Returned

for Giuliana Sgrena, Italian journalist, kidnapped in Iraq, 2005

You were trying to tell their story. Why else would you be there in that desert of bullets and covered women so far from Rome, pillars and pressed olives, cheap wine, your communist lover? You were there to tell the story of the weak, the dispossessed, those without voices, without anything, even names, cockroaches of war. You gave us their names: Mithal al-Hassan, trumpeted her torture in Abu Ghraib, turned our eyes to this suffering. They should have loved you for that: held a parade in your honor, draped you with garlands of the finest desert flowers (what flower grows in a desert?), driven you atop a float through the streets of Baghdad. What did you think when they grabbed you, those masked men, covered your mouth, and shoved you at gunpoint into that tiny room— dirt floor, dusty air, the stale flat bread they fed you, water tasting of metal. What did they do to you in there, men without names, without faces? Whatever it was made you speak a different tongue: Nobody should come to Iraq at this time. Not even journalists. Nobody. Now the cameras are on your return, Giuliana. What will happen to Mithal and the other Iraqi women trapped under the veil of blood and sand, to their bony brown-skinned children? Who will speak against the soldiers stacking naked men like bags of flour, collaring them like dogs? What is it to speak of atrocity? What is it to live it? Voice of the voiceless, ruffled bird, I wonder how you will walk down the street now, ears pricked to every sound, the scuttle of mice loud as tanks in your scarred ears. Wonder if your breath will catch at the accidental brush of a stranger. If you will ever return to a country gutted like this one to name what has gone unnamed —Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, those places where you wear the same skin as the oppressor and strain for the whisper dancing through your veins: Go home. You don’t belong here. Go home. You don’t belong.