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Kolo
Nathalie Handal

Palestine

GALLERY

CONVERSATION

In the Balkans a woman breastfeeds, hums a low tune, combs her hair, laments hanging on the village trees, she tries to forget the rapes the refugee camps the slit throats of Srebenica, tries to remember the blink of her own past passing, days dancing the kolo, each torture unsung in that violet swaying. Unsung, the slow movement of a foreign language on the lips of an émigré, the sailing of cruel memory in water drops, drying on the cover of a book with Cyrillic letters. Unsung, the swallowing of sentences by soldiers after they have killed… She imagines those who have left, the search for lost relics, silverware in ordinary antique stores in Paris London Chicago looking for anything an exile leaves except the song unsung beneath the tongue of the sea wind…a kolo. A woman breastfeeds and cooks and hums, crosses fall sideways without a sound, the past slips beneath her raised arms, the kolo whirling on.

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Maggie Nolder (United States)
The tradegy in the Balkans unfortunatly proves the Human rights are not women's rights. The women of this country were mass raped by sodiers in "rape camps". To return to a normal life after such a tragedy seems almost impossible. Some women are able to put their past behind them, and look to the future, while others live in the past. I choose to move forward & glance back at my past as a reminder

Imagining Ourselves Team (United States)
How do you deal with painful memories? How can we move on from our sometimes violent past?

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