Day 7: Curriculum by Manar Daghash
The bell rings
The start of another day
I wonder how many students didn’t get to start another day today?
Israel bombed 443 schools in Gaza.
Pay attention.
Class is about to start and you’ve never been good at math.
The unit today is on square roots
Roots
My father is from Bethlehem
My mother is from Deir Yasin
The Deir Yasin massacre
I wonder if this massacre is worse.
Pay attention.
PEMDAS, parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction
Palestine
They tried to divide you and multiply you in settlements and partition plans
Forgetting that fractions lose their better half when multiplied correctly.
You cannot create a whole piece in a divided country.
Why does the news sound so much like a math lesson?
Proportionate responses,
Number of casualties,
Percentage of civilian lives,
Fractions of uninhabitable homes,
Distributing to neighboring countries
Does making Palestine mathematical make it easier to subtract us from the equation?
The bell rings
In English class, we’re learning about irony
Families dying together in their living rooms
Cut flowers on the grave of a fetus,
a flower yet to bloom
Corpses fertilizing the ground of a holy land
Have I gone too far?
Is displacement and the right to return only understood through the words of Tolkien,
when it is colored in metaphors and alliteration?
Would Palestinians be better understood if there were dragons and elves?
Is suffering only accepted when it’s magical and entertaining?
Should we make our screams sound more poetic?
Sound
In physics, we learned that the intensity of sound is reported in decibels
But how is it reported here?
How do we report the mutilated screams of children?
Why is it that the sound of villages falling is so quiet?
“If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it,
Does it make a sound?”
Philosophy.
The bell rings
Scientific fact:
Extended exposure to a stimulus decreases
physiological and behavioral responses
Does exposure to human suffering make us desensitized to it too?
Does the smell of scorched bodies no longer stimulate us?
Does the wailing sound of pain and cries for help
become background noise
after time?
Is time all it takes for the scars
that our not ours
to heal?
The bell rings
In marketing, we’re learning about news placement and headlines
“You’re making headlines baby!”
Baby,
drinking contaminated water
covered with shard-torn skin
dies before they are born.
“If it bleeds, it sells”
Yet here we lay bleeding.
Bleeding through the pages of each newspaper onto the hands that hold it
Pleading
Can you hear us now?
Their blood is no different than ours,
Plasma, cells, platelets
How can you look at blood spilling out of children and still
see blood type
Gaza has laid open like a cadaver
Exposed
Showing her titanium spine
Her vertebrae stacked like heavy storybooks for us to read
Books for us to study the history of our ancestors
The chapters
The pages
The binding
like olive tree roots
I pack my books
I zip up my backpack
I think of the 11-year-old boy, Ahmed, who carried the body of his little brother in his
“He’s not heavy, he is my brother”
I think of the weight on the back of every Palestinian carrying their home over their shoulders
with their feet rooted in the ground
The banner above my teacher’s desk reads:
“Curriculum is a map and the world is a classroom”
If curriculum is a map,
then why is Palestine nowhere to be found on yours?
If the world is a classroom,
then Palestine is the teacher
Their history is carried within them
Their humanity is not calculated
Their resilience is poetry writing itself
Their return will be their headline
And their freedom songs will be heard
“Palestinians teach life, sir”
The bell rings
Class dismissed