Chapter 1
An Introduction
(We were trapped and squeezed, on a boiling afternoon, one August, one tiring day. We were on our way to the great city of Zarqaa where we lived. We were in a service cab, due to terrible poverty and low income.
Three strangers.. we were, and as for the fourth, he was filled with nostalgia, possessed by the spirit of patriotism, singing songs of freedom and playing the music of loyalty to our beloved country which we adore endlessly.)
(Lost pieces)/
Perhaps it is a little unfair how the spoken excerpt above ends up being an introduction for dark monologues… in the color of sorrow…
For the vile actions of the vermin…
For the woe of the grim pains of wandering..
For the conversations of those tired heavy foreheads; dripping with sweat and bleeding sorrows and bewilderment… as if the earth cracked with volcanic flaming anger and the sky thundered with catastrophic, destructive sorrow.
The first of those condemned people approved. Everyone who was around and about reacted with anger, provoked by what he had done. They described his action as red blooded, red like a provoked meteor!
It was like a piece of remains.. but.. with grudges as well. An ignited grudging fire it was…even more than that.
And.. so it was.
They started that fire and ignited it with their verminous grudges. As a matter of a fact we remember, with utter patience we had nothing but, that it was (…) until it became:
Like a poison…
As light as a needle…
As small as a mosquito’s wing…
And the ultimate struggle was to amiably admit that fact.. regardless of how hard that was!
Nonetheless, in between one death and another, we remember, more than ever, that (every soul has a record keeper)…
(Found pieces)
It (this introduction) is destined, today only, perhaps, to become fuel for a limping run.. nothing more nor less.
Even if within the horizons of this novel- these monologues- a small answer appears to be a prophecy of some kind, I might then.. try to collect that. Then my pen and I are going to have a huge weight, a burden dropped off our shoulders. Then we might be able to fly, we hope, to be able to catch the souls of the dying bleeding words!
At the start of writing- the end, the struggle.. revealing secrets. It is exactly like escaping the raging dogs of some other Khaled Safwan1 inside the maze of another Karnak.. one that is darker.. one that is beyond the ability of any novelist no matter how good and prolific he is.. one that no one can dare to write!
Perhaps another Ragab2 can, but under the condition that it is written with the blood of a martyr, instead of another abdel-Rahman Munif in a different Sharq al-Mutawaset “the Middle East”. That is because the vermin of yesterday did not know the mechanisms of their sons: the vermin of today- after they transformed Arabic into a foreign language, sent its national identity further than the Atlantic Ocean, and muddled its purity and virginity into dirtiness. Then, Arabi3 could not even dare to shed a drop of blood at the side of the raped land.
And how.. at the sight of the strongest.. those Stalin-like.. those who are the most barbaric?
As for those virtuous pure virgins, how whilst there is no hero, a rescuer, a grandson of Mutasem4 to answer a roar by a free Arab from a free nation?
How.. whilst there no inherited sword to satisfy the raging with another Yarmouk5?
How.. did they change it from a burning angry red fire to cold blue ice?
Until the break of the promised dawn.. at least in writing to say the very least. Here we are.. writing stories- commandments about a Barraq who does not sleep when a Layla6 is screaming.
And we handcuff the hands of the joy-makers in this land, then we repaint his art with hammers. And.. we pray that God is there to stop it. To stop those who replaced our children’s wheat with concrete. To stop those who ruined the warmth of yesterday. To stop those who double-crossed every single good man out there.
And.. to God only we plead, initially and eventually, and we pray that the sun of Arab nationalism will rise again to bring back freedom and a heyday to the brave ladies and gentlemen.
