Marcello Di Cintio begins his new book, Pay no heed to the rockets, with a poem and an image: a girl in a green dress. The poem is “Apology to a Faraway Soldier” by [a:Mourid Barghouti|16083673|Mourid Barghouti|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1520787914p2/16083673.jpg], the eminent Palestinian poet and novelist born near Ramallah and officially stateless since 1967. For Barghouti, “Writing is a displacement—a displacement from the normal social contract—a displacement from the common roads of love and enmity. The poet strives to escape from the dominant, used language—to a language that speaks for the first time. If he succeeds in escaping and becomes free—he becomes a stranger at the same time. The poet is a stranger—in the same degree as he is free.” Di Cintio takes us on a different path into a conflict that for many has become cloaked in years of violence, misinformation, propaganda, and deadening familiarity. Places become their tragedies. Marcello calls that the “cruel accounting of death and despair.” The different path he chooses in this beautiful book is through the arts and that girl – through the “longing for beauty” her image awoke in him, the desire to go beyond the cruel accounting and find the life and art that stubbornly refuses to be shaped only by conflict. This is not to say that art is somehow immune of above the conflict. In crushing detail Di Cintio describes an Israeli attack on an the Sakakini cultural and arts center in Ramallah. Why destroy a center devoted to writing, concerts and the arts? “They wanted to give us a message that nobody is immune,” the Paletninian poet [a:Mahmoud Darwish|75055|Mahmoud Darwish|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1414535868p2/75055.jpg] said.

Here is his beautiful description of the girl that starts the book, from a photo taken during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014: "The girl-around ten years old- wore a green dress and pink leggings, and her long hair was tied back in a neat ponytail. She pulled books from beneath shattered concrete and cinderblocks and stacked them in her arms. The books were tattered and filthy, their covers dangling from their bindings. But in the last photograph, the girl walked away smiling.”

“Nothing is more beautiful than a story,” Marcello writes. In this book he takes us on a familiar journey, yet makes it deeply, wonderfully unfamiliar, through his unflinching eye – an eye that takes in the pathos and the suffering and the complexity as well as the exquisite persistence of life.
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