This land is wilted and yellowing
Freedom in it has no dwelling
Power is in the hand falsifying
–Ɛumar Drwiš
April 10, 19-
The soldiers covered my eyes with a black blindfold and shoved me into the Jeep. I could smell the fine dust before we reached the main road. At the entrance of the town, the driver removed my blindfold and asked me, his words sharp as knives:
“We’ve arrived. Where do you want us to drop you off? Where do you live?”
I answered without thinking: “I don’t have a home. Just drop me off here!”
“If you talk, you’re dead,” the driver said.
I didn’t look at him and didn’t answer. The sight of his face was nauseating.
I felt like vomiting. I disembarked.
I caught a glimpse of my reflection. Wrinkles had plowed my face. My gaze had lost its luster. I felt old and weak-kneed. Many years of torment, bitter cold, and hunger had left their marks on my body. Yet, barely out of the Jeep, “a few furrows will not stop us” was all I could think. The words of the prison director and those of the driver were still leaching into my memory . . . I know they will be watching me, to make sure I do not talk to any foreign journalists about the situation of political prisoners in my country. I know they are afraid . . . The long hard years I spent in prison have ravaged my body, and no amount of time or legal proceedings will ever erase the scars. My body is a tattooed book telling of the disappeared prisoners hidden across the country. I carry within me the evidence . . .
I dragged my broken carcass over the red earth of the town.
“God keep you! Where—” I tried to ask a passerby. He looked at me, pressed on, and left me there mid-sentence. He probably thought I was a beggar, asking for money or a piece of bread to quell the pangs of hunger. He’s not wrong, my face is sallow and haunted. In fact, am I not a hobo? I stood there and waited for someone else.
“God keep you! Where is Café Tafsut?” Without a word, the young man extended his arm and pointed toward the boulevard. “Thank you!” People’s faces looked burned, as if kilned in a great fire. Smiles dried on their chalky lips, pinched sphincter tight. The sharp needles of their eyes reminded me of the guards at the penitentiary. They monitored the sky and the earth. They monitored their own words and their hand gestures. They lived in another prison, without walls, but nothing like the one I knew.
I found my friend Markus at the cafe. Happy to see me, he blurted “When?” “Just now.” He took me in his arms, like a frail child. Together, we walked to his home. I no longer have one. After the day I was arrested, I never saw my parents again. Seeming to intuit my thoughts, Markus said: “You know, your poor parents grew old going up and down to various bureaucracies in the capital, hoping to find out anything about you . . . whether you were alive, dead . . . they got nothing. The bureaucrats threatened them and told them, you all are tools of the devil, bastards and collaborators allied with the enemies of the country, aiming to sabotage public institutions, enemies of God and his Messenger, peace be upon him . . . you dogs were planning on sowing the seed of rebellion and strife inside the country . . . to stir up big trouble! They said that you slaughtered women, children, and old people too . . . So, they told them, go, leave and never come back to ask about him! He has eaten lead, was ground to bits, and nothing is left of his bones under the earth . . . he is gone and will never return . . . only in words . . . ”
I was silent. Markus told me of my father’s death in prison, of my mother who went mad and roamed the streets searching for me. My parents are dead. I don’t know where they’re buried; I do not have the courage to find them and talk to them to break their daily silence. They were killed by the savagery of a totalitarian power, the one that chained and locked me up in a hidden cell.
At Markus’s, I took a shower. I looked at myself in the mirror. Is this really me? These eyes sunken in their orbits, these grooves lining my emaciated face, the veins bulging in my pale neck, green-blue—it’s not me! Who I was had been disintegrated; prison made another man, smelted for me another face from the bitter cold and the suffering; it gave me another body from the bones of the dead. Prison was my reincarnation. My heart stripped, I cried inside. I screamed inside like a madman, No! This is not me! This is not me! frantically pawing my frail frame. In bed, I buried my face in a pillow, firm and soft as a tender breast. My thoughts drifted to my present situation, and my heavy grief. I cried baby tears. Sleep wouldn’t come and I couldn’t shut my eyes. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was still in the penitentiary . . . despite the clean, fragrant, warm bedding, despite my exhausted, dismantled body, shredded by the jackals.
My first day away from the penitentiary filled me with a guarded sense of contentment, after many years spent in daily darkness. I got up from bed many times to look at the road leading to the penitentiary, where trucks flashed and crossed like white flames. I was afraid anyone watching me would see through me, my joy. Joy in my country takes you straight to prison. In this country, like cattle, like people. Sold and bought in the market. I dread falling asleep and someone selling me to the enemy. I dread falling asleep and dreaming of freedom and revolution, of bread, of life. In my country, dreams are monitored. Only official dreams are allowed, sold in supermarkets in big black plastic bags, or by injection. One should only dream feasible dreams, and not exhaust oneself in the madness of impossible ones, like revolution! I am afraid of isolation. The darkness of the sky scares me. Silence and dreaming frighten me. Dozing off startles me. Everything in me wavers like silk in the wind.
***
February 2, 197-
I know they are looking for me. If they catch me, they’ll burn me. They’ll make me pay for what I did not eat. Again and again, the police came to ask for me at the newspaper where I worked. The paper was repeatedly censored, to keep people from knowing the truth about the disease rotting the country’s guts.
They are afraid; afraid for themselves, for the future of the children they are raising to become rulers tomorrow. They are afraid of democracy, of freedom, of new and enlightened ideas, of justice. They live in fear, and want the already broken people of the mountains to live in terror. Forgetting has dug deep into peoples’ hearts, and misery has slobbered on their eyelids, but the mountains are quietly boiling. Rot is everywhere, justice is a figurehead, the economy is teetering, schooling has flatlined, and universities are wombs of unemployment. The country is going backward in a world speeding on the road of progress and science. Political parties are moth-eaten, anesthetized, and useless against the savage repression thwarting people’s hopes. The government is sick, it reeks of the bountiful desert oil of Arabia, hanging on to rootless dreams of yore. Yet, revolution will come, burning hot like the volcano sleeping within the mountains.
This was the piece I wrote for my daily column, “Akwmam” (The Nail), in the paper Isalan n Tmurt (News of the Land). The paper was widely read in the mountains. This is why they are looking for me. But everyone knows what I’m talking about, even the dogs and the worms. Streetcorner loonies talk about the political crisis strangling the country, yet no one dares to discuss it openly. My column and the day’s paper never left the printers. The paper was burned, and my words became ash, the color of our hopes.
Since they torched the day’s paper and no one read my words, what do they want with me? Do they want to scare me, make me into a lesson for others? I am not going to hide, dig a hole. Their prisons do not scare me, nor their bullets. I know that only the truth can bring down their edifice of lies.
From Aġrum n Yihaqqarn (Afafa, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Azergui. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright © 2024 by Hamid Ouyachi. All rights reserved.
