block out the sounds of sheering metal from the construction site right under my window as I translate stories from Arabic to English for the Damascus Bureau, an under-project of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

I have fled Aleppo from the increased fanaticism of the rebels, I have fled Aleppo from the chokehold of the regime, I have fled Aleppo to Turkey, I have fled Aleppo to Lebanon, I have fled Aleppo not knowing if I will ever return, or what I might find if I do.

Lina Mounzer

Language gives the individual the power and strength of the collective. And writing, speaking, telling stories—wielding language in narrative form—has the ability to transform the collective through the individual experience.

Who is the reader I’m addressing

there is no real resolution to the trauma of the collective. It lives on in all the stories you will ever tell from now on, in all the stories that will be passed down along the line of culture, even when they are about something else.

Trying to rewrite my past in an effort to not have to translate it.

these I’s bump up into one another again and again until they are accidentally shattered, the various pieces of these commingled selves becoming, for long moments, indistinguishable from one another.

All this I have watched from my living room in Beirut. Sitting on a worn gray couch with earplugs in, trying to block out the sounds of sheering metal from the construction site right under my window as I translate stories from Arabic to English for the Damascus Bureau, an under-project of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

Fear is something you get used to, it becomes the new baseline from which your body operates

For the last few nights I have been glued to the news, unable to turn it off

Our daughter did not die because of a bullet or mortar shell or carbomb, like my father, sister, brother, cousin, mother, neighbor, pharmacist, teacher

range in age from their teens to their sixties and seventies

where her perfect blue body lay among countless others they had not yet found place enough to bury.

When I tell you how my nine-year-old cousin was martyred his first day fighting on the frontlines, do you think us monstrous to have let him go, or must I add a note to explain how we have come to accept that in war the desire to fight and its attendant risk of death is something that doesn’t respect childhood?

A barrel will no longer ever be a barrel again; shrapnel will always explode from it. The word mustard will forevermore carry a whiff of gas, rashing your skin, smarting your eyes. When you say Sabra, or Shatila, you are not referring to a place, but to a heap of dead bodies shot indiscriminately and tossed aside like worn rags

Translation is not just about transposing words from one language to another. But transplanting a feeling, a way of seeing the world, from one vocabulary of experience to another. I think of the verb, to transplant. A seedling from soil to soil. But also an organ from body to body. The procedure must be as delicate, as cognizant of the original conditions of creation in order to nurture and ensure a continuation of life.

To translate a text is to enter into the most intimate relationship with it possible.

In Arabic, the root of the verb, to witness, is sh-h-d. Roots are important in Arabic. They are present, that is, known and recognizable, not obscure etymologies but immediate and close, giving life directly to all the words that bud and branch from them.

Translated literally, the subject is the doer, the verb is the doing, the object the one it is done to. In English, a writer writes a book; a letter. In Arabic, al-katib yaktubu kitab; maktoob. All from the root k-t-b, to write.

All this I have watched from my living room in Beirut. Sitting on a worn gray couch with earplugs in, trying to block out the sounds of sheering metal from the construction site right under my window as I translate stories from Arabic to English for the Damascus Bureau, an under-project of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

My body vibrating, whether to the shattering of an earth drill or to the tension of what I read, I have witnessed them march in the streets calling for change, bury loved ones, resuscitate strangers, defy soldiers and snipers, wait in breadlines, pack their whole lives into vans and cars, undergo daily humiliation at checkpoints on their way to and from work, to and from university, which they have refused to leave or discontinue.

I have buried seven husbands, three fiancés, fifteen sons and a two-week old daughter

I have been threatened, beaten, strip-searched, thrown in prison, tortured and made to watch as my mother knelt weeping at the dirty feet of tribal leaders to beg for any information about my kidnapped father. I have waited at countless checkpoints, praying that no one finds the bread, the money, the schoolbooks, the chocolates I have hidden in my bag, on my body, trying to smuggle them through to people on the other side.

And two contradictory things become true at once: that despite the fact I am attempting to reproduce her words as faithfully as I can, they must now re-emerge in words unavoidably my own.

they are constantly traversing borders both visible and invisible

Fear is something you get used to

But the new words were strangely light.

the battle has been won in our favor. The enemy has been driven out of our town. The town council invites us back to reclaim our homes. Immediately I pile into a bus with my mother and sisters for the long journey back to our village, singing and ululating all the way. All I can think of is my journal, with all the poems I have written over the years. Left behind in the rush to leave, I have mourned it every day since, cursing myself for forgetting it. We climb the hill together, a key buried in my mother’s pocket, that never once left my mother’s pocket, flying the last half kilometer over jagged rocks and dried clumps of earth that were once orchards and fields. I see my mother pull out the key, ready to open the door, only to find a pile of rubble where our house once was.

All this I have watched from my living room in Beirut

Fatma

where our house once was

I have waited at countless checkpoints, praying that no one finds the bread, the money, the schoolbooks, the chocolates I have hidden in my bag, on my body, trying to smuggle them through to people on the other side.

When we encourage students to use technology, do we remind them of the risks of placing their information online and give them choices of how much personal information to reveal? Do our students recognize the ways in which Facebook’s privacy settings continually shift without user permission, and what posting a photo today might mean for their future employment opportunities? Do students recognize the importance of password-protecting their devices and having different passwords across platforms?