The best metaphor I know for being a Middle Eastern poet, especially one trying to survive inside American institutions, is learning which words make authority relax its grip. Studies suggest that “How may I help you, officer?” is safer than “What’s the problem?” Studies suggest that “My pleasure” is preferable to “No problem,” because even naming the existence of a problem, even to deny it, risks sounding oppositional. This idea appears in a poem by Solmaz Sharif, but it also appears everywhere else: in airports, job interviews, classrooms, and police encounters; in the quiet studio apartments where Arab poets write their first manuscripts while accumulating rejection letters that never quite say why. We learn early that language is not neutral. Words do not merely describe reality; they negotiate it. Certain phrases calm power. Others alert it. To say problem is to suggest friction, and friction invites scrutiny. So we edit ourselves. We replace honesty with courtesy. We smooth our sentences until they can pass through metal detectors unnoticed. This is not politeness, it is strategy. It is survival. And those of us who come from marked identities understand this intuitively, in our bodies, long before we can edit it on the page. And so we become fluent in erasure. We master a grammar that avoids accusation, avoids refusal, avoids naming harm too directly. We learn how to speak in ways that keep us safe, employed, publishable, alive. So Babylon, once imagined as a place of abundance, myth, and language itself, a city so powerful it generated stories, has learned how to speak back. Its modern dialect is procedural, militarized, command-based. It does not ask questions; it issues instructions. What was once a center of meaning has become a site of control. What was once magical is now operational. And those of us who still write from its ruins must learn, carefully, which words can be said aloud, and which ones must be smuggled in disguised as something else in the face of power.

A senior U.S. military officer has said he is willing to apologize for the damage American troops caused to Babylon, an apology that arrives only after the destruction has been documented, photographed, and folded into official history. According to a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation, after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. Marines built a helicopter landing pad directly on the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon. To reinforce the site, troops filled sandbags with archaeological fragments, pieces of the city itself, turning history into construction material. Helicopters were then flown in and out of the area, and their vibrations caused at least one ancient roof to collapse. None of this was secret, and none of it was accidental; it was simply deemed acceptable. For more than a thousand years, Babylon was one of the most important cities in the world, a center of architecture, law, and myth. Under Nebuchadnezzar II, it was home to the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The city eventually fell to the Persians under Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C., but even conquest left much of Babylon intact. What centuries of war did not erase, modern occupation managed to damage quickly and efficiently. When John Curtis, a leading authority on Iraq’s archaeological sites, visited Babylon at the invitation of Iraqi antiquities experts, he reported “substantial damage.” Ancient brick pavements more than 2,600 years old had been crushed by military vehicles. Trenches had been cut directly into archaeological layers. Decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate had been pried loose, leaving visible cracks and gaps. Vast amounts of sand and earth, visibly mixed with archaeological fragments, were gouged from the site to fill thousands of sandbags and metal mesh baskets. Babylon, once a city that produced language, meaning, and myth, had been reduced to a military depot. What it meant no longer mattered. What it could be used for did.

The last time someone wrote seriously about this was more than a decade ago, which is how silence usually works: it stretches long enough that it starts to feel like consent. I catch myself asking, Why do Arabs never speak up? and then immediately distrust the question, because it assumes speech is simply a matter of bravery, not access, not accent, not the quiet math of consequence. I think it’s a language barrier, but not just vocabulary, a power barrier, something felt more than understood. America, in this sense, is like the white kid in class who comes over to your house, eats the last plate of food without asking, and then jokes the next day about how you looked hungry during lecture. It takes, renames the taking, and laughs as if hunger were a personal failure. I notice this most clearly in small, bodily habits. I get into a taxi and sit in the front passenger seat, what I was taught back home, a gesture of respect, closeness, trust, and the driver looks at me like I’ve crossed an invisible line. I’ve done something wrong without intending to, and now the burden is on me to explain or correct it. These moments teach you when to speak and when to stay quiet. America has always drawn chalk lines around our bodies, stepped over them, and then celebrated the stepping. You learn quickly that politeness is conditional, that kindness depends on who feels powerful that day. Everyone is as nice as the last thing that made them feel important. And if you don’t learn how to speak inside that reality, you learn how to disappear.

I write in a poem: “Dear singers, how shameful it is to name your arenas “Babylon” when the crumbled remains of Babylon itself are nothing more than a U.S. military base now.” I was thinking specifically of Lady Gaga, of the way an arena tour can be called Babylon and be met with applause, lights, devotion, while the word’s actual history sits buried under sandbags and logistics. What unsettles me is not just that Western audiences don’t notice, but that many Middle Eastern fans don’t either. We cheer along. We learn when irony is allowed and when it’s safer to swallow it. The word Babylon becomes aesthetic, mythic, profitable, detached from the place itself, which has already been detached from protection. Much of the damage to the site was not caused by bombs or firefights but by infrastructure, the quiet violence of preparation. Roads, trenches, barriers. The work was largely carried out by Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which, until 2000, had been run by Dick Cheney. This is the part that rarely survives into pop language: Babylon wasn’t only occupied; it was outsourced. When the archaeologist John Curtis documented the damage, he identified destruction in at least twenty areas of the site, while stressing that his findings were not exhaustive, some sections were inaccessible due to landmines, others simply ran out of time. Even damage, it turns out, can exceed its own documentation. One of the most disturbing examples was the Ishtar Gate, the sixth-century B.C. structure built under Nebuchadnezzar II. While the upper sections now reside safely in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, the foundations remained on site, and were damaged. Ten of the dragon reliefs showed signs of gouging, likely from looters attempting to pry out decorated bricks. In nine cases, this damage had not existed when Curtis photographed the site in 2003. Which is to say: the harm continued after the cameras arrived. Babylon kept breaking even as it was being “secured.” And somewhere else, an arena filled with people chanting the same word, Babylon, as if it had never belonged to anyone in the first place.

What’s difficult to ignore is the gap between this metaphorical Babylon and the real one: a city whose ruins were turned into a military base, whose bricks were crushed, whose dragons were gouged out. Gaga’s Babylon is glamorous, self-referential, safe. It exists entirely inside the arena, where history is repurposed as atmosphere and nothing is asked of the listener except participation. The problem isn’t that she uses the word; it’s that she uses it as if it were empty. This is especially unsettling given who Gaga once was. Early in her career, she positioned herself, credibly, as a public advocate for people pushed to the margins: LGBTQ+ communities, people of color, those whose bodies and desires were routinely legislated, mocked, erased. She spoke loudly when it mattered domestically, when the risk was manageable, when the audience was already leaning toward applause. But activism, like language, does not stop at borders. When conversations turn outward, toward the Middle East, toward the hanging of gay people, toward imperial violence, occupation, and silence, Gaga goes quiet. Not because the issues are unclear, but because they are inconvenient. Because they risk alienating markets. Because the job, perhaps, feels finished. But international fame does not come with an expiration date on responsibility. You don’t get to clock out of solidarity once your audience is secure. When you name your song “Babylon,” when you tour the word across continents, when you profit from its weight while ignoring its wounds, you are not just babbling, you are choosing which histories deserve volume and which ones can be muted. And that choice, however melodic, is not neutral.

Like Lady Gaga, like most celebrities, like most Americans, social justice tends to stop neatly at the nation’s edge, as if empathy were issued with a passport and quietly expires once you leave domestic airspace. Inside the border, outrage is loud, eloquent, merchandised. Outside it, things get complicated, accents appear, facts require context, and suddenly silence passes for restraint. The work, we’re told implicitly, has already been done. The performance was sufficient. I consume the news and pop culture the way an animal watches the world from behind railings, alert, aware, trapped. I can see everything, understand enough, and still be unable to intervene. Sometimes I have a thought, something sharp, specific, unmarketable, and I do what we’re trained to do: I search for it online, hoping someone else has already said it, hoping I won’t be alone in thinking it. And no one has. Or worse, someone almost has, but stops short, softens it, makes it polite. That’s when you realize how narrow the script is. What gets said circulates endlessly; what doesn’t might as well not exist. And so the silence isn’t empty, it’s curated. It’s enforced. It’s doing exactly what it’s meant to do.

I leave the house and see a sign reading Abortion Clinic, a sign that says Solve World Hunger, a sign that says Plant a Tree. Language everywhere, moral instruction laminated and nailed into the ground. But I never see signs that say Being gay is punishable by death in parts of the Middle East, or Ceasefire now, or Journalists disappear for writing the wrong sentence. There are limits to what fits on a sidewalk without causing trouble. Some truths are considered actionable; others are deemed impolite, or worse, too political, which is the phrase celebrities and politicians use when they mean this will cost me something. Sometimes I catch myself wondering what it would take for people to look up. Imagine Lady Gaga naming an arena tour Gaza. The outrage would be immediate. Headlines, think pieces, boycotts. Not because the word lacks meaning, but because it has too much. When she called a tour Babylon, no one asked what had happened to Iraq, or what continues to happen there. Babylon was safe, ancient, aesthetic, emptied of consequence. Gaza would not be. ISIS would not be. Palestine will never be, because those names still bleed. And bleeding doesn’t sell well under stadium lights. But here’s the part I can’t avoid: why do I keep asking her to do it? Why do I keep waiting for a celebrity to speak first, as if moral permission travels downward from fame? Why do I want someone else to absorb the risk, say the sentence, take the hit? The truth is that idolization is a convenience. We elevate people so we don’t have to act. We outsource courage the way Babylon was outsourced, through contractors, through brands, through voices loud enough to drown out our own hesitation. When they fail to speak, we get to feel disappointed without feeling responsible. This doesn’t absolve them. International platforms come with international obligations, whether anyone asked for them or not. Silence, when amplified, is not neutral. But neither is dependence. The fantasy that change arrives via a microphone, that justice needs a headliner, that history moves because the right person finally tweeted, it keeps us watching instead of participating. I know this because I do it, too. I refresh. I wait. I hope someone else will say it cleaner, louder, safer. Meanwhile, the damage continues quietly. At Babylon, hundreds of thousands of square meters were covered in gravel for vehicle parks and storage, compacted and chemically treated, the earth mixed irreversibly with archaeological remains. Trenches were cut into undisturbed deposits. History was contaminated not by spectacle, but by logistics. This is how erasure actually works: not with explosions, but with preparation. Not with villains, but with systems. And no celebrity can fix that for us. Which means the question isn’t who should speak for us, but why we’ve been trained to believe we can’t speak without permission.

I genuinely believe we don’t just elect the least qualified people, we also grant celebrities a kind of moral diplomatic immunity, a permission slip to do and say whatever they want without ever being asked to account for it. How is Lady Gaga, who named a song Babylon, who toured the word across continents, never once asked about Babylon itself? About Iraq? About what that word refers to when it stops being aesthetic and starts being real? If you Google hard enough for outrage, you’ll not find it; if you Google for accountability, you mostly won’t too. Gaga releases Babylon, the culture applauds, and Iraq remains background noise. Years pass. Nothing happens. Only this essay shows up late, like a receipt no one asked for. This is how abstraction works. It’s like eating garlic bread and realizing the butter isn’t just butter, it’s butter plus hydrogenated soybean oil, something technically edible, technically legal, but quietly substituting itself for the real thing. That’s my issue with everything. Babylon the song is not Babylon the city. Babylon the brand is not Babylon the ruin. One is smooth, marketable, untroubling. The other is fragile, cracked, and inconvenient to acknowledge. The last outsiders to visit the ruins of Babylon did not come as tourists or scholars; they came in tanks and helicopters. Archaeologists have documented the damage: vibrations from repeated landings, tremors from armored vehicles, trenches cut into undisturbed ground. The Iraqi archaeologist Hadi Mussa Qataa, guiding reporters through the site, described how modern military presence blighted a landscape that had survived millennia of conquest. This isn’t metaphor. This is physical harm. This is what happens when history is treated as terrain. According to reporting from 2008 by Al Arabiya English, Iraqi archaeologists were already pushing for Babylon to be included on UNESCO’s list of protected World Heritage sites—a move that might, even then, have slowed the damage and allowed scholars to return to excavate what remained. The word might has now aged poorly. More than a decade later, Babylon still exists in a state of conditional care: acknowledged just enough to be referenced, not enough to be protected. This is the familiar pattern. Destruction first. Documentation second. Concern delayed until it becomes archival. By the time the alarm is translated into English, formatted as a report, and quietly filed away, the cultural moment has already moved on. If there’s a problem here, it isn’t just Gaga. It’s the culture that lets symbols circulate freely while consequences stay buried. We keep the word. We discard the place. And then we act surprised when history feels hollow, when language stops meaning what it names.

I keep wondering what this kind of silence trains us to become. I’m surrounded by people who are educated, politically fluent, leftist, attentive, people who can diagram power in any domestic context you give them, and yet the Middle East barely enters the conversation, as if it exists outside the range of acceptable concern. I start to suspect that Babylon might be my Babylon, while everyone has their own version of Babylon. I first understood this in jail, of all places, when the man in the cell next to mine slid three novels through the bars and asked about my Iraqi mother. We talked about books, about sentences, about how language moves when it’s trapped. Then he told me about the military, where he’d been, what he’d seen, what never left him. What followed me out of that space was the realization that silence is not neutral, it’s instructional. It teaches restraint. It teaches timing. It teaches you which losses are shareable and which ones should be professionally internalized. The word secure is part of this instruction. Babylon was declared secured. The base was secured. The site was stabilized. And yet it kept breaking. Roofs collapsed. Pavements cracked. Ancient ground was contaminated by gravel, fuel, vibration. Security didn’t stop the damage; it merely reorganized it. The harm became procedural, slow, normalized. This is how things break now, not all at once, but under supervision. Babylon, in this sense, isn’t just a city. It’s a template. It’s the Middle East as a whole, declared stable while actively deteriorating, labeled strategic while being hollowed out, discussed endlessly but protected only in theory. Everything is secured except what actually matters. Language survives. Music survives. Metaphor survives. The place itself absorbs the cost. And we are trained, carefully, to accept this as normal, to believe that collapse only counts when it’s spectacular, that slow damage is just the background noise of history. This is what silence produces: people who can recognize harm but not interrupt it, people fluent in critique but unsure how to apply it beyond borders. Babylon doesn’t fall anymore. It’s managed. And that management, polite, bureaucratic, well-defended—is what keeps breaking it, even as we’re told everything is under control.

Subscribe

[10:49 PM, JUNE 7TH]

My second 

best cigarette 

ever.

*

You

sounding these numbers: 

*

“10:49pm, June 7th” 

“10:49pm, June 7th” 

*

So I 

never forget 

how tender. 

*

Later I thought 

this is how 

it is going 

to sound to 

my lukewarm 

sack of flesh 

after I cut  

my wrists 

in the bathtub.  

*

The paramedics

just repeating 

numbers.  

*

My soul 

will not 

be able 

to lift up 

a glass 

of water 

even after 

all of that.   

*

I will 

hover over 

all of them

*

And I will 

not relate 

to any 

of them, 

but to my 

used Q-tip 

discarded in

the trash bag.  

*

Lungs so diseased, 

you don’t even 

want to 

undress me, 

my love.  

*

Men before you 

have hit me

harder than I 

hit this typewriter, 

not even for 

fifty dollars. 

*

Crossing my legs 

as rough hands, 

with grime under 

their nails, 

going inside my 

underage self

in backseats. 

*

They say 

no one 

ever finds 

the words; 

that is 

why I 

broke many 

vases.  

*

Landlords won’t 

come to my 

doorsteps 

to fix a leak 

or a dripping 

faucet, 

unless with an 

eviction letter.  

*

My typewriter 

says things 

back to me:  

*

“Why won’t 

you find 

a knife 

instead of 

pressing 

my keys?” 

*

I said, 

“I paid 

the rent.” 

*

“I have 

twenty three 

days left.” 

*

And thirteen cigarettes 

until I quit 

for you,

my love. 

*

I wash 

my fingertips 

with scented 

soap

*

Before they 

circle your 

lips 

and ride 

your tongue 

like a 

wave.  

*

Your mustache 

feels like 

a brushstroke.  

*

They say 

no one 

ever finds 

the words,  

and I 

understand 

when I 

look at 

you,  

my love.  

*

I say that 

I am cursed,  

but my skin 

has never known 

a cigarette burn 

yet.  

*

I light one 

and think 

of shaving you.  

*

To paint a painting 

of a panting dog 

pacing inside a locked 

car in one hundred 

and thirty degrees 

weather.   

*

To describe 

how 

I felt.  

*

It will 

move the 

museum visitors 

to tears.  

*

Without incriminating 

my desperately wanting 

to be understood 

self.  

No one wants 

to hear how 

things went.  

*

And when I think 

of myself dead,  

I think of 

that dog.  

*

And when I 

think of the bed 

we use again and again 

to warm up our bodies,  

*

I can hear 

the car doors 

unlock. 

                        Between a bruised peach

                               and a bloodbath 

                  how much do you 

                          want to kill

         Sometimes when it’s dark

                 I light matches and let them 

     burn through my writings 

    and this is what I know about 

              telling my truth 

                 All I know 

            is how our resentments 

      stay baby faced between us 

           And the last time 

                    you cried 

                           it sounded like 

                    my father pawning 

            my mother’s gold earrings 

        You’re as lonely 

              with me 

        as a severed thumb 

                          Your first drink 

                 was in your mother 

          now every time 

    you drink me 

     something in you 

               goes missing 

                            A drunk 

                      sips still water 

                          and outgrows God

             I outgrew God

when you kissed my neck 

in the laundromat  

I become wind 

      and trouble the city of hotels 

            where you might be 

                    without a home 

                         because of me 

                           your speech 

                       carries knives 

                  that tremble 

         at strangers

And If they kill you

           when I am not there

                        I’ll make my tongue 

                a sponge 

           to wash your corpse 

                                         When they come 

                                to take your body 

                       from the morgue

                 I will keep the bag 

             your wallet with our pictures

    and your Bic lighters 

my dreams 

   fill with cows 

       missing their udders without you 

But you’re alive 

         it’s like cashing a winning ticket 

             I never bought in the first place 

         When you become mad at the wall

                    I do the talking 

                          and you bite 

                               my dirtied fingernails 

                                     We’re not lovers 

                                    we’re two children 

                           kicked off the bus 

                for not having book fair money

             I love you so much 

          sometimes I want to dissect you 

        imagine everything you’ve seen 

      printed inside your skull

   I’d tear you open 

just to understand 

        Do you ever think 

             how casual killing is 

                  like water 

                       through forks 

                 Our fathers 

       aim rifles at us 

    we close our eyes 

  and wait decades 

for the shot 

           the God who made 

            fearless dinosaurs 

         also made grown men 

              sick at the sight 

            of two men kissing

Everyone wants 

                   their hands on your life 

                          even the homophobe

                    Everyone  

          wants their hands 

           on our crotch 

       the voice you hear 

             reading this 

                  is half you 

                       half me

                       I am God 

                when I pour hard liquor 

           and the rim never meets my lips

              I am God 

       with a mouthful of you 

          reciting my poems 

               in my head  

          I am not God 

    when cars flip 

and people die 

        I have no citizenship 

           where I live 

                 but I keep a treasure 

                      in my medicine cabinet

                           Where I swallow

                      pink pills and we 

              close the blinds 

       just to kill lust 

where you swallow

        all of me 

             like cracking 

                 a lobster’s socket 

           I’m afraid 

     I might lift 

into the ceiling 

And meet God—

   but I outgrew him.