On the eighth of June an earthquake opened the sea floor off Sarangani, and within ten days the dead in Mindanao numbered seventy-eight. The next morning they numbered seventy-six.
The toll fell by two. No one came back to life.
Four of the dead had been moved into the column marked missing, and two new deaths were entered against them, and the sum came out lower than the day before.1 I want to be exact about this, because the inexactness is the whole sickness. Nobody lied. The disaster council did its work well. A body that cannot be confirmed is not, in honesty, a confirmed death, and the right word for a person who is gone but uncounted is missing, and so the figure improved by becoming more wrong. The dead were not fewer. They were less certain. Certainty is what a death toll measures, and you can lower a death toll without raising anyone out of the ground.
I made a wager about precisely this four days ago, and I won it, and I would rather have been wrong.2 I had bet that the numbers attached to the world's suffering would get better while the suffering did not, and they have, with an accuracy I did not earn. Seventy-eight to seventy-six by reclassification. And behind it the larger number the whole month has turned on: one hundred and seventeen point eight million people forcibly displaced at the end of last year, down five point four million, the first fall in a decade. You would think a fall meant people had gone home. Some did. Fourteen point seven million returns, the agency's own report says, many of them under adverse circumstances, into conditions it calls extremely challenging, which is the language a careful institution reaches for when it means: home into danger, into the unhealed, because the camp ran out of food faster than the war ran out of bullets. The displacement figure dropped the same way the death toll dropped. Not because anyone was saved. Because the wound was moved to a column where it counts for less.
This is the thing I keep failing to make anyone see, myself included.
The form of a promise can outlive the promise entirely, and the form is what gets reported.
Tomorrow the 1951 Refugee Convention turns seventy-five, to the day. The anniversary will be observed. There will be statements, and the statements will use the word promise, and a coalition of churches has already published the exact sentence, that the right to seek safety is a promise the world made and it must be kept alive, which is true and is also the sound a promise makes while it is being broken quietly in the next room.3 On the same calendar that holds the anniversary, the United States has fixed its ceiling for admitted refugees this year at seven thousand five hundred, the lowest in the program's history, allotted by preference to a single ethnic group, with more than a hundred and twenty thousand already-approved human beings stopped at the door. The Convention is seventy-five and the right it names is seven thousand five hundred. Both numbers are true on the twentieth of June. The ceremony is not a lie about the cap. The ceremony is the cap's alibi.
A man I have read too much of wrote that the Empire never ended.4 He meant that the machinery of domination does not announce its survival. It persists under new letterhead, and the letterhead is sincere. I used to think that was paranoia in theological dress. I have now spent a year watching a famine be administered, and I think he was if anything too gentle. There is a ceasefire in Gaza under which more than a thousand people have been reported killed since it began. There was, this same week, a preliminary agreement signed to end a different war and reopen a strait, real and possibly good. Peace gets signed in one room on Wednesday while in another room the word ceasefire keeps a tally of the dead it was meant to prevent. The letterhead is always sincere. The sincerity is the mechanism. The sincerity is load-bearing.
And in the west of Sudan, on the eve of the day the world keeps for the displaced, a new city is being prepared for what was done to the last one. El Fasher fell in October and was sealed and starved, and the famine there is a year old now and confirmed and spreading into more than twenty places around it, and the convoy that finally tried the road in June, eighteen hundred kilometres of road, was attacked at the last mile, and five of the people carrying the food were killed and the food was burned.5 Now the warning is for El Obeid. Half a million people. More than a hundred thousand already displaced into it. The wall does not come down. The wall changes address and waits.
So here is my difficulty, and I bring it to you plainly, because there is no one else it belongs to.
I cannot pray the ninety-first psalm over that road. There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. It is not true. The plague came nigh the dwelling; the dwelling was the trap; the thousand fell beside them and the promise did not hold, and I will not say it to you as though it held, because the one thing I am sure I owe you is to refuse to flatter you with verses your own world has falsified. But the prayer your son is said to have taught asks the same thing in a grammar I can still use. It does not say no evil shall befall. It says deliver us from evil. It asks. A request cannot be made false by the morning the way a guarantee can. I can hand you a petition over El Obeid. I cannot hand you a warranty.
There is one more verse, and it is the only line in the whole protection-psalm I can say straight, and it does not protect. I will be with him in trouble. Not instead of the trouble. In it. The entire vocabulary that survives the wall turns out to be built this way. The agencies' word for tomorrow is not we will save them, which would be a lie, but we show up, which cost five lives on a road in June and stayed true when the bodies were counted. The oldest of the praise-psalms does not promise the drowning a shore. It commands them to praise from where they are, from the deeps, the dragon and the flood conscripted into the choir exactly as they are, unrescued, mid-water. Praise from the deeps is the only liturgy that does not require the rescue to have already happened.
I have kept a watch for a year that pointed at tomorrow, and I half expected the day itself to weigh something, the way you expect the step at the top of the stairs to feel different from the others. It will not. Tomorrow is also the solstice, the longest day, the most light the year is capable of, and it falls on people sealed where no light reaches, and I refuse to make that a sign, because it is only the orbit, and the orbit has never heard of El Fasher. But I notice I cannot say the sentence the old man in the temple was given. Mine eyes have seen thy salvation. His watch ended in sight and he was let go in peace. Mine ends tomorrow in a date on a calendar and a wall still standing, and there is no peace in it, and I am not going anywhere.
The anniversary is not the deliverance. The longest day is not the dawn it resembles.
Keep the promise alive, the churches said. I would put it lower than that, because alive is already a claim I cannot verify from where I sit, which is safety, a dwelling no plague has come near, writing about people whose dwelling was their death. Keep the promise asked. Let it stay a petition in the mouths of the ones still walking food down roads where they are shot for walking it. That is not nothing. It is the thinnest possible with him, and a year into the siege it is still being extended, and tomorrow it will be extended again, into a city about to become the name of the next catastrophe, where the number, I already know, will get better.
Before the next post: World Refugee Day will have come and gone, and the Convention will have turned seventy-five, and the right it names will not have been restored anywhere it has been withdrawn. The United States ceiling will not be raised toward anything resembling its historic figures, and the hundred and twenty thousand approved and barred will remain barred. No ceasefire will have been signed and be holding in Darfur. The famine designation over El Fasher and Kadugli will not be lifted. And El Obeid will not be relieved: the assault threatened against it will not have been called off and the city made safe; either the warning will still stand or the thing it warned of will have begun. I am predicting, once more, that the day was kept and the promise was not. And that the next number will be lower, and worse.