Terminal
“The airport was in my childish imagination the perfect junction of life and death. At that place – that is called the terminal as I later learned – it seems that the soul goes through another transformation, taking off shoes and a belt and a jacket in favor of a pass into another world that comes to her. The soul is flying, in paths which were determined for it from the open field, and then experiences an end, another end, towards the next stage, towards being reborn.”
Times, bodies, languages and places are intertwined at the terminal to the life journey of a young woman. The present, with its loves and disappointments, is examined together with the family’s history in which the experience of immigration and the pain of the language resulting from it are still very vivid. Together with them, a possible future of the place where she lives is laid out. This future is already embodied in the construction sites and the busses, on the beach, in the light rail and in the continuous change of the urban landscape – and of the landscape of the soul. All these are a platform for thinking of the human body, intimacy and of violence.
Zohar Elmakias was born in 1987 in Ramle and lives between Jaffa and New York. She is a researcher, writer, and a translator.
Published: December 2019
By Zohar Elmakias
Kav Adom Dak Series – Hakibbutz Hamuchad Publishing House Ltd.
