is like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,
it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.
But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...
Chapter 5, Page 18...
'Now I had to feel unaffected before that fateful day [when I was arrested], Even if words or images broke into my night and prowled around me, I would beat them off, send them packing, because I would be unable to recognise them anymore. I'd tell them "You've got the wrong person. I have nothing to do with these phantoms. I'm no longer of this world. I have ceased to exist. Yes, it is me speaking. That is precisely it: I'm no longer of this world-of yours, at least, yet I have kept the power of speech, and the will to resist, even to forget. The one thing I must not forget is my name. I need it. I'll keep it as a testament, a secret in the gloomy grave where I bear my fateful number: 7." I was seventh in line when we were arrested. It didn't mean much.
My dreams flourished. They visited me often. They would spend part of the night with me, disappear and leave scraps of my daily life at the bottom of my memory. I did not dream of liberation, or of the years of imprisonment. I dreamed of an ideal time, a time suspended among the branches of a celestial tree. If it is the child within us who awakens when we are afraid here it was the wise man and the lunatic in me who revealed themselves as ardent opponents, each striving to take me the farthest from myself. Smiling placidly I watched the tug of war between these two extremes.'.
For the second blog entry in this series please left click here.
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