CREATIVE NONFICTION

How to Say ‘Survival’ in Latin

Published in Hayden’s Ferry Review Issue 75 | Nominated for Best American Essay 2025

To the professor that can’t stand me anymore: it’s the first time this semester that I’m actually doing your assigned homework. I have the Latin final tomorrow, but my friends are all in jail. Dear God, please get them out before I’ve memorized these vocab terms. I’m terrified. I just want to be there and see them released. I want to stand in the blustery cold outside of Hennepin County Jail and scream in the dark until the mayor decides the jail doesn’t deserve them anymore. Professor, I just want to protest. I have 200 words to memorize in Latin, but not one of them is freedom. I have 200 words to learn in this dead language and not one is capable of saving my dying blood. 

I know. I know you’re sick of me, Professor. I know you can’t offer me as many extensions as there are dead children; I know you’re not capable of granting an extension on a single Gazan life–but is there anything you can do to help? I’m going to panic. My sixteen-year-old cousin is in jail by himself. I can’t get him out but I can’t focus on reading Virgil. I can’t focus on reading anything but a slogan on a picket sign telling the world he’s innocent. 

He doesn’t deserve to be there–none of them do. The news is lying and saying they blocked a highway. They didn’t. They just drove slow. They were driving slow enough to make sure the roads knew which bones it buries. They were driving too slow for complicity to commute to the echo chamber. Does the echo chamber have an address? If God is a real estate agent, will he promise someone this Zion, too? The police are upset. I want to tell them that I, too, am upset that the road to liberation is slow. We only drive at the speed limit it gives us.

Remember how you taught us that a Latin verb form changes depending on the person performing it? My friends performed whatever the verb is for trying to keep your Palestinian blood alive. And now? Now, their mugshots are viral flashcards. A poker deck laid out for the world to pass around and gawk and jeer about over liquor and Fox. On Twitter, the nicest ones are wishing rape on the only hijabi of the group. Others pray that she’s suffocated in her drapes and dragged across the sea. Professor, please forgive me. I’m trying to erase these mugshots from this neo-Nazi Twitter account so I can memorize Latin verb forms instead, but I’m sorry. This is the only verb form I’ve memorized today. 

And now it’ll never leave me. 

——

Professor, how do you say “hero” in Latin? I know the word for “children,” liberi, comes from the word for “freedom,” liberum. Is this a prophecy? Please tell me it is. There’s a picture of this Gazan child that I can’t stop pulling out my phone to stare at every day. He's a hero. A precious hero. A toddler sitting on top of a mountain of rubble; accompanied by a giant, fluffy teddy bear; a Palestine flag; and a radiant, glowing smile like he’s just saved the rubble ridden world. I don’t know what it is that gets me about this picture, why I reach into my pocket or walk all the way across the house just to grab my phone every single day; once, twice, every damn second until I can’t read a sentence of my textbook without doing a routine phone-check–maybe it’s that teddy bear that gets me. The teddy that has a better chance of being alive in a land where felt is stuffed better than flesh. Maybe it’s the boy's smile, his joyous, adorable smile. Or maybe it’s because he looks just like my younger brother, Muneer, the soul of my soul. Maybe it’s because my family was one arbitrary migration away from being exiled to the open air Zoo in 1948, and Muneer could’ve been one of them–what is the boy’s name? I don’t know. 

In class, you taught us that the Romans had only nine names for men. Maybe if the boy were Roman, I would’ve had a 1 in 9 chance of knowing who he really was, at least part of it. But instead, dear boy, your identity is a wild card.  You could be a demographic threat or terrorist. Future pedophile or barbarian. You could be a human animal or a child of darkness. Or, you could be gone. You could be gone. You could be gone.

I know the Latin word for “dream” but not for “nightmare.” If I did, I would write all over my homework, a cryptic Latin, “Professor, I’m having nightmares about my family being in Gaza. I’m not eating or sleeping. Please help.” But Sana, they’re professors, not therapists. What could you guys do except offer extensions but not solutions, offer to prolong the slow death but not resolve it, like in Gaza? I know the Latin word for “dying” but not “grieving.” I know the Latin word for “people” but not your people, a phrase that doesn’t quite mean family but that kind of kin whose body bags you want to cradle forever and never allow to be lowered into the ground. 

Professor, how do you say “survival” in Latin? School used to help me survive depression, but now I’m just staring at you lifelessly when you lecture in class. I’m sorry. I haven’t been in my body for months. If I’m in it, I wear it like a costume. If my body is a temple, who exiled me yet again from my home? I used to listen to my favorite musicals on the way to school, but I’ve learned the actors are disingenuous and I get sick even thinking about them–all of them. All of them and their corporate executive parents; all of them and their stupid black Instagram squares and designer black suits and Google Talks interviews about how “this character thinks this thing about social change”--what the hell do you know about heroes and resistance when you’re vlogging from the Met gala? Google would never invite a real Elphaba. 

A bunch of Broadway stars sang a rendition of “Bring Him Home” from Les Miserables for the Israeli hostages. I sure would like to go home, too. Haven’t heard any renditions to bring us home, 76 years later, 6 million of us. No, we took the home. We are Jean Valjean, only we didn’t go after the bread, but mere crumbs. We’re Jean Valjean, but from Javert’s perspective. And who is Javert? They wouldn’t know it themselves. 

----

There’s this guy that sits in front of me in my chemistry class. Blonde, plays baseball, seemingly majoring in Exercise Science. Gossips with the girl with the yoga pants and the sports jerseys about the latest team tea. Shrugs to himself when you ask him if he knows what the next part of the project is asking. “Uhh-i-dunno,” he says, looking back down at his phone. 

His name is Collin. It’s the middle of a genocide, and I’m the one doing his whole section of the group project. I’m sitting here solving chemistry problems in one hand and scrolling through charred children in the other, saving his grade while scrambling to save exploded flesh–and he knows it all. He knows exactly what I’m dealing with, what I’m dealing with because of him. He knows but doesn’t bat an eye–not at the fact that I’m saving his ass, not at the fact that I’m doing it while consuming collages of minced bones, all while he gets to browse TikTok skits like it’s nothing. This kid 100% knows but doesn’t give a damn. 

On the first day of class, we were assigned to write community guidelines as a group to make everyone feel welcome. One of the guidelines the class decided on was being supportive of group members that are struggling and need help getting caught up to speed. I informed my group right away that my family was being slaughtered. I also informed them that their wallets paid for it. (Well, I mean I didn’t say it like that; I said it nicely.) But he just stared. He’s probably never thought about justice except when assigned to write an obligatory MLK Day paper in 9th grade comp. Probably wrote about turning the other cheek. 

I often get up and give a speech about the genocide to my peers, in my chemistry class, in my Latin class. I don’t ask permission; I just do it. Lord knows Goliath never even inquired about forgiveness after suffocating my brothers under the rocks. 

There are the kids that smile at me. The ones that thank me and snap and “mhmm.” There are the unresponsive ones who I manage to find some grace for. Maybe they’re awkward? Quiet? Then there are the ones that straight up disgust me. The ones who scoff or just stare at me apathetically as I lament, of toddlers sleeping in sewage, of the father that opened his dead son’s body bag just to gift biscuits to his corpse before they part–all these guys know how to do is stare. They know me well enough that I’m doing their whole damn project, but then treat me like a stranger and stare–stare at the dumb social justice warrior; stare at the angry brown girl; stare at that triggered classmate always shouting about those same old starving kids in Africa or Asia or whatever orient is too far East of the West.

I’ll never forgive him. I’ll never forgive him or his soccer girlfriend; I’ll never forgive him or every last one of the despicable people that watched my people caged like human animals, banging on the bars of the enclosure and said nothing.

Professor, how do you say “betrayal” in Latin? There are people I will never, ever speak to again. Long time “friends” who in over 100 days have not had one word to say to me. Not “I hope you’re ok,” not a heart emoji. Just a “seen ten hours ago,” and then ten days ago, and then never. Just pictures of their tacos and their sundaes while the ice cream trucks in Gaza have become mass graves. I wanna tell them, I begged you to bear witness. I begged you and you ignored me. If you just woke up, congratulations, but you’re 13,000 kids too late. In college, we don’t get retakes on tests. They should be used to things that are similarly unforgiving, like a bloodline that’ll never be brought back. There are close friends that never even bothered to respond to my countless messages about my family’s slaughter. The most I got from one was a, “thanks for sharing! I am so amazed to see how this crisis activated you.” Activated me? It fucking killed me. It absolutely fucking killed me. 

Wanna know when I first learned that I deserve to be alive? It was when Ovid said so. Ovid the poet, the one you taught us about in class. He, a Roman, wrote millennia ago that Palestine exists; not an invention, not a fabrication, not the thief of our Canaanite home. I wonder if that’s palatable enough evidence to persuade my white friends. But I don’t care anymore; I have a new family. A family that is chained together, if not in jail, chained to this fight. I have a family that’s outside Hennepin County Jail sheltering from the cold under the fragile home we’ve made of cardboard signs, and how I wish I could be there with them. Instead, I’m lying on this couch trying to memorize Latin imperfect verbs. Imperfects are verbs with no definitive end, actions that supposedly happened in the past but looped perpetually. Like, “Gaza was being slaughtered indefinitely”  as opposed to “Gaza was wiped out forever.”  I’m sorry, Professor; I promised I’d be a good student by the end of the semester but it’s going on with no end, the bombing, the shaking inside of me. If my body is a temple, mine is vibrating like it’s about to be leveled. How do you say “survival” in a dead language that managed to outlive 13,000 kids combined? If a Latin verb changes depending on the person it’s attached to, tell me what survival will look like when attached to your traumatized wreck of a student.

For now, I’m holding on by doing what my people taught me to do. Move around and pace constantly in search of the closest thing to being safe. Someone commented on it recently: “I notice you always get up to walk outside during class.” Funny, I think my people have never been allowed to stay in place. Migration is in our DNA. For now, dispossession is imperfect. I’ll learn to stop moving one day. It’ll happen as soon as the world quits staring at my displacement and helps me get my home back.