Life weapon’s
dictatorship
By: Mamoun ElTilib
Translated By: Ibrahim Jaffar
Introductions:
(Tayfara was a military slave of the Cavalry
Divisions (the Divisions of Knights) which was relegated to the
Sheiks-ministers of Hamaj. He presumably has been enslaved during one of
the sieges of Rajab to the Nuba
Mountains within the course of his
campaign against Kordofan, for he reached the age of reason in the era of Nasser wad Idris. Imaginatively, we would correlate Tayfara’s memories of childhood with those of Dogalo
Doguendan Ari; a Nuba boy of the next generation who, like Tayfara, has been, as a young boy, enslaved and
taken from his native land. Dogalo,
as a young man in his far-off exile, has vividly lived the memory of his
homeland that has been sustained within his soul as a minute world of
landscapes, distant and diminutive shapes; young kings wearing jewels and
straddling horsebacks; steppes of azure color of bubbly plant under the pure
sun and an endless gray torrents of rain punctuated by lightning in the sSeason
of Autumn; solemn rituals performed by chant priestesses presented in the name
of the invisible anaconda; colossal fortifications of stone erected amongst
hilltops’ folds; virgin forests with uncanny fruits and talking animals. All of that is garbed in a wonderful light
guarding the passage between memories and dreams)
Jay Spaulding, THE HEROIC AGE IN SINNAR,
translated by Dr. Ahmed Al-Mo'tasim Al-Sheikh
(When I think
of the multitudes of myths with which life is abounding, I find one that has
visited severe harm upon all, which is the myth of homelands. I hereby mean: why do I have to look at
myself as Argentinean and not Chilean, for instance, or someone from Uruguay? For that I have no clue of an answer. All such myths, which we
forcibly slot into our lives, and which were initiated only to serve hatred,
spite, war and hostility, are extremely harmful, indeed. But I do think that, in the long run,
the legend of governments and nations will be dissipated and we shall be
transformed into… well… cosmopolitans.)
Jorge Luis
Borges, translated by Najla Osman El-Toum
Points:
For the
awesomeness of the impact of war, submerged with the toughest and most
conspicuously effective tools, the role of the human beings scattered upon the
span of (the colonial geographical legacy- Hassan Musa) which is called
“The Sudan” was forgotten, or decidedly overlooked; the role of the individuals
not incorporated within the media’s figures measuring the records of the dead,
injured and displaced people, who have so effectively contributed to
disintegrating the walls blocking the flood of the human values that explode
after every stress peoples confront; especially when the worry of those walls,
which were constructed, with excessive zeal, by “those faces mutable in the
media hallways”), is to dispossess people of life; a matter that goes to
farfetched stages beyond death as there is ever a smiling difference between
swiftly and comfortably slaughtering the animal and so incarcerating it from
play that it is vehemently pushed down towards the vermin of the earth for tens
of years. What we, at the midst of the
countless presently pressing Sudanese issues, want hereby to refer to is to be
summed up in two essential points.
Firstly:
Separating Human beings Through Borders:
Separating
human beings through geopolitical borders is a practical impossibility. But practical impossibilities can,
paradoxically, be realized.
Natural facts could, that is to say, otherwise be counterfeited into the
end of encasing human beings into a particularly preconceived reality
via wheedling them into obstinately subscribing to it. Indeed, the whole world influences in, and is
influenced by, any on-goings in Sudan. Nay, by any event that happens at any spot on
The Earth. But the human definitions of
the word "influence" are often restricted to effecting negative blind
communications amongst human beings.
Thus war has a loud voice within the parliament of the definitions of
the word “influence”. Then there come
the iconic individual leaders with their overwhelmingly repetitive tongues at
the media venues! Thereby resides below
a thick stratum manufacturing education and information. Or otherwise that which so makes
“factuality” and falsifies the facts of nature that it limits human
imagination to boundaries within poorly imaginations which thus portrait the
world the way it claims it is so as to guarantee the interests of
groups apprehensive of the pulling out of the mat of superiority from beneath
their feet.
Reality tells
otherwise. For within the realms of
education, thinking, intellectuality, creative, artistic and technical
production, besides the vocational and technical paths, the word "margin"
goes to the void! To be precise: the
impact of power and wealth on this geographical realm does not exceed the
contributions of Sudanese individuals and their individual communications
anywhere. But the local/global
discourse insists on keeping the long distance between the two influences, thus
eliminates one of them at the expense of the other by turning all into warriors
instead of revealing their effects as constructive workers who do not, as
individual persons, differ from each other in anything!
Marginalization
has, for instance, never stopped a person from being a thinker. But the interpretation of the discourse of
the word "marginalization" has pushed the majority into putting their
talents and personal capacities unto the midst of a war that is always
presented as the only path towards forcefully wresting rights. Hence the glorification of its martyrs and
heroes obscures the peaceful achievements of other individuals.
Consequently the alternative mechanisms of change remain in the wrong hands.
Two pictures have thereby been envisaged to represent the “reality” for the
Sudanese citizen: that of "rebellion" and that of "peaceful
civil resistance." The latter doesn’t yet appear to be founded on any
clear principles. It persists in espousing slogans immersed in a constraining
language; a Salafi jargon potted only for the benefit of the mindset of
the Arab- Muslim man.
Thus it characteristically begins by heading statements and outcomes of
partisan conferences with the traditional Islamic instigation: In the Name
of Allah…. That is up to the end of
the negative manipulation of religious, and “cultural”, terms in which that
man and (his regime?) believe; that never-changing regime reigning since
Sudan’s Independence! Thus the very
essence of the human right is so pulled and placed on the altar of religious
and cultural dialectics, hence the calumniation in war and bloodshed. That
man is transformed, via a criminalization’s mechanism devoid of any
knowledge of human nature and its evident shortcomings, into a ruthless
fiend. Moreover, the culture of that man
is abstracted, within the consciousnesses of those who have been stigmatized
as marginalized, from all that is aesthetic and beneficial. Images are
thus twisted as follows: a marginalized creature, ill-bred, seizing a weapon
laden with the vulgar malice and loathing towards a rank of "socially
decent people"; a marginalized creature whose mores bear nothing but
oppression, rejection and aggression. These images only reflect what is
arbitrarily portrayed by the media and the counter media.
Nevertheless,
the Sudanese peoples, as individuals and collectives, have persistently been
able to communicate within their own realms, as well as with the rest of the
peoples of the world. That is besides
their perception of the geographical rifts which besotted the entity of East Africa which has, until recently, suffered living
outside the contemporary bounds. The
educated elites so set, since Independence, upon the differences to entrench
them by nomenclatures- such as Sudan, Eritrea, Kenya, Chad… to the end of the
land of the formerly known as the colonized countries, presently "the
developing countries"- that nearly everyone Sudanese believed that the
separation of states by concrete, or militarized, walls can separate human beings
notwithstanding their various forms of shared languages: dialects; spoken and
written languages; cooking; music; arts; literature; education; discoveries (of
medicinal drugs, scientific, electronic …etc innovations); principle political
positions and, otherwise, the sharedness of the human materials
with which in his modest daily life the human individual feels, lives, loves
and forms his/her aesthetic appraisals and judgments. By absenting those civil
materials, hence accentuating armed communication in search of justice and
truth, such collective false images have been formed and via them we lost our
sense of a simple fact: that is every human being is categorically different
from the other, and that is that what precisely makes them equal.
I,
notwithstanding agreements or disagreement, refer the reader, in this context,
to a collection of essays, by ustaz/ Kamal El-Jazouli, which has recently been
re-published, with the title of “Once again, for Recollection and History” and
in a series in which he emphasized the human characteristics that naturally
resides deep inside every human being and thus seamlessly allows him/her (more
or less) practically to interact with other human beings.
Kamal’s
articles drew on his own life experiences on the cultural, intellectual,
political and judicial levels. And through the medium of such articles Kamal
has rendered an account of his relationships with some individuals
(colloquially viewed as "southerners") who have significantly
contributed to the courses of intellectual development and creative dialogues
amongst human beings as such. Thus no
one would thereby be able to spoil his enjoyment of the poetry of, for
instance, Sir Annai just via categorizing Sir Annai as being a marginalized
poet! The same perspective is manifested in the relationships between
the human individuals (whatever their ethnicities or cultures) in the communal
markets. For what brings them together
is simply work and the attempts to achieve decent living circumstances that
could get them out of the plight of poverty.
But, more fundamentally than that, the bond that appears to link them
together, despite their yet “alive-and kicking socio-cultural conflicts”, seems
much simpler, for that bond is, firstly, life itself
and, secondly, the intellectual revolution within that life itself.
The possibility
of the outburst of an intellectual revolution in Sudan is thin. But factors presented upon the surface of
reality do gesture towards the authors of it. But who are those authors? They shall
not be only brave lads who can face torture and humiliation. For they are radical revolutionaries against
all of the intellectual walls that separate the human being from
his brother human being. Thus their
loyalty is not presumed to be, in the first place, to anyone but each
other. That is if they could discover
the presence of each other!
They do exist at any time and where.
And Nature does not tolerate any undertaking without persistently
seeding/sowing those authors in.
But the problem hereby resides in the impacts of history and the
climatic conditions on the soil. So
there are those who refuse to listen, or just look a person in the eye with
respect, simply because he/she belongs to a certain political party (be it a
ruling or opposition party). Or, else,
because he/she belongs to regular forces (be them, as I have indicated at the
outset, police, military or security… etc.) the discourse has stripped their
members bare off any humanity, turning them into "pure monsters" though
they are, in the first characterization, human beings like everybody else: weak
and vulnerable to all kinds of diseases.
And hereby I say that though madness is the nearest disease to the human
being yet its definition (the same as its impact) could not hold a formula
outside of the standards of that which is (at least initially) negative,
and that which is (at least initially also) positive. Madness, that is to say, has been, and is,
fairly dispersed amongst the inmates of the madhouse and… well, the
artists! Hence warmongers, as well as
the masterminds of the rival groups, so dispose of it that the soldiers inhale
the scent of musk emerging from the bodies of the "martyrs"! And, pushing some to kill, those mongers and
rivals almost end in this ultimate result: The return of an army of lunatics
who are to be honored as the heroes of this country! Most of those will be crushed if they do not
adhere to the body of the ideology trade.
Others, but some, shall, otherwise, get the authority for making loose
decisions. But thereby still remains the
impressive aspect in the matter of the distorted earth soil which leaves, no
matter how hard the history and time of its population on it, holes through
which the roots of adventurous minds are implemented. But that now is colliding with a layer of the
dreams and nightmares of groups that are engaged in rivalry with each other on
the surface.
I do find
myself in disagreement with the content of the argument that “politics is
dangerous, so it is a mistake to leave it all in the hands of the
politicians”. For such argument gives
the legitimacy to a person to be a politician though his relationship with the
art of making politics would be next to none. It, in other words, gives the status quo’s
guards the ownership on politics and thus calls upon us- after recognizing
their entitlement to that via the sheer believing in such a proposition- even
to contest with them upon it. That which is hereby even more corrupting comes
about when some individual politicians arise from within the people and then
singlehandedly achieve, by their intellectual might, their resourcefulness,
eloquence performance and adherence to clear principles, radical changes that
affect communities in their entirety. For the political discourse would then so
bow before such achievements that it would realize a certain malevolent end
which is represented in ascending those individuals to the standings of
holiness via depicting them as out-of-reach legendary beings whose aptitudes
are never to be matched by any other human individuals. Hence their
names and ideas are ultimately idolized whereas the other mortals
are left with believing that the only realm that is eligible for them and their
capabilities is that in which each of them may lose his/her brother, mother and
children, for the mere sake of “commemorating” a human revolution that might
have succeeded in progressing humanity towards realizing some of the values of
goodness but, as it habitually happens, has overlooked the living details. For a revolution that throws its thinkers
and writers into exiles while- apart from, via continuous collective
criminalizing and bestializing, omitting out of existence a rather mucky group
termed as “the dogs of the regime”- restrictedly addressing other jellylike
groups which are, as a whole, referred to as “the good oppressed masses” is
doomed to failure even if it has succeeded in ousting the presently ruling
regime.
The government
is but a sick imagination. And he who
thinks that such things as passport, name, identity, or even a nation or a
culture ... etc. shall ultimately define himself to himself, and to others,
will continue facing an elusive enemy that is embodied in a frightened poor guy
like himself in whose hand they put a gun and into whose veins they have
disseminated a madness that is continuously generating foes. Revolution, that is to say, does happen at individualized
levels, for it is essentially against the mental system that conjures up
enemies. Hope will then be bestowed upon
those who will set out, at the close of the era of the present Empire, the
bases for the future educational syllabuses.
But for now change rests upon the attention of the intermediary leaders
of the political parties and the intellectuals (whose lives have been enflamed
by deprivation for more than twenty years) to that the existing symbols
(political parties, leaders, etc.) are saddled with the same chemical formula
that generates the “system of generating foes”.
Hence either all should forsake their old political parties (which is a praiseworthy
form of madness) or, otherwise, they should accept the shattering of these
parties to smithereens at the first communal, and
democratic, election’s juncture whereby, in the wake of the failure of the
underlying causal factor, i.e., the government, (by the mere efficiency of the
peoples’ wrath or just via a sudden economic crash!), healthy socio-political
settings are adequately assured.
The politician
is not an already labeled out person.
He/she is not typically that who holds the reins of power. He/she needn’t even be a political writer, a
party leader or member. This says that
the politician is, in a more fundamental sense, a leader of the sweeping
floods of intellectual change towards the depth of wellbeing. And if the upheavals of the twentieth century
so sidestepped his/her role that he/she has been transformed into a
broad-daylight charlatan, then his/her depiction as "a politician"
becomes a disgrace to the art of politics.
That given, our waiting for his/her speeches and statements is
thus turned into an endless nightmare of which we haven’t yet awakened!
When I said
“distrusted hands” I was just referring to the inability of such hands in
relation to defining the minimum terms of their coalition which should be based
on clear principles of which is the categorical rejection of the Religious State in all of its manifestations. And such “categorical rejection of the Religious State in all of its manifestations”
should, on my perception, be insisted upon precisely because nobody has, as
such, the right to make anybody else accountable to him, or her, in terms of
the tenets of the religious in which he/she believes or the culture to which
he/she belongs. That is even if the punished
one happens to belong to the same religion, or culture, of the person who would
thus be punished. The human individual,
in other words, cannot beforehand decide his/her place of birth or colour. He/she also does not choose his/her religion,
culture or identity at the moments of birth.
Furthermore, even many of those individuals who would later choose to
disown their religions of birth may not be ready to announce that openly for
fear of execution or social exclusion.
Or, otherwise, they may not dare doing so for strategically
desiring/designing to win the majority’s approval. Apart from those “disowners” there are some
who would object to certain cultural norms in their given societies. That is in addition to other women and men
who would never accept being (on the basis of whatever religious or cultural
dogmas or norms) penalized- physically or psychologically- for the ways in
which they live their personal lives or do their personal choices inasmuch they
do not, in that living and doing, harm other persons or invading their free
individual spaces. But such instances
are too varied to be all mentioned.
Hence what hereby remains to be said is that a human being should only
be answerable for himself/herself as a human being per se, i.e.,
only within the realms of what humanity as such values as human
par excellence and not through any un-chosen acceptance of already
institutionalized formulas of religion, country, ethnicity and culture.
Forging
alliances’ shortcomings isn’t attributable only to political shortsightedness,
but mostly to the dominance of the compelling sway of the war. Those who took up to arms (i.e., those who
have renounced the peaceful path of change for mounting up power in a war
characterized by wrecking havoc and destruction) have committed a mistake in
allying themselves with the traditionally major political parties, thus leaving
their political thought and principles to the dogs! I am hereby suggesting that such political
parties aren’t habitually ruled by alternative manifestos, pacts, conventions
or conferences inasmuch as by the transient politics of the status quo
(i.e., the transitory interests at hand).
That is simply because a person who doesn’t perceive that the
distinctions between the human individuals do not primarily reside in
the beliefs of theirs that have had been in existence before their birth should
certainly being merely in pursuance of his/her own interest. Alliance
should, therefore, be with those who perceive that difference resides in
the personality- the character that is made, in most of the
instances, by the System that designs “reality”. That is inasmuch as the human mind/character
is bendable to the authority of ideology.
But some human individuals do variably make their own characters, thus
breaking through the barriers of destructive conventions and codes. Yet in both
of the characterizations the human being should not be essentially
perceived of as the enemy.
Conclusion:
Our Mother
Earth has, through the varied living organisms and inert objects that She
brought forth from Her belly, formed out sufficient signs and outstanding
capacities for us to build contact with Her, as well as within ourselves. Hence ideas and inventions, both destructive
and creative, so roamed and reveled amongst us that they have streamed through
one civilization towards the other; one time towards another: peoples and
nations are linked to one another.
And even if, just for the sake of boosting
up certain individuals egocentric authoritarian cravings and material
interests, political projects and ideologies have brainwashed them into holding
on to beliefs and thrillingly laughable hyperboles as that of “the countries’
borders” those peoples and nations shall, wittingly or unwittingly, be daily
associated with each other through the faculty of all that is full of life and
living. By losing that weapon (i.e., all
that which is full of life and living) the non-violent movements for change has
thrown away their achievements while the armed movements, including the present
Sudanese government, have inexorably succumbed to the Global Market’s
System. Hence the political and
commercial discourses’ attempts to so push the society towards all that which is
intellectually light that they would manage tricking the socio-political
leaderships into believing that the era of the thought and the arts that are
expressive of the essence of human life and human individuals’ unique destinies
(i.e., those “substances” which connect human beings with a mysteriously feared
clandestine network) has virtually been ended.
Those who dominate over our destiny have
detected the potency of that weapon. So
they have manipulated its power to connect human beings together in a manner
that is evil and humiliating to our nature as human beings. And they have remained the same: extensively
extending from the power of the family, the authority of the kingdom, the
dominance of the union of the empires, up to the terrorizing alliance of
corporate and ideologies. Thus we hereby
found all that is full of life mockingly throbbing in every drop of a
commercial and every packaging of a commodity!
They are, that is to say, now using the same weapon that could have
annihilated them. Thus, in their
life-mocking endeavour, they shut down public libraries, suspended the natural
flow of the movement of writing and publishing, tabooed dancing and women have,
therefore, been withdrawn into a social-occasions’ dull state of apparent
sobriety. They have also trivialized
newspapers’ articles, screened out all sources of information, separated people
from the world via demolishing language’s bridges and, ultimately, suspending
movements of/for change unto the cyber space whereby such movements remain
fancying addressing the total whole of a variedly multi-peopled nation.
Africa can realize its status as the Earth’s
Garden of Eden that has been present in the mythologies of the human race
throughout the centuries. The countries
to which are referred to by the name of the “developing countries” can also
discover that prospect. Human
imagination can thereby open, in a flash of a glance, the curtains behind which
roar floods, earthquakes and disasters.
Thereby we see humanity’s imaginative heritage swarming inside Nature’s
furious eye. Hereby is the Earth
finally announcing its renounced presence, thus forcing the human race into
holding conferences which they wouldn’t so intensively hold except when an Open
Third World War is designedly produced;
“Open”, I am saying, because the World War has never
ceased raging and ranting. But as to
these countries: have they really been developing countries? Or they have, otherwise, continued playing
the role of the “growth-assisting” countries.
That is with all of their natural resources and wealth; their most
ancient world civilizations and, even more primarily, their human
being: his sculpture, music, culture,
science, art, empathy with Nature and deepened knowledge of Mother Earth. Such gifts do represent rebelling symbolic
attitudes that are resistant to every form of arrogance, prominent upon history’s
facade whereby they are beating their colossal roots against its conceited
nose.
Anti-life mentalities are discernible, to
everybody and at the first instance. If
no civil organization, neither military power nor peace negotiations could have
shovelled them off the seat power, then the destiny of the peoples who are
shouldered with the burden of the might of such mentalities shall be either
fleeing the whole situation (thus disowning all that which belongs with its education
and culture that are poisoned with violence, suppression, absenting of
thinking, inasmuch as its wars, coercion, conceit and exploitation) or,
otherwise, being annihilated within it , hence scorched with the fires of dispossession
and poverty, crime and horror, fraud and deception, blackmail, humiliation and
insult: those stigmatizing impressions
that have now encircled the eyes of everyone could not be hidden off the walls
of a city like Khartoum.
Yes, when the
people of Khartoum shall taste the reality of the destruction that has already
befallen their own lives (that destruction which is now on the verge of complete
exposure) they will then realize that just staring at TVs and attending Friday
prayers in which they would listen to a sermon on meekness or contentment and
another sermon on women’s debauchery shall not be sufficient to enter heaven,
for therein there is something that transcends all of those conflicts of the
international community, the regime and the armed movements. That “something” is simply them-
themselves. This is applicable, in fact, to all of the inhabitants of the world.
That is inasmuch as every society lives on
swallowing up (part or half or even whole) the distortions that is presented to
them by the books of the destinies that are written in terms of power, wealth
and dominance- distortions and terms that a people would fight for, kill and/or
be killed, then, on looking for heroism, finding only a large mirror waiting
for a respectful stare, continuing times and times; sliding back towards
generations immemorial.
The boundaries
that are separating a human individual from another human individual, a group
from another group, a tribe from another tribe, a religion from another
religion, a country from another country, haven’t yet been broken. For they won’t be broken by any means of
political mechanisms or chatter, but only by education as a tool worthy of
effecting transcendently radical change, via developing the human individuals’
capabilities for benefiting from information sources (reading, writing and
e-learning) and, ultimately, by availing to use the rich jewels of the cultures,
histories and arts of the peoples of this land, re-linking those peoples with
such histories and cultures and arts, growing and developing all of that and
henceforth enjoying its infinite pleasures and joys.
مامون، هسي عملت برنت أوت لهذا الشيء الذي لا أعرف ما هو .. عشان أقراه في السرير والمخدة المكبوقة. وسوف تاتيك الإفادة قريباً .. أشتاق جنونك يا جميل.
ردحذف