Reflection on the earthquake in Morocco by Kenza Badi

She stood as a mountain,
a mountain grounding with heartbreak.

With a heavy body, she stood to start the day with the willingness to break days of her bed holding her. She stood with a ghost, taking her hands out of a toxic state of grief.

She opened her phone very slowly.
App
after
app,
she tried to ignore all the notifications,
but could not deny so many messages at once.

She had received messages from people she had loved a decade ago; asking how she was feeling.
And from friends in Palestine and Beirut asking about her safety.
This mix of ‘feeling’ and ‘safety’ was scary; it felt like she couldn’t capture the news.

She shook for a moment and thought about all the scenarios.
The first scenario that came to mind was the war.
She fears the war.

She found out through the news that there had been a heavy earthquake in Morocco.
She googled ‘earthquake’.
Her slim body froze.

She called her mother and sisters, but no one responded. She thought that her mother had died, and her sisters were hanged underground. She started grieving all the joyful moments of her childhood. Her grief transferred to gentle fear. Somatic fears need to be relieved urgently. She started crying, thinking of the funerals and of the last goodbye. Death approached her as a perfect witness.

She walked in the streets of a city, crying alone. Hugging the trees and kissing the walls. The wind spirals were her family, even the rocks grieved with her. She slept in a fiery heaven, performing her grief in public, acknowledging her imagination and the reality of her loss. An unknowing loss.

She embodied TikTok’s sorrow.
She didn’t know what she had lost, but she knew she had lost something.
A memory.

Every street she drowned in a river of tears; a public outpouring of grief, song, and laments, mourning her diasporic anxiety.

Anxiety made her aware of how her life was very fragile and her body uncomfortable, since there is a strong connection between her whole being and her motherland and its people. Including her connection to her mother and to all the poems that her exes wrote for her. A connection that felt like a series of grieving emotions knocking on the doors of her inner world. A connection out of the space, a mokro grief as a chapter of her personal stories. A source of sorrow and ancestral depressive sounds.

She didn’t know why, but she was excited to perform herself, pronouncing the English word ‘earthquake’ properly for the first time, E A R T H Q U A K E.

Later in the evening, the mother responded.
And the mother started telling me about the wedding yesterday.
An unforgettable wedding party during an earthquake.
My mother told me that all the women in the party kept dancing.

I do not trust my mother, but I removed an earth of guilt from my fractured rib cage. I always thought that if she were okay, I could push my guilt towards and beyond her to another time in the future.

Just after that,
she will officially die.

Kenza Badi (1992) is born in Casablanca, based in Amsterdam. She is an artist, writer and organizer, and the founder of MarokKueer Zawya.

Kenza Badi: “I removed an earth of guilt from my fractured rib cage”