Tuesday, January 8, 2008

The clouds today wrapped round the blue sky like a belt, a line of white all around the horizon... If you tilt yourself upside down it would look like a real sky with all the pieces where you thought they should be.

Sorta like if you were upside down, this country might look like a real country...

Not the kind of country where universities are expected to be prisons, and straitjackets and where silence is your best friend and independent thought is a handicap...
Not the kind of place where surveillance and a hysteria of scandal mongering have become absurdly holy, and liberty and diversity are considered atrocities...
Not the kind of place where genders are supposed to be so protected from each other, so unknown to each other, so alien that the only thing they know how to do when they meet is no more developed than the feral coming together of wailing cats in our streets...
Not the place where art is dangerous unless it is as still and lifeless as we are supposed to be...
Not the place where families protect you by strapping on the very weapons they want to protect you from and riddling you till there is nothing left of you, or your freedom, to protect...
Not the place where politics is a zoo and we are helping to feed the monkeys.

Maybe if we are upside down long enough, the pressure on what is left of our brains will squeeze out an original thought, or a wild and free idea...

Or maybe just something close to the kind of courage it takes for a woman in this upside down place to stand firm and unswaying... close to the kind of calm that hushes the room when a woman defends against the pranks that should have been left long ago in the backward schoolyards that are the last places that bullies still reign. For the kind of solidarity that comes with people who stand together against the little tyrants that have slithered into the people's house, and smeared our still weeping newborn democracy with a meaninglessness that makes me eye one way tickets like they were the love of my life.

I think maybe some of you have been upside down for a while...because it seems so pretty once again that people are gathered in the building built for the people... And the sky looks right again.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." Camus

12 comments:

UmmEl3yal said...

Sit upright dear and look closely into the horizon and you will see hope coming carried by the young people who left school today to support their freedom!

kwtia said...

indeed :)

Anonymous said...

you write so unbelievably beautifully.

Anonymous said...

I love your writing style

EXzombie said...

I don't know if it's my first comment on one of your posts, but let me thank you for a charming style, will wait for more, so keep up the good work

DiLLi O MiLLi said...

Very impressive @ Well said SiS.
:)

But I think being upside down long enough will destroy what ever left of our brains !!

They say we are a "Democratic Country" !!! How come without freedom ??!!

None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free !!
Goethe


.

Amethyst said...

This is too well written to not share. I hope you don't mind:)

Anonymous said...

Can you make a difference???

Anonymous said...

Your gentle and poignant eloquence is mightily moving.

We live in the land that lies through the "looking glass". If we are not the Alice's, then we are the Mad Hatters, the Duchesses, the Kings and Queens of Hearts. The Dormouse. Caterpillar's locked in a Freudian embrace with our hookah's to dull the pain.

This is who we Kuwaitis are nowadays, mostly.

Allow me to quote you back to you:
"Or maybe just something close to the kind of courage it takes for a woman in this upside down place to stand firm and unswaying... close to the kind of calm that hushes the room when a woman defends against the pranks that should have been left long ago in the backward schoolyards that are the last places that bullies still reign. For the kind of solidarity that comes with people who stand together against the little tyrants that have slithered into the people's house

To stand unswayed by the little tyrants who daily wreak dangerous bits of havoc to destroy souls bit by bit is no longer just an option. Standing unswayed is one of the few remaining tactics of survival we have left.

I sometimes feel like Kuwait is dying a most unspeakably sad and undignified death.

And my final broody thought for the day on our Kuwaiti existence:

"I do not wish to be born. In the first place, it makes me shudder to think of all the things I shall inherit from my father - the insanity alone is bad enough..."

- Ryunosuke Akutagawa in Kappa - it is the response of a fetus, when asked if it wishes to be born...

Anonymous said...

Freedom is a myth created by our idealizing mind. Freedom to some is a 7jab, freedom to some is a beard. While to others, freedom is simply just breathing fresh air. Freedom is what ever brings you joy in life, unless you, or someone else tells you otherwise.

If utopia, were to exist, we must undoubtedly would have to live it laying upside down.

White Wings said...

i've been sitting on my head for quite sometime now, i like it this way, things make sense :)
outstanding ...keep it up

F. said...

Very well written piece...
You make a great point...
Keep it up :)