Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely

Contributed by Rebecca Chace / It’s 5:40 AM in New York and 12:40 PM in Palestine on August 10, 2024. I run back and forth inside my dark Brooklyn apartment, barefoot in a T-shirt and underpants. The workshop I’m leading for teachers in the West Bank begins in twenty minutes and my internet is down. Unplug the router; count to ten; plug it back in. I’m the one who’s supposed to have good internet. I have hot water, air conditioning, access to health care, and a well-stocked bodega on the corner. I lead workshops for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College, which has partnered with Al Quds University for sixteen years. When Ibrahim, the soft-spoken director of the program for first-year students, reached out to schedule their annual faculty training sessions, we assumed he meant the workshops would take place on Zoom, not in-person. 

“We are in person,” said Ibrahim. 

Ibrahim was so sleepless when we met for a planning meeting his eyes looked bruised. It had been ten months since the October 7 attacks. I wanted to be of use. I was supposed to arrive in East Jerusalem two days ago. Israel had recently carried out two political assassinations. An explosion killed Fuad Shukir, a Hezbollah leader, in Beirut; a second one in Tehran killed Ismail Haniyeh, the lead ceasefire negotiator for Hamas, a day later. All flights to Tel Aviv were cancelled except for EL AL’s. Nobody wanted to fly EL AL. Could I fly into Jordan and take a van? We pivoted to Zoom. 

I needed to get the internet working, button on a nice shirt, make coffee, and comb my hair into something unremarkable. Instead, I watched the WiFi bars struggle up and down on the upper right corner of my screen. The night city hummed through the open window. A car boomed a summer soundtrack. The top of the Empire State Building was a bright red stick of candy across the river.

I managed to open the Zoom room moments before the start time with my notebook, pen, and cup of coffee. I’m strung tight with first-day nerves. I don’t know these teachers and they don’t know me. Some are new faculty at Al Quds and don’t even know one another. We will be spending six hours a day online for the next five days. Nobody wants to be in these floating squares where we’ve already spent too much time with our students. Boxes inside the boxes of our lives which we can blur or mute or switch to black when we can’t bear it anymore. Nobody asks for an explanation of the mute darkness, though some students will occasionally offer an excuse in the chat. Ibrahim said he would start the day by introducing me to the group with a few words of welcome. Instead, he said, “this is a terrible day at a terrible time for Palestine. I would like to begin with a minute of silence for the children.” I stopped breathing. I had been following the news as closely as I could, but I didn’t look at the headlines this morning. These teachers had been living for hours with whatever had happened while I was still asleep or yanking a proper shirt off a hanger in my closet. The range of horrors was so vast and I knew so little. I resisted the temptation to flip to another window on my screen to see the headlines from Gaza while we held this silence. I was ashamed to display my ignorance as a well-intentioned educator beaming in from a place of opulence. Ashamed at being a citizen of the country that supplied the weapons, ashamed at the privilege of pursuing a life built around words, though everyone in this workshop had made the same choice. What practical good could writing do? I closed my eyes. 

Israel had bombed the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City at dawn. The school was being used as a shelter. More than 200 people were on one floor for morning prayers, another floor was sheltering women and children. At least eighty people died. It was the largest number of women and children killed in a bomb strike since the war began. Israeli military denied the casualty count from Gaza Civil Defense. A surgeon at Al-Ahli hospital said that the severely burned bodies of the wounded, including children, was “very difficult to watch.” I read this article in the New York Times at our first break, an hour and a half after Ibrahim opened the first workshop with silence. 

I invited the teachers to write privately for five minutes. I explained that we would be doing a lot of writing together over the next several days. Some would be private and some would be shared. They could always choose what to share. The teachers nodded, floating above an empty room with chairs placed around a seminar table in Abu Dis. The anthology they assigned to their incoming students had more classic Western texts than I was used to: Marx, Darwin, Hannah Arendt. I had taught these texts years earlier, but I was nervous about returning to them right here, right now. The only play was Antigone, which seemed a little on-the-nose. The story begins and ends with unburied corpses and a guilty politician. Was this the best or worst play to teach in Palestine in August 2024? I wasn’t hired to curate their curriculum, I told myself, I was here to give them some practical tools for writing in the classroom with their students.

I screenshared an image of The Fall of Icarus by Brueghel the Elder and asked them to write informal responses to a series of questions. I wrote along with them, modeling what they would do in the classroom with their students. What do you see? Write down five things, no opinions, only observations. Begin each sentence with the words, “Look at the . . .” We each shared one or two of these lists aloud. I wrote: 

Look at the horse pulling the plow downhill
Look at the tiny field
Look at the bare legs in the water
Look at the bird and the fisherman
Look at the sun on the horizon
What don’t you see? Write down five things that are missing or obscured. Begin each sentence with the words, “I don’t see . . .” 
I don’t see the castle that used to be on the island
I don’t see Daedalus
I don’t see the painter
I don’t see worms and bugs under the plowed strips of grass
I don’t see a lookout in the crow’s nest.
What are the noises and silences in this painting? I hear; I don’t hear.
I hear the sound of a body hitting the water
I hear the bleating of the sheep
I hear the sound of the wind in the sails
I don’t hear the only sheep looking at the body in the water
I don’t hear the white buds opening on the trees.

I then asked them to turn to a poem in the anthology: Muséé de Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden. Many of them already knew the poem. Everyone knew the myth of Icarus. Auden wrote:

About suffering they were never wrong, 
The old Masters: how well they understood 
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse 
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

We read the poem aloud, taking turns, reading it backwards. If we were in-person I would have us out of our chairs, walking around the room. I asked them to read the poem simultaneously, so their words stumbled into one another, breaking the seal with laughter. I then asked each of them to choose one line and write back to it in their own words. Then I read the poem aloud one more time, inviting them to interrupt me when we came to their chosen line, disrupting the poem and hierarchy of leadership. 

Students love this exercise, it’s playful and sometimes produces brilliant results. A teacher I will call Malik was a quiet man who spoke more and more as the days went on. He told us that he was a father of three and had been unable to leave his home in Ramallah since the beginning of the war. On the day he finally decided to risk a visit his brother, driving the car with his sister, wife, and children, the road was blocked by two Israeli soldiers in an open jeep, though it wasn’t a checkpoint. As the family waited in a line of cars, one of the soldiers raised his machine gun and fired at the hillside above the road. A body fell backward. It was a Friday night, said Malik, many women were walking with their children along the side of the road carrying plastic shopping bags from the market. They ran when they heard the gunfire but there was nowhere to go but straight in front of them; no way off the road. Malik turned his car around and drove back to Ramallah. 

When I read aloud Auden’s penultimate line, “Something amazing, a boy falling from the sky,” Malik interrupted with what he had written in response:

I wish that all the children could remain in the sky. 

Nobody spoke. In one sentence, Malik had flipped the myth to a Palestine where every parent is a Daedalus without feathers, twine, wood, or harness leather. Where children soar above the ruins on homemade wings held together by beeswax.

About the author: Rebecca Chace has written for the New York Times, the LA Review of Books, The Yale Review, Guernica, Lit Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications. She is a Faculty Associate and the Program Manager at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. Her fifth book, Talking to the Wolf, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.