Paper Cranes for Palestine

nic(o)/le gargiulo

May 30, 2024

I sit on cool concrete, legs crossed, nostrils flared, brow furrowed, spine and shoulders hunched.

In the last two days I’ve installed nearly 6,000 paper cranes along many windows and walls.

Strung, with delicate thread, in rows of fifteen to twenty.

Spanning orange and blue, yellow and purple.

Red. Green. White. Black.

Palestinian artist Heba Zagout and her family were murdered during an Israeli airstrike on October 13, 2023.

Each individual crane represents a Palestinian child who has been murdered since October 7, 2023.

These particular cranes exist thanks to a local mother and her 11 year old daughter whom I met last month.

When they began this endeavor they set out to fold 5,000 cranes. As the months and monstrosities have progressed, that number has increased to almost 15,000.

The cranes vary in size, corresponding to the age of each child whose life has been so violently, so tragically, yolked from their Earthly exploration.

Many of the cranes are smaller than a quarter.

When we first met, the mother described the gatherings where they fold cranes with other community members in loving, grief-throbbing detail...

You have to use both hands to fold. You can’t grip your phone, you can’t follow distraction.

You are simply present.

You speak with those around you. You tend to the process.

You feel the weight of each crane between your fingers.

You feel the grief within your heart and every single bone.

Though I haven’t yet contributed any cranes to the memorial, I’ve been spending intimate time with them during the last few days while I install them at my workplace.

They were brought to me in bins, color coordinated, their looped tops taped to the edges to keep them separate from each other.

However, despite the immense care evident in their packaging, many of the strands inevitably became tangled with one another.

And so, much of my time during installation was spent hunched over on the floor, trying to free crumpled masses of bird and thread…

Clots of wing and vine.

I had to be careful with the untangling as to not tear any of the birds or snap the sacred line connecting them to one another.

The delicacy of material made this process extremely challenging.

The bodily emotion it conjured within me is a sensation I have seldom experienced. So rare, that as I began to notice the feelings emerge, I was confused and had difficulty discerning what was arising within me.

Frustration mixed with fury mixed with agony and awe.

A sob-scream buzzing just below the skin, emanating from a secret core…

In the end the cranes sway, untangled, in window light.

They catch sunbeams. They catch morning breeze.

They swirl and fly together, these brothers and sisters, watching a world pass by as they look on in their suspended beauty.

Watching the rest of us flaunt our ugly imperfections…

A grace they were never granted.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published




Mimesis
by Fady Joudah


My daughter
                        wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?