A Waiting Wretchedness..
Unfortunate in your circumstances ? Anguished ? Agonizing ? Victimized ? Forgotten ?
Wretched creature. A surplus on this earth. There is no place for you.
Wretchedness.
The forgotten people. Left in some corner of this world. Voices unheard. Talking in the dark. In the Nothingness. In the Void. Smiling at strangers, all alone, in recluse...awaiting miracles. The miracle of Death or the miracle of some Divine Intervention. It all becomes the same. It's the waiting in secret anticipation, in a secret hidden hope, somewhere lodged inside of you, that keeps you going...
Otherwise, life is the same. A waiting room in a doctor's office, waiting for the final prognosis. A cubicle in a court room, waiting for the final verdict.
You look around, and you see no one. No doctor, no judge and no jury. Yet it seems, feels like you are in line. You have taken your place in the queue...waiting.
Nothing forthcoming.
Waiting...waiting...and in the waiting, you forget what you have actually been waiting for...
Waiting becomes your state of being, your day to day life...
You hear new names, new parties, lists, you dip your finger in technicolor ink, you smile at the cameraman that comes to film you and you wait some more...
You've waited through it...
Every time you left your home, you saw Death staring you in the eye...enticing you to join Her, in an orgy of other corpses that lay at your doorstep. You pick yourself up, and hop over the bodies like a grasshopper in Spring.
You pretend this is grass, you pretend it is not happening, you pretend...and you wait some more...
The sight becomes familiar, so does the stench...
A deadly violence insinuates itself and occupies your daily language, it becomes your only vocabulary...
You try to tame it. You render it banal, inevitable, a part of your decor, a piece of furniture...and you hop like that Spring grasshopper every time you leave your home...
You say to your neighbor, so and so is bloated, I saw him, Cheba'a mawt - he is satiated with Death...Your neighbor shakes his head, and says - This is the Decree of Allah.
On good days, you color it, and infuse with new sentences, with new demands, exorbitant demands, exorbitant for a wretched forgotten soul like you. Your vocabulary stretches itself beyond the acceptable borders and expands to - security, food, water, electricity...
But the cameraman that comes to film you asks you to say cheese and show your purple ink finger to the world.
You dip your finger in more ink...You even buy it and dip your face in it. Water board yourself in ink...and you repeat the words that everyone wants to hear, you repeat the words from that wretched dried up throat of yours...and you wave your fingers, your hands, your clown face...hoping...
Only to find yourself in that waiting room, waiting...
You are in a waiting room and the pious surround you. Veiled, cloaked,with silver ringed fingers, with rosary in hand...
In the waiting room, they give you sermons. Your eyes swell up with tears, a thousand old tears, for a Hassan, a Hussein...a Karbala fight of a hundreds years old...
Then you remember Hani, Kassem, Ali, Mohammed, Georges, Fayrouz, Yayhia, Omar, Hend, Aicha, Noman, Othman, Mahdi, Bilal, Sarmed, Sawsan...
They are gone. They did not make it to the waiting room.
You feel even more wretched and wait some more...
In the wretched waiting room, you realize that even Allah, has forgotten your names and has forgotten you. And you wait some more...
Painting : Iraqi artist, Mohammed Sami/ The Magician, 2008.
