من قال أن مدينة الموتى لابد أن تكون ساكنة؟!
——
من وحي حوار آخر مع هنادي
مر اليوم كأي يومٍ عابر، ولم يطف بخاطرها ما قاله فى الصباح سوى عندما سألتها زميلة بالمكتب.. “خير؟ لابسة إسود ليه؟”. فأجابت بطريقة تلقائية بلا تفكير وصوتها يختنق “عايزة أحتفل.”.
طوال اليوم لم تستطع الإجابة عن أى من الأسئلة التى ألقت عليها من الجميع مستفسرين عن سبب الإحتفال المفاجئ. كان الأمر الذى يعنيها أن تنسى، تنسى كل ما قد يشتت نفسها أو يذكرها بهاجس خاطف مر أمام عينها. أو هكذا توهمت. إشترت بلح الشام وبسبوسة كما إعتادت فى حفلات والدها المفاجئة. عادت للمكتب وحاولت مشاركة الجميع ضحكهم، أو هكذا أيضا توهمت..
فى المساء ظلت تنتظره حتى دقت الساعة معلنة إنتصاف الليل. عندها صممت الأم “لازم نكلم البوليس”. تشبثت البنت بيد أمها مترجية وهى لاتزال عالقة فى مكانٍ ما لا تستطيع النهوض.. دمعت عينيها ولم تستطع إخبارها أنها تعرف أنه لن يعود..
On my way home today, I passed by the mall to buy some stuff, when I found there was a concert taking place. Some youth were singing songs for “Tholathy adwa2 el masra7“. I didn’t realize how long it passed since I last attended any concerts till I felt the percussions getting into me.. Unconsciously, I caught myself repeating back the words with everybody..
For a minute I felt how much I miss the feeling of attending a concert.. a real concert where I would get lost amid the crowds. I would forget being a Muslim, hijabi in an Eastern society. I would sing loudly.. sway with music, clap and jump. Dance if needed.. and let my hair scatter all around.. reaching a sun.
At this particular moment I felt I need not to think I am free, but to practice being free and to be myself, no matter how odd myself can be.
Few minutes more, and I left..
نقلاً عن مدونة صاحب :الأشجار
حادث التعذيب و القتل الأخير و الذي راح ضحيته خالد سعيد أعاد الاهتمام بالتعذيب كواحد من أكبر ما يعوق حركة الناس نحو تحسين ظروف حياتهم. الأفراد المحتجزين هم أضعف من أن يمكنهم الدفاع عن أنفسهم، و لهذا فإن سلامة الأفراد مسؤولية المجتمع.
يبدأ اليوم موقع جديد لقوة العمل المناهضة للتعذيب في العمل. تتكون قوة العمل من “مجموعة من المنظمات الحقوقية والأفراد – أطباء ومحامون وصحفيون ومدونون – اجتمعوا على العمل معا من أجل مناهضة التعذيب والتضامن مع من يتعرضون له مستخدمين في ذلك كافة الوسائل بداية من الدعم النفسي والقانوني وكشف جرائم التعذيب والنشر في الاعلام والأبحاث ومخاطبة الرأي العام بخطورة القضية ومعدل انتشارها وسبل التصدي للقائمين عليها”، و هي مدعومة من المجلس الدولي لتأهيل ضحايا التعذيب في كوبنهاجن.
باكورة إنتاج قوة العمل فلم بعنوان رامي: قصة من تمي الأماديد، و رامي هو “طفل من قرية تمى الأماديد بمحافظة الدقهلية عذبته الشرطة في عام 2008 ليعترف بجريمة قتل لم يرتكبها”.
هذه أشياء بإمكانك القيام بها كي تساهم في المجهود من أجل إيقاف التعذيب في مصر:
- شاهد فلم رامي، و اعرف كيف بإمكاننا أن تنصرف حين يصبح واحد ممن نهتم لأمرهم تحت خطر التعذيب
- ارفع إشارة الفلم إلى هاتفك المحمول، و انشرها بين معارفك بالبلوتوث. اترك البلوتوث مفتوحا في المواصلات و المقاهي كي يحصل الناس على إشارة الفلم
- أرسل كريكاتير “اللي سبق أكل النبق” كبطاقة بريدية لأصدقائك، لتساعد في نشر الوعي بأهمية التصدي لجريمة التعذيب
- تابع أخبار التعذيب و علم نفسك و من حولك من مواقع التعذيب في مصر، و مركز النديم لتأهيل ضحايا العنف و التعذيب
- انشر رابط موقع التعذيب عندهم… و احنا ضدهم
- بلغ عن أي حالات تعذيب لأشخاص تعرفهم على الأرقام 0164004012 و 0164004013
سُبحانَكَ كُلُّ الأشّيَاءُ رَضيتُ سِوى الذُّلْ
وَأنْ يُوضَعَ قَلبِيَ في قَفَصٍ في بَيْتِ السُلطانْ
وَقَنِعتُ يَكونُ نَصيبي في الدُنيا.. كَنَصيبِ الطير
ولكنْ سُبحانَكَ حتى الطيرُ لها أوطانْ
وتَعودُ إليها….وأنا ما زِلّتُ أَطير…
فهذا الوَّطَنُ المُّمّتَدُ مِنَ البَحرِ إلى البَحر
سُجُونٌ مُتَلاصِقة..
سَجانٌ يُمسِكُ سَجان
مظفر النواب
فى الحانة القديمة
I am half way through reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and definitely enjoying every thing about it – for it is simply as good as my favorite Animal Farm. To me, Nineteen Eighty-Four is even a more pleasurable brain teaser to think about the Big Brother’s systematic planning to apply mind control -on either its party members or the Proles- and relate that to our current happenings.
However, the most amazing thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four, is how Winston -the main character- is constanty drawing our attention to his feeling of being lost in time. How he is not able to identify what year he’s living in or pinpoint exactly when this or that incident happened. Most of the time he’s talking about the “thereabouts” in time, with a blurry memory and confused mind whether “facts” ever happened at all.
Time is always a personal fascinating subject. And the question whether we are living in time, or time is living within us, used to, and still, a demanding topic – even if I know before hand it’s difficult to find an answer.. But just imagine you are living with no memory at all to linger on to -no books, no clearly written history – except that fed to your brain by “them” whoever they are.
Messing up with nations’ memories can never be any easier.. Controlling their future can never be even more easier..
I woke up today with a persistent thought in my mind that the more I grasp I am living tomorrow’s history, the more I want to remember everything as much as I can today.. I have to stay aware and , all willfully, keep the history as vivid in mind as I possible can, to pass it on to my children and grand children. There are certain facts that should never be forgotten, fundamentally in a corrupted and highly disturbed present as the one we are living in; one should never confuse between his enemies and friends. Else, everything our grandparents sacrificed in the past will be gone as fast as a flicker of an eye in the future..
“Chup ko. Shut up.”
Mariam did.
It wasn’t easy tolerating him talking this way to her, to bear his scorn, his ridicule, his insults, his walking past her like she was nothing but a house cat. But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid. And Mariam was afraid. She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not.
In the four years since the day at the bathhouse, there had been six more cycles of hopes raised then dashed, each loss, each collapse, each trip to the doctor more crushing for Mariam than the last. With each disappointment, Rasheed had grown more remote and resentful. Now nothing she did pleased him. She cleaned the house, made sure he always had a supply of clean shirts, cooked him his favorite dishes. Once, disastrously, she even bought makeup and put it on for him. But when he came home, he took one look at her and winced with such distaste that she rushed to the bathroom and washed it all off, tears of shame mixing with soapy water, rouge, and mascara.
Now Mariam dreaded the sound of him coming home in the evening. The key rattling, the creak of the door- these were sounds that set her heart racing. From her bed, she listened to the click-clack of his heels, to the muffled shuffling of his feet after he’d shed his shoes. With her ears, she took inventory of his doings: chair legs dragged across the floor, the plaintive squeak of the cane seat when he sat, the clinking of spoon against plate, the flutter of newspaper pages flipped, the slurping of water. And as her heart pounded, her mind wondered what excuse he would use that night to pounce on her. There was always something, some minor thing that would infuriate him, because no matter what she did to please him, no matter how thoroughly she submitted to his wants and demands, it wasn’t enough. She could not give him his son back. In this most essential way, she had failed him-seven times she had failed him-and now she was nothing but a burden to him. She could see it in the way he looked at her, when he looked at her. She was a burden to him.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked him now.
Rasheed shot her a sidelong glance. He made a sound between a sigh and a groan, dropped his legs from the table, and turned off the radio. He took it upstairs to his room. He closed the door.
A thousand splendid suns
Chapter 15
~ Khaled Hosseini
It’s always sad, so sad, to read something you really really wished to hear for yourself, then discover its directed to someone else at the end..
You re-read the whole thing again and don’t really know whether it was the very you who allowed your mind to trick you by hiding all these signs , to may be give you the pleasure of dreaming it may have been you for few minutes? or was it your mind that did it all on it’s own?..
But you won’t really know the difference then..
It’s 3:00 a.m. and I am scared enough to get myself up from bed in the middle of the night to search for a good book, any good book I think I may enjoy once I finish reading “Born there, born here” for Mourid El Barghouti.
“I saw Ramallah” and then the sequel “Born there, born here” are of the most exciting, depressing, enjoyable, painful experience I ever lived through reading.. and the idea that I may reach their final page, sooner than later, makes me feel sincere insecurity for not finding something as equally wonderful any time soon.
I am searching for stock of “relatively” good books in my library and on my mind Paul Sweeney’s quotation:
You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
Unfortunately, I am about to lose two..
He told her “Lets call today’s coincidence as ’serendipity’.”
She walked the other way and murmured to herself “I am sorry my friend. Serendipities happen in movies, only in movies, and nowhere else.”
You know those days when you wake up in the morning and need to quickly get dressed. You absolutely have no intention to look pretty, you actually don’t want to. So you grab an average dress, something that you keep for a crappy-mood-morning like this one. You don’t comb your hair, or don’t try to perfectly do your veil..
Then you hastily dash out of the house, and accidentally run into someone who would tell you “Hello pretty, how are you?”.. and it doesn’t feel good.
Tahrir Sq. at 1 am.
I have never felt comfortable with weddings..
But this time was different, both the bride and groom are more than just colleagues at work, and more than just a dear sister and a dear brother. Luckily last minute escape plan also failed and I just found myself there.
Once I saw their faces shinning with smiles.. I was suddenly really happy..
~*~*~*~
This is the first wedding I really really enjoyed. As simple as it was – I sincerely wished them an ever lasting happy life..
~*~*~*~
Nonetheless to add more magic to the day, it was the first time to pass by my favorite Tahrir square alone that late. A moment of serenity while watching Cairo sleeping with open arms embarrassing everybody under dim lights.. Cairo is beautiful. As quite, as elegant and as peaceful only at night..
It was indeed a night to remember, for once in a very long time, I had very good reasons for joy..
—-
The post’s title is borrowed from Omar Mostafa’s first book.
Long ago I heard a quote on radio and wrote it down in the nearest random book beside me. Only today the quote crossed my mind and I couldn’t get it away from my thinking till I found the book after intensive searching. The quote was there, sleeping on the very same page I vaguely remembered, lying between thousand other pages scattered in hundred books around the house…
I am sure I wrote it once upon a time, and it crossed my mind for a reason – even if I don’t know what is it, just like my decision to share it with you only today as well..
“For us once our brief light has set, there is one unending night for sleeping.”
I will never forget when she actually cried at the end of Arab Bloggers conference, or the many times she saved no effort to help everybody -at least myself- with whatever we need on Global Voices Online internal community..
May be we never had a chance to talk much, but since the first time I saw her I secretly called Jillian C. York the “colorful”; for her spontaneity, energy, smiling face and kind heart can fill life with more “life” and color the world a better place..
Honestly, I didn’t plan to post it on her birthday, but this is how it came :-)
So a happy birthday dear Jillian.. and may your laughter never leaves your face..
Recent read books
