In Our Country

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This country used to be pronounced like this. Now we pronounce it like this. Old people, or foreign people, you know them from the way they say it: wrong. There is famine in that country now. There is plague. Now no one goes there. Even the people who live there, they try to leave. This country — and when I say this country I never mean my country, I mean this other country, over there — was once one country but now it is four. This country is now two. This country still pretends to be one but is really one hundred. This country was never a country, but all the countries around it chose to believe that it might become so. This country was never a country, but faraway countries chose to believe that it might become so. In this country, the war has not started yet. In this country, the war continues. In this country, the war stopped, but it left nothing behind that you would care to see. When I was young, no one travelled to this country. Now it is safer, but not too safe, so that you can go there for nothing. For nothing, you can see all the places you were once so afraid of. Now another country is the one we do not travel to. Now there is someplace else to be afraid of. In this country, people once lived there, but now they live over there. They moved because they were afraid. They moved because they didn’t have to be afraid anymore. They moved to be closer to people of their own religion. Own language. Own color. Own food. Own way of saying “good night” and “good morning.” They moved when someone else moved them. In this country, they moved and then moved back again. In this country, they moved until the land they had was land where nothing grew, and the people starved. In this country, they moved until the land they had was land where nothing grew, and the hungry people killed each other. In both countries, the movers said — we did not kill you, this is not our fault. In this country they eat with their right hands. In this country they eat with their left. In this country they have so little to eat other countries choose to believe the starving are beyond preference but they are not and they pray with both hands before eating. In this country God is capitalized, and in this country he is not, and in this country he is many, and in this country he is nearly less than one. In this country they speak to him like this, and in this country like this, and in this country the people worry that she doesn’t like to be spoken to at all, but they cannot stop trying. No country thinks itself an orphan. In our country, we are never afraid, because it is our country. In our country, we are always afraid, because it is our country. “Good night,” we say, in the way we say it in our country, and in our language that phrase means many different things. Sleep well, sweet dreams, wake in a place the same or better; do not wake in a place that is worse. Let it be worse in some other country. Goodnight, we say. Goodnight.