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We have grass; it exists
Mar. 17th, 2025 11:14 pmLast week I saw No Other Land (2024; Oscar-winning documentary on destruction of a group of small hamlets in the West Bank, filmed from 2019 through 2023).
In it, at one point the father of Basel Adra (one of the two main young men making the documentary) takes several of the children in the extended family to school in a van. (The school is later destroyed.) The children are chanting in the van, they say--
We have grass; it exists.
We have a mountain; it exists.
We have a chicken house; it exists.
We have a rock; it exists.
There may have been other things they say--those were the ones I scrawled down in my notebook in the theater.
This could be something similar to playing "I spy with my little eye" ("I spy with my little eye something striped!" and then people guess what you see). Or part of a nursery rhyme or something that doesn't rhyme when you translate it into English.
But to me, watching that movie, it felt like a verbal way of touching, and touching base with, things that are really there and won't disappear. It felt like a spell, even.
Although the chicken house does, in fact, get bulldozed.
In it, at one point the father of Basel Adra (one of the two main young men making the documentary) takes several of the children in the extended family to school in a van. (The school is later destroyed.) The children are chanting in the van, they say--
We have grass; it exists.
We have a mountain; it exists.
We have a chicken house; it exists.
We have a rock; it exists.
There may have been other things they say--those were the ones I scrawled down in my notebook in the theater.
This could be something similar to playing "I spy with my little eye" ("I spy with my little eye something striped!" and then people guess what you see). Or part of a nursery rhyme or something that doesn't rhyme when you translate it into English.
But to me, watching that movie, it felt like a verbal way of touching, and touching base with, things that are really there and won't disappear. It felt like a spell, even.
Although the chicken house does, in fact, get bulldozed.
