The world runs in circles…

Yes, I suppose it does. The world runs in circles…
I stand at a bus stop and turn around in circles. I get off the bus at a place that I know and that is new to me at the same time. What am I actually trying to do? What am I actually looking for? Am I looking for something? Something that doesn’t want to be found?

It’s the 24th of April 2023 and I find myself in a landscape that was once part of my world, and now I don’t know which way to go? The beginning and the end is somehow knotted, and somehow the same.

My companion Inbal is something like my sister. She is standing there, still giggling about the song we chose as the soundtrack for our arrival, our arrival in my memories. Immediately a crucifix catches her eye. Yes, this area is very, very, very Catholic indeed, and this region wants to show that to everyone who arrives.

At home, at home, fi albayt…. I have no idea where that is. At most WHO that could be… but that is probably not the question here. Everything goes round in circles. I left this area as soon as I could, and yet I return. Why I don’t know exactly. Perhaps to conform to some kind of cycle.

The drizzle doesn’t exactly welcome you, climbing slowly but steadily up your bones at barely 9 degrees Celsius. Cleaned villages in grey and again and again: ece homo, the suffering Saviour. The pale version, of course. He sometimes looks at us strangers as if to say: « Yeah, what? I can’t help it. They put me here in the drizzle. I’d rather be somewhere else. Bloody martyrdom. What a shit idea… » But maybe that’s only in my head.

So much green. AlQalb alakhdar. The green heart. The rolling hills, mist on the meadows, a few windmills on the horizon. Postcards became real. Even in the drizzle.

Inbal and I, we talk, almost all the time:
Imagine you would live here….
Ich lebte hier… I used to live here…
Which one is the best song of the Beatles?
Blackbird! Yeah, sure…
Tomorrow is the Israeli National Day, and today is the day to commemorate the soldiers who died in the war.
Wow, efficient. Two birds with one stone…
And there: Jesus, again! As if they could forget… Like: what am I? Ah, yes! Catholic!
Do you know what FKK is? There were places in the GDR where people used to be naked… like on the beach, there has always been an area for naked bathing… a nudist beach, you know… my mother loved it… my father didn’t… I think he did’nt get the concept…

I talk to some passers-by. Inbal doesn’t understand a word, although her German is pretty good. Probably the dialect. Dull and impenetrable, like lush green and dense forest. My German as high as it can go, as clear as possible, as if I were reciting Goethe….

That moment hasn’t changed. That moment before I approach someone. That hint of a second when I walk up to someone, that hint of a slight flinch. The alien is about to say something… Is written on the faces for a blink of an eye. A tiny and quite unintentional sliver of rejection, maybe fear, maybe loathing. Quite uncontrolled, quite impulsive, just from the gut…. THAT moment has not changed.
And then this irritation, maybe relief, maybe surprise, when I speak clearly understandable German. That hasn’t changed either. But maybe that’s just in my head.
How the windows in my grandparents’ village were closed when I walked down the street with my siblings. How our curls were marvelled at and felt as if we were in the petting zoo on the other side of the fence.
How the poor Negro children were pitied because they were not brought up with the Saviour. Yet I am baptised. Circumcised too, but also baptised…
Hey, your father is a Nigger, isn’t he?
No, he’s a civil engineer!
Wash yourself, you’re so brown…
Maybe these memories are only in my head. Just images I invented for something tangible that surrounded me. Who knows…

Now I’m walking through this village with another sister, making art, or something similar. I try to distract from election posters, don’t translate everything exactly, and just mention in passing that our landlady’s dogs are called Wotan and Thor, and they’ve set up a sauna in the garden, emblazoned with the words WALHALLA…

Record. On. Drizzle. Rain. The first soundtrack of our walk.

So many signs, symbols, crests and landmarks. I wish they could be heard… I still stand in front of the houses, in the middle of the green, in front of the people, and I don’t know if, or if I don’t belong here. Parts of my childhood took place here, but it was also the childhood of someone else. I leaf through it like a book…. The world runs in circles. I wanted this circle. I wanted to step into this loop. I wanted to jump into this loophole. For what, I don’t know. And may I will not find out.

Grandpa’s gardens
(25 April 2023)

The house is owned by someone else now and everything seems so much smaller than I remember. Just behind my grandparents’ barn was a gigantic realm of adventure, now there’s just a garden with some fruit trees and a warped arbour.
Further up the hill is a small chapel, what else…. At the back of this chapel is a crypt, and in it lies Jesus on his deathbed. A doll, of course. But realistically made. He really looks dead. Not like he’s about to rise from the dead. That was the scariest place for my siblings, cousins and me, but also the most exciting. The perfect place to make up stories, to have adventures, to play with integrated shiver. Right next to the crypt begins the Way of the Cross. Reliefs of the Passion of the Messiah line the path. At the very beginning of this path, in the direction of the church, is a huge crucifix. Massive, made of grey stone, as if it had been designed for the entrance to the Reich Chancellery. The iron cross is in the base. To the left and right of it, memorial plaques with the names of the sons of the village who died in the World War. I discover three of my grandfather’s brothers, one of my grandmother’s…

It’s a bank holiday in Israel. Inbal tells me what she would do in Tel Aviv today. There is a civil war in Sudan. My uncle said on the phone that everyone is fine. Only where my cousin is, is not known. He is at every demonstration and is very involved, so maybe he was arrested…. But that doesn’t mean anything. During the riots that led to the ouster of Omar Al Bashir, he was also missing for a fortnight…. Here, everyone seems to have a new car in the sharpened driveway and wears Jack Wolfskin against the weather.

Inbal and I sit in the chapel and write. It’s dry there and a little warmer. Then we sing. Hebrew, German, English, Arabic. Then we laugh at the absurdity. I briefly imagine what would happen if someone came and caught us in this unholy act. How would I try to explain that? Would I try to explain it? Or just leave it in the church hall, like a false altar.

Later as we leave the village, Inbal says to me that she can’t quite connect me with this village. She speaks of the lines of connection and the eternal circle…My fallen Wehrmacht relatives and Israel, her fallen relatives and Islam, the resurrected Jew and the two artists who have fallen away from the faith on the journey…
She says: This story, our story began way before our existance…

Record. On.

We leave my grandparents’ village after visiting the family grave. Now that we are leaving: cheesy clouds oh so beautiful in blue sky. Middle Earth shows off its idyllic side. I know quite a few plants along the way and can hear my grandfather talking, while I show off my knowledge to Inbal. I guess I’m not a son of the desert after all. Ana min hinna. I just hear the desert calling all the time…

Two Circles

We draw two circles.
Around the sites of my childhood.
Grandma’s garden
Mama’s garden
And in between desert,
forrest and wild confusion
Sound of the desert and Church bells
Scarf and appeal
Marx and revolution
Masks and djelabia
Palms and semolina

We are two circles each
And walk in circles
In search of the places
Where the circles intersect
Peace

Das grüne Herz Deutschlands / the green heart of Germany
(27 April 2023)

Oh my gosh, it really is beautiful. These thick mixed forests, thick meadows, thick horses and cows.

In one of the first PR campaigns of the state of Thuringia after the fall of the wall, the state called itself: The green heart of Germany! Wa bismillah hadha sahih! Green it is here! And somehow a prototypical landscape for Germany: prototypical villages, prototypical cars are driven and prototypical things are said. It also feels like the heart. It throbs gently, rests and grumbles now and then about prototypical things, about prototypical life. But actually it feels quite at ease with itself. Of course people would prefer to be among their own kind, surrounded by prototypical prototypes, but there must be something that can still be improved… Prosperity is that…

It wasn’t always like that. In former times, as we are reminded at the sacrificial bog, volunteers were sacrificed here for the good of all. Sacrifices to the moor. Voluntarily. Killed in several ritual ways. Overkill. Head off and pierced and poisoned and drowned. That’s what they wanted. The victims. What is it with them and martyrdom?
The sacrificial moor is right next to the geographical centre of Germany. Maybe that’s why it’s called the green heart…? The centre. Germany’s Bellybutthole. The core. The heart. The centre. Stuck in the middle with you. In the middle a lime tree. Unify us all with your leaf. Deep in the Belly Butt Hole of Almania, not far from there the Spittelbrunn. There used to be a settlement there, but not for long. So we’re told. Water too irregular. The water comes from the bottom. From the Belly Butt Hole. But only when winter is over. There’s nothing in winter. So they tell us. No water. Water does not say. What he is doing, right here, at the fountain, he also tells us. Photos. For the next election poster. You understand? The Connection to the homeland, you know. Photo in the middle of the forest. In the middle of Germany.

At least the weather is playing on our team today. Great job. Sun. We play tourists. With the mask of the visitors. It’s all so interesting and funny…. I joke about the forest, the water and the centre and somehow it seems for a moment that I voluntarily sacrifice parts of my youth. On the sacrificial moor. Okay, if I do so, then with a song…

Green grove, all green, oh so green
Green heart, green hill
Green hopping grashopper
Green wings everywhere
Camouflage in green, green middle
Green to the middle, to the belly, the but
Green light zack zack

Green yeah green
Are all my clothes
Green yeah green
Is all I wear
That’s why I like everything that’s so green
Because my darling is an alien…

Green Tea for the skin
Elected green, green eaten
Reasons very green
Thorough green on the tongues of the scales

It’s so green when two desert flowers greet
It’s so green when abundance buddies back
Goodness, so obscenely lush green
Foots swirling through green
Kissing rivers watery green meadows
I’ll settle for something green to enjoy (or sneeze at, depending on your hay fever)

Raschid Sidgi

Walk1 Lori/Sidgi April 24th – May 3rd in Thuringia / Germany