Today, I write under the weight of lofty wishes, attempting to sketch a new shape of the past, even if only on paper. I write so that everyone can remember with me the slap from someone once in a dark cell where even pain couldn’t be distinguished, taking advantage of my loneliness and isolating my weakness. Today, it’s time for the world to taste that injustice and those pains with me. Read with me about my arrest, his arrest, her arrest, their arrest, and our arrest. Let us together shed light on that darkness under the sun, hoping to break the darkness that friends live in unknown dungeons.
When God does not tolerate injustice and denounces oppressors, how can we humans accept it for others and ourselves?
The First Arrest:
In the scorching heat of August 2015, despite the blazing day, cold and shivering crept into the pores of my soul and all the veins of my heart and limbs when I was suddenly and without warning taken to a human slaughterhouse, drenched in its darkness. Here began the arduous journey with a foggy vision and an unknown fate, carrying you between life and death without knowing the reason or the charge. As soon as you are dragged into that vile swamp, torrents of insults rain upon you, and screaming words devoid of decency strip you of everything, or more accurately, strip you even of your dignity and value as a human. You are thrown into the cell as a neglected human number or as a worthless and unnecessary piece.
I don’t want to go into the details of that swamp and explain what happens inside, as it is information that is no longer hidden from anyone; it is known far and wide across the world. Our daily screams even reach the ears of the international community… to no avail…!!!
Do you know, gentlemen, what the charge against me is? My only charge is that I think differently from them; my thoughts do not please them and contradict what they want, which is to live in a country crippled in thinking about anything different and new except for innovating and renewing methods of torture and oppression; a country disabled from freedom and democracy; a country halted even in growth and prosperity, just because they delight in plundering its wealth and paralyzing the minds of its children… I wonder, has the concept of civilization and democracy even turned upside down for those who support these oppressors?
Do the civilizations of nations rise on the ruins of countries and people, or do the so-called democracies thrive on silencing voices and minds?
Why haven’t we heard the opinion of the advocates of democracy about what is happening to us…
The Second Arrest:
This is the most painful, burning, and enduring. You can’t get over it, even after a while, even if the circumstances of time and place change. It remains a scar in the heart and soul that is hard to remove. Yes, it is your psychological and spiritual arrest…
I spent thirty days in the abyss of prison, but in the psychological measure, it equals thirty years of oppression, darkness, and loneliness, finding myself equal with the walls of the cell; we became close friends, I leaned on it from exhaustion, and it squeezed my breath in a desperate attempt to console me…
The hours would fall exhausted from my sorrow-laden day, surrounding all my spaces…
I slept heavy with the noise of my boredom and memories filled with the voices of the tortured mixed with sobs, and woke up leaving the details of hope for survival stuck in my dream…
In that cell, my feelings clung to beautiful memories and my mother’s exhausted hands as she sat on a mat of spiritual communication with God in the depths of the night and the edges of the day… raising them to launch her prayers and send them to the sky to protect us, ease our affairs, lift our troubles and adversities, and distance us from oppression and oppressors…
My mother went to her Creator while I was still in detention, and her prayers remained flowing in the veins of my trembling soul in a dying nation…
After detention, when you step out to breathe fresh air again; you find yourself glued to the thresholds of years that grind you like a millstone without stopping, and you have no good option but to surrender to it willingly. With the passing of those days and then the years, you begin to feel your limbs that do not stop growing in the arms of an endless alienation; struggling with the disappointment of years that dwell in life and pale yellow days sweeping over the soul and the nation that inhabits us but we do not inhabit it because we are forcibly distanced from it, and we cannot return to it, so we can only breathe it as a painful memory from afar…
Today, I find myself only in a race with endless foggy days, shattered circumstances, and the voices and groans of the crushed that penetrate my skull.
But when I dive deep into memory, I think of all that iron on which they spent billions of dollars to make bars that imprison us and separate us from freedom, and demonic weapons, and heavy missiles and tanks that crush us… and we still emerge from behind their bars, and rise from under their rubble and debris, alive, not dead, and we will not surrender and their ashes will not suffocate us. Our screams must reach. Our wounds, aged by betrayal, will heal with the rain of prayer and certainty in God’s victory, and will grow green spreading and penetrating the pores of the nation…
And here I remember the words of Martin Luther King, the American civil rights activist and one of the heroes of peaceful resistance:
“The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
In conclusion, peace upon everything that comes in its perfect time…
Peace upon those who will mend the damage, lift the oppression from the oppressed, and bring them out to the sun…
Peace upon a nation with the flavor of my mother in a moment of prayer that my heart breathes and keeps me alive with hope.
Aliya Al-Nasser
Arabic Language Graduate
Article Writer for Al-Rih Magazine, Syrian National Stream
Activist and advocate for the Syrian revolution’s causes.
