An inauspicious day from the get-go

by Hisham Bustani

    translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie

Some damn thing made her mom start talking to her about her fiancé yet again. “He’s just not cast from the same clay we are,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s really got it in him to make a home.”

And as always happens at such times, the young woman shouted and swore, then she hurtled—like a metal water tank hoisted half-way up towards the roof slipping its trusses to crash back down—out of the house.

In the moment between her opening the front door and slamming it behind her, a tank passed; the sound of its tracks the crushing of little children’s bones, the smell of its exhaust charred corpses.

As she crossed over to the opposite sidewalk a sniper behind her shot a young man at the end of the street, of whom nothing had appeared in the machine gun’s sights except the hair on the back of his head.

Before she raised her hand to her friend’s doorbell a bulldozer had extended its metal claw towards the walls of the next-door building, so that it crumbled into pieces on the ground.

Under the rubble a doll with disheveled hair and dusty clothes was playing some music out of her belly, next to her a notebook in which the boy had drawn what he imagined of a bulldozer destroying a house that he imagined as his own.

The boy sits silent while the woman at his side (his mother) hits herself on the head, his father having preceded him to prison. The boy will grow up one day and will love a girl who has grown up also, and then he will be betrothed to her.

The boy who got engaged to the girl—after they grew up, and he got out of prison—had been saying goodbye to her at the end of the street, and stayed there watching her walk away until she entered her house. Then he slowly walked along the street from one end to the other, passing in front of the sniper, who eventually took the decision to put a bullet in the back of the boy’s head, after the tank had gone down the street, and he’d heard the sound of a door slamming and a girl had dashed by from one sidewalk to the other, all of which he took to be evil omens, and were a real bringdown, made him feel sinistrous and doomy—so he pulled the trigger.

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“I am having a bad day,” is a euphemism universally used. The spectrum of meaning is wide. Everyone as described in this story-poem experiences their bad day personally, uniquely. The point however is that they (we) are all linked. There’s no way around the fact, fate links us all together. The “boy-engaged-to-the-girl” is linked to “the sniper-behind-her.”

To have a “bad day” varies qualitatively depending on who you are, and where you happen to be in this story…

Which of these characters do you imagine yourself?

Here is what the poet had to say about the intent of this poem.

“My poetry has always been influenced by other artistic media, including contemporary dance, music, and audiovisuals. ‘An inauspicious day from the get-go’ is a poem with direct roots in cinema. It is affected by the simple, striking, abrupt, and contradictory visual elements in the films of two avant-garde Palestinian directors: Hany Abu-Assad’s Rana’s Wedding and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention and The Time that Remains. Similar to these films, the poem explores the indifferent, banal, and haphazard genocidal violence inflicted by, and inherent in, settler colonialism; so that regular, daily acts of the colonized, like talking on a phone, or looking out a window, become extremely dangerous actions. Through the ‘colonial encounter,’ such simple acts transform into areas within which the colonized struggle to maintain their continuity, existence, and life, as contrasted with the colonizer’s core endeavor[s] of disruption, annihilation, death. This poem touches on these contrasts of ordinary, day-to-day living, examining how colonialism obliterates them to a point of no return.”
—Hisham Bustani

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