November 05, 2006

Flashback : Thoughts extravaganza in a Bonfire night

Four years ago while i was still studying at university, i wrote this essay in an online forum i used to post in, I'm reposting it as-is to capture the true essence of it.

little did i know at the time that the thoughts manifested in it will perpetually echo with relevance until today, alas with even wider spread footprint, for we now have the affairs of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine among others haunting our minds with distress and worrisome.


At the peak of the Israeli assault on Lebanon, Jordanians spent well-over half a million JDs on fireworks on the night of Tawjihi results! Though some may justify shelling huge sums on an individual basis under the premise that people are gay-happy and they want to celebrate (after all, it's better than firing rounds of AKs around, no?), yet the cumulative expenditure is totally unjustified at wartimes.


It'll be another despicable highlight of our culture failure and defeat if the niche of our society decide to celebrate bonfires at our ends, were the unacknowledged resistance is striving to find the money to source firearm, while others are spending the money on recreational fireworks to celebrate others' engaging history


Enjoy the piece
:

For those who don't know what bonfire night is -as I have only came to know it when I came to England few years back-, it is a night of which people shell out mad sums of money on fireworks, and blast them out all night long in a spectacular display of an urban tradition!
What provoked the following stream of thoughts was not the astonishing and dazzling displays I have witnessed throughout that night...

What triggered it was merely the background sound of that night...

As I walked back from university on a late hour, I was listening to all these fireworks exploding, some where close, some where echoing, some had thunderous explosions, other seemed to have this repetitive pattern of sound that tend to remind me of an automatic assault weapon. Slowly... my hallucinatic mind could not help but to drift in a stream of thoughts, visualising the west bank -and Gaza- in pursuit of capturing the anxiousness my fellow Palestinians live -or die- under... day by day!

The unexpected explosions that you tend to hear every other second did trigger a hint of anxiety, as I forced my self to believe that I was in an anxious situation, trying to capture the moment and have a taste of what its like to live under fire, and it does sound like anything but normal... they say a picture speaks for a thousand words, but tonight it proved the other way around, the continuous fead of news from Palestine could not squeeze a single tear drop... while a Hollywood movie might get many weeping over a fictional love story with a dramatic twist of some sort... Tonight I could not help but to keep my self constrained by the tangling stream of thoughts thrilled by an ever-lasting explosive echoes and sounds

Yet I live in a peaceful and quite town, and during my usual shuttle walk between my house and the university, the worst thing that I might encounter in my linear daily life is a drunk and or drugged-up homeless whom might ask for some change! building up from this situation, and with the help of my imaginative mind, I hardly managed to remind myself of those who live under the siege, how do they feel? I hear the thunderous explosion, with un-dismissible certainty that this explosion was 150 foot high in the air, indeed not worrying about if it was of a close proximity... which is certainly different from being in a situation where you encounter actually occupiers, geared up with M-16s, F-16s and apatches looming in the horizon, and every other explosion you might hear is in the next block, until one day you are in its proximity, yet they lead a normal life... they get married and seem to strive to survive and raise out of ashes time after time!

After a long day at uni., and with this imaginative journey to examine 'how it feels like' to be there, I shall lay down and sleep... to wake up for another English, gray and rainy day... certainly those anxious thoughts should evaporate by then... as for those on the front line back there... Allah Ma3ahum

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