ALFRED TARAZI / PORTALS

At the beginning, it wasn’t supposed to last very long, a few months, a year at most. The issue at hand was simple, the struggle was clear; overthrow the regime, turn the country into a secular state, unite the Arabs, and free Palestine. Armed with revolutionary zeal and fervor our only chance was violence. We had to defeat those reactionary militias fighting to protect the right-wing Christian political establishment. They often say: “We didn’t choose the war, the war chose us”. How did it all begin? Incidents: an escalating game of tit for tat aggressions and retaliations. And after the incidents came the battles, and after the battles, the trenches. Soon enough, we were dying on all sides, a constant flow of Martyrs. The respective parties would publish images of their exploits… tales of heroic assaults, tales of heroic resistance. In the published images, they would draw a black line over the eyes of the soldiers in action. Most of us were not full-time soldiers at that time. We had other jobs, other occupations, and a civilian life to maintain. We would however publish in magazines, newspapers and posters the images of our Martyrs unaltered, passport photos for most, with their eyes heroically gazing into eternity. We, who survived battle after battle, had gazed into the eyes of death, an empty abyss of evil and pain. We have been consumed in a ball of fire through combat, dragged into a world of infinite death and destruction. You, yourself, as you scroll through those images, I warn you: we will display the putrid corpses of our victims. You can stop now, or then indict your eyes and tell them: “There you are, curse you, feast yourselves at that lovely sight”. You will ask me, what does it feel like to kill a man? And I’ll tell you, the most troubling thing in a corpse is those eyes, wide-opened. Shut them for they are windows to the underworld. So the most crucial thing in such circumstances is to protect oneself from that. You either believe in fetishes or you don’t. And for us, who strongly believe in the one and only god, a fetish is often needed to secure a relation with the Almighty. There are those talismans made of small silver cylindrical containers, in which you find a magic scroll, incantations, wishes, and protectors against the evil eye. But surely, there must be a better way to protect oneself against that evil eye, especially if you knew firsthand that the eye in question was evil. It was not the eye in itself as a separate organ, but as the window, the portal into the souls of men. From those men, one should seek protection, especially if you happen to have devoted your life to fighting them. In this case, you torture and kill. But before you kill, that is, before you make sure that life has definitely given up on that body, you watch your back. Torturing evil men is not a sport and you do not do it for fun. You torture to gain a certain knowledge to which you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. Information, that is certain, but beyond all the blabber related to the warring activities on the fields, you gain knowledge of just how much pain that person can endure. You hold his life within a suffering mass of nerves, waiting for that lucid moment at which the body and the mind associated are going to break and reveal themselves as one to you. And that is the spirit. But before that soul goes on wandering, slipping through its mortal envelope, you rip out the eyes off that body and keep them safe from decay. And the spirit rests there, stuck in a portal from which it cannot escape. This is how you protect yourself from the evil eye. In a closet, on a shelf, in a jar, away from light, they rest. I do not look at them often. But they are there.