Prologue: The Lost Tribe
This is the story of the lost tribe,
not vanished but taken.
Cut from its own remembering.
Those who built walls around their shadows,
did so with blades at their backs.
They were told the wound was a border,
that the line would keep them safe.
Before the first fence, there were wanderers.
They carried fire in their mouths,
and sang to the night for warmth.
Some refused the new names,
and were buried without them.
Some burned their fields,
so the map would stay empty.
Others bent, broke,
and were told to call the desert peace.
We are their children,
the memory that remembers them.
Listen.
This is spoken from the marrow of the cut.
Resist the stitch.
Let the body speak.
I. The First Cut
The fence was the first violence.
Before the bullet, bomb, or sword
there was the line.
Bullets decay.
Bombs detonate.
Swords rust.
But the line remained,
the wall, now a weapon.
The land bled silently.
No screams.
So they called the desert peace.
The deer without a corridor.
The river strangled into a row.
The child who would never learn the song of the mountain.
The world was not conquered with armies.
The world was conquered with pen,
with stakes, surveys,
title and deed.
They drew it as a square,
a lie.
A new gospel for a new people.
We grew to fit the form of the lie.
Curves of the body contorted against sharp angles.
Faces disfigured inside a mask.
Deformed.
We stood inside the line and forgot the shape of the world,
passed down father to son, mother to daughter.
Generation after generation.
A disease.
And from that line came others,
lines on a map,
lines in a courtroom,
lines across your skin where you held your tears too long.
Shared became scarce.
Sacred became taxed.
Kin became trespasser.
From the line grew the cage.
We called it virtue.
Too proud.
Bodies kept in boxes turn to bone.
The lines do not stop at the edge of fields.
Rusted barbwire cut inward,
into our minds, our dreams, our selves.
Spirit cleaved from flesh,
desire from duty,
instinct from permission.
The line silences the memories that cannot be mapped.
Claustrophobic.
