Love teaches me not to love

Aiub. Ioug. Ayub. Ainou. Aiou. I had as much difficulty pronouncing his Arabic name as I did understanding that our love was not possible in an impossible world.

This name came to destroy, in a way, my West.

Initially, this project was intended to save a man in a vulnerable situation, and for that man to save me from loneliness. I traveled to Tangier, Morocco, to find him, marry him, give him my Europeanized South American papers, and create a new work based on that.

But then Ayoub appeared, and the project collapsed. His name (“the returned one” or “the repentant one”) is very popular in Islamic countries: 115 children with that name were killed by the Zionist state of Israel in the Gaza Strip.

For those dead I give your name to this work that speaks of you, of colonialism, of migration, of Palestine.

And all that I want to kill inside me.

Marina Otero