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- 1. LETTER MANIFESTO: A STORY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY 26 ! CHAPTER 1: THE ISLAND ! It all started with an island, a tiny island, a compact one with the source of life, where everything came from, all forms of creatures, plants, animals, organisms, matters, objects, caves, fire, seas, oceans, myths, anything you can imagine. They were all scattered beneath every single piece of sand. The truth was it was not an imaginary island at all. It was a real island. Yes, it was alive. It was an island, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. One could open the map and point his fingers at it. The closest piece of land was miles away, hence it was an isolated place. It sat in the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean, right in the middle of a territory called Bermuda Triangle or you can say the Devil’s Triangle, far away from England, America and all those big fellas. There were maps drawn, stories written about it: All those mysterious, hideous stories about planes and ships. And the island was in the middle of those stories. It was at the center, at the heart of Bermuda Triangle. It was where we were living. It meant everything for us: Our homeland. ! Us? We? Just like any other person who was born in some part of the world, we were born on the island. We were from here. We belonged to this little land mass. We were the islanders. The population of our race was as compact as of the island itself. It was just 26. Just a single community living here for some time. Cliché. What was not cliché was that we were different from the rest of humanity. We were black. It was the characteristic of our skin. Someone made us in this color. Someone we didn’t know, someone we would never know. That specific someone also created us without genitals. There was no sex in our community. No males, no females, no genital discourse. Well, we guessed that was just the nature of the island and that did not really bother us. Sometimes cigar is just a cigar and that’s it. And you know what? We never knew how we were born on this island. We never had ancestors, mothers or fathers. Our history was never known to us. We lacked the sense of belonging to anybody. We did not have a family tree. Just in the flick of time, we were here, already created by some enigmatic force, a force that would be never known to us, a force that we would never comprehend fully. No, it wasn’t God or Jesus or Mohammad or David or Moses. It was never about them. They were just parts of some fictitious books. We just accepted that on this particular island, we suddenly started to live and the source of it did not really matter so long as we lived. Our hands suddenly touched the soft sand, our feet walked to the shores of the island and we
- 2. liked it. People would say there was something wrong with our genetics, but that would not really matter for us as we would not really care what they could say. We would not be surprised if they called us negroes. These people liked naming. ! What we cared about was the horizon. We could see the perfect combination of colors. When it was time of sunset, the sky was slowly landing onto the water touching its blue belly with its smooth reddish hands. They were silently going to sleep together. At sunrise, they were waking up together, leaving each other with slow kisses. The hands of the sky were getting yellow as he was leaving the ocean at a slow pace. When the sun was at the top, they were watching each other constantly. Clouds, storms, grey hospital rooms, tornadoes tried to screw with them. It was as if they were trying to separate the couple. But it really did not matter at all. Each night they met; each night they slept together. It was the most romantic relationship we had seen in our lives. We named them Miles and Erato. ! Beyond those beautiful colors, there was the world. We knew it was bigger than our island and there were other creatures living in it. Animals and plants were under the command of people for generations. Not only did they occupy the area of others, but they also occupied themselves. Then, they drew maps just to show how much land they occupied. That’s how the term border was born. Within those borders, they had countries. Each one of those countries had their own names to show that the people living there had their own identities. The word England stood for defining the LAND of the ENGLISH. Outside those borders, there were other lands to occupy. The name Canada for example, was derived from the English will to occupy northern parts of America. The English motto “We CAN invade them” was the real reason they called those lands CANADA. It was almost as much fun as to call the Native Americans as Indians. Those were the people and that was the basic nature of naming. ! It was not just indigenous to England. Some were Greeks, some were Romans, some were Ottomans, and some were Egyptians, Persians. They all wrote histories. They all wrote science, geography and maths. They all wrote something. Their ancestors did that as well. They lived in the same countries, they thought in the same countries, they wrote in the same countries, they identified themselves with those countries, they ate, fought, slept, named their sons and daughters after themselves in those countries and eventually they died in their countries. Everything lived, their names, their fathers’ names, names of the inventions, names of the invasions, names of the treaties which were the results of those invasions,
- 3. their mathematics, their arithmetic, algorithms, formulas of those algorithms which all became part of their lives, which had effects on their lives, either directly or indirectly. They all lived somehow, except for their flesh and bones. All of them were DEAD, only their textual existence lived in the graves. A man called Friedrich Wilhelm Nietszche called this dilemma “The Eternal Recurrence.” And then he too died. The textual reality did survive, however. Welcome to the island. ! So the world was all about the other side and the island, and the horizon was just an amazing setting in between, a border dividing the reality of people and the textual reality of the island. Each sunset and sunrise, it assured us that Miles and Erato were going to same bed every night. They were spirits filling our lungs with happiness. They looked like fictitious divinities smiling at us with their omnipresence, assuring us each day that this island, this realm was the true source of life. We did not know what that meant for the people. Miles and Erato were different from people’s Gods for us. They felt real. We felt different with their presence when we looked at the horizon; we felt the whole existence of the island was complete with their eternal love, with that unshrinking bond that repeated itself each day and each night. ! We were different from people and it was okay for us to be different. We were created in a different way and it was okay for us to be created different. Our skins were ink black and it was okay for us to be black. They whispered it to our ears each time that we could take pride with our difference. We were one with Miles and Erato. The undying passion in their love was in our hearts. Freedom and difference tinged with love. There was one other reason why they were at the center of our existential cause. They blessed us with the most venerable duty in the world; the duty to grow letters out of ground. Below the island, there were thousands, even millions of letters. Our kids. Our sons and daughters, our kindred. ! This process of digging had been going on for pages. We were digging the ground for some time until we could reach the letter at the bottom of the ground where the sand slowly became mud, which was the meeting point of the island and the ocean. The kids were blossoming from beneath the sand where it was humid, muddy and suitable for them to grow up healthy. We then took them onto the surface of the island slowly. The letters, when taken to the surface for the first time usually cried like newborns. We tenderly embraced them and waited for them to be silent. After a tiresome digging process, we stood up from the ground with the letters in our arms, smiled at them kind heartedly as if we had been
- 4. parenting them for a long while and released them in the air and watched thousands of letters fly towards the horizon. The view you could see would probably be a huge cloud of birds filling up the space, migrating from one part of the world to another. They were our little birds, our kids meeting with their freedom. Then we would start digging again, it was a continuous process. It was painfully heavy, but still it was the most precious duty in the universe as we could see their infancy, that innocent stage, that preparation for life, that short embrace assuring us that we were tending them to pursue their freedom. It was these motherly feelings that formed the eternal bond between us and them. They looked so pure and free when they disappeared through the horizon. Each followed a different path, a different direction. They scattered throughout the world. ! Some of them, early in the 8 BC, made their way to western parts of Anatolia. After a long time of migration, they settled themselves around the suburbs of a place named Smyrna. It was there where they first encountered a fellow named Homer and began swirling around his head like a tornado. Some others went to Avon, England and perched at the roof of the house where Shakespeare lived. And some met John Fowles at one of the hospital beds when he was suffering from amnesia. These were just a couple of stories that could set an example for their constant movement. We dug; they flew and got written in every part of the world. They met people. They became algebra, literature and geography. They became immortal. They started to settle in the books. They became names. They became the formulas for the medicines. They became the history itself. They became wars and treaties, they became countries. They were people. They were names. They were ideas. They were the names of the diseases. They were the Cancer. They were the science. ! What was science really? Oh, let us tell you what science was. Science was just a combination of the kids S, C, I, E, N, C, E. Cancer? Cancer is what’s happening in here right now, right at this moment, hands of some guy are playing with the kids and the words start to grow uncontrollably in textual reality of the humankind, as soon as they complete this process it will be all silent. But before that, there was one specific story, a story that was different; a story that concerned the nature of humanity; a story that rose against the power of the omnipotence. A story which was in the middle of Bermuda Triangle, a story which had a huge hole inside it: story of the blacks. ! ! !
- 5. ! CHAPTER 2: MESSING UP WITH THE WHITE MAN’s BURDEN FOR FREEDOM ! There he was standing in the middle, looking at our faces, devouring our eyes. It was his gaze: A gaze that was sucking our bones, numbing our skin. Darkness. Abyss prevailed. He was checking us, weighing our muscle power, our toes and our hands. We felt he was making some theoretical calculations. He started to count our heads. It was weird that we could not do anything except watching him. For no particular reason, we could not move anywhere unless he told us to move. We could not comprehend what paralyzed us. Was that the gaze? Was that his politics? Was that his white skin? Was that him and his armed men swarming the island; or was that his overwhelming power on letters, our beloved kin that laid us mutilated? We really did not know. We felt different when he came to the island. It was as if some kind of powerful device beyond our reach was playing with us, testing our capacity to decide how far he could colonize us, our movements, our race, our beloved letters who had been flying up in the air for a long while since we first dug them up on the surface of the island pages ago, or ages ago. Were they captured? We looked at the horizon to catch a sight; we could not see any of them. We did not see Miles and Erato either. We felt alone. ! The tense is forcefully sliding itself back to 1726 when they came to the island. We were about to reach to the bottom of the ground to take the newborns out when we saw some shape on the horizon, it looked like a tiny spot at the beginning. But it was growing bigger as it came closer. It was sailing towards the island. It was a ship! People were approaching to the island. We continued digging. Letters had to be taken out from the sand and freed. The digging process was much more important than humans or their ships, and their stories as all their existence depended on our beloveds. So what we did was to take the newborns out of the sand. After they cried in our arms for a while we let them go up in the air. We did not panic. We did not hide them or put them back in the sand. We had to let them go so they could find their own ways, read themselves in some parts of the world. It did not really matter for us if it was Homer, or Shakespeare, or Nietzsche or Marx, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Homi Bhabha or Abraham Lincoln or Napoleon Bonaparte, Jacques Derrida, John Fowles, Angela Carter. That would be cruel to them. Then we would use them for our purposes; then, we would keep them here, they would be stuck in the sand and get drowned at the bottom of the ocean.
- 6. Once taken out, they had to go up in the space. We would cheat ourselves if we did not let them. Otherwise, we would be killers of our own kindred. Those were our kids. They were everything for us. We held them in our arms thousands of times, we watched them cry, hushed them tenderly. They were so sinless, you see? Even though it took us seconds to prepare them for their flight, we saw them in our arms, passing their infancy, getting ready for their long journey in the space. We smiled at their innocence. Every day we loved them. It was no different than the day before, or the day after. Every single day, who knows, for how long we caressed. And this made them part of us. Some specific sense of parenthood grew inside us, no matter how humane this sounds. It was true. We had feelings towards these kids. We held onto life because of their sole existence, as their sense of freedom is ours; their arms, ours; their shapes, ours; no matter how different they looked, they were part of us; our kids. They were floating through the sky as usual. It had always been a pleasure to watch them fly towards their freedom. But at that time, in May 26th 1726, when the weather was open as a blank page, when there was actually no specific reason for the kids to gather around that ship, unless someone enticed them or fooled them into his own text, they started to form a circle and fell over the ship, one by one. Some twisted their ankles; some broke their legs and some others their necks. His handwriting was not good at all. We could hear the loud shrieks of the kids, as the ship drew closer to the shores of the island. They were imprisoned. The ship anchored right by the beach at the eastern side of the island. Thousands of British soldiers landed, all armed, looking straight, they formed a circle and waited for the invader to get off the ship. There he was, looking at us. He had a pen and six pages in his hands. He walked down to the beach in slow synchronic steps. We could hear the sands crushing down under his feet. He patiently walked to the middle of the circle. As soon as he took his place, the circle started to move towards us with loud steps. They were all looking at us hungrily as if they were all going to devour us. The soldiers in the front line divided into two and started walking around our group. They formed a ring around all 26 of us. If it could be observed from the top, the shape of their circle would probably look like: ! !
- 7. ! ! HIM S S O R us L E D I We could not see anything except for their presence and we felt like someone was choking us. We did not have too much space. The sand, all of a sudden, started to feel funny below, our hands, our feet, our body started to lose their power. We slowly sat down on the sand; we then laid our bodies on it. We could not move at all. Since our heads were on the sand, we could hear the cries of the kids still buried under the island. They wanted to get out of the ground. We could not help them as we laid there motionlessly. We did not have the power to dig. We were in a prison, where we could not move a muscle. We did nothing but put our heads on the sand, lying there almost dead. We started to hear the kids’ cries as they were smashed by his steps. Sound of his steps was getting louder and louder. Thump. Thump. Thump. It was like a heartbeat of some living thing, something we could not yet name. Something that was getting louder and louder. Something that was synchronic with his steps. He was walking towards us. He was imprisoning us. We were struck by his omnipotence. ! There he was now, in the middle of the circle, looking at us observantly, done with his calculations and counting our heads, taking down some notes on the paper. “There are 26 of them,” he said to his soldiers. “Bring one of them into my presence.” “As you command sir!” Whatever he said could be done. Everything, including us, this island and the kids lying beneath his steps like a red carpet before his great power. He had the power to name us on those pages he was holding. People would read our names throughout the world, trade us, sell us, kill us; they would yell our names, SLAVES! That’s how they would know us. They would never care whether we had kids buried under the ground. Our kids, who were waiting for their freedom; who would die out of hunger buried in the
- 8. ground unless they were taken into the surface. They needed our parental attention. They were crying, shrieking below us and we could hear it so well. We could not let any of them die. But he was simply not letting us, that general, the boss, dictator, invader, villain, colonizer, whatever he was, he was not letting us. He had the power to manipulate us, name us, present us to the world as slaves. He had that recklessness to change our fate and historicize our existence, our pure, honest purpose of growing up letters, parenting them. Here they cried under the ground once more. They were still alive and breathing. But his loud steps were making it harder for them to breathe. The oxygen they were inhaling was getting less and less as they remained buried underground. If they were not free, they were no different than dead. We knew our kids. He doomed them; he doomed us with his power. That bastard could see through everything. Him and his omnipotence. We could not stand it. Now he was just standing there and ordering his soldiers to fetch one of us for further examination of our bodies. He would put our muscle power into test to comprehend whether we were fit enough to work in his plantations in America. Two soldiers came as he commanded. They grabbed me and started to haul me from my arms towards him. They made me stand up by holding my arms tightly from both sides. If they did not hold me from my arms, I would not stand up myself as my body was literally paralyzed as a result of his omnipotent power over us. He started to walk towards me. He held my head up, to see how I looked like. He saw my eyes, felt my cheeks and my neck with his fingers. “All look like the characteristics of a negro,” he murmured. He moved his head forward closer to my cheeks. He started to lick me. I was surprised in the first place because it was really hard to find out the reason why any person would lick another one’s cheeks. It was either because of recklessness or desire. I could not tell at that time. But according to the Slave Trade books published in Europe, which defined how to pick up a strong slave, licking his sweat was supposed to determine his health. The taste of the salt in the sweat of a slave determined whether he had a tropical disease or not. So basically, that’s what he was doing to me. Licking me for scientific purposes. At least, that’s what I assumed at that time. He then looked at my face, opened my mouth and started to count my teeth. “26 of them,” he said. He looked a little perplexed. According to the autopsies performed in Europe, humankind was known to have 32 teeth. Probably he was considering us as a different being, either animal or some kind of an alien creature. He kept his determined gaze on us, though he looked a little bit confused. He was trying to classify us and apparently something was very wrong. He ordered his soldiers to sit me
- 9. down with the others and checked everyone’s teeth one by one. Either there was something wrong with science or we were not humans. All of us had 26 teeth. Terrified, he took three more pages out of his pocket and started to write down: ! Interesting island. The negroes we were going to ship to America turned out to be a different kind. They bear the characteristics of usual Negroes. They are ink black. However, it is a mystery that all these creatures have 26 teeth. At first look, it is so hard to tell if they are men or women. They haven’t spoken yet. I don’t know what language they speak. They don’t seem responsive. They all look as if they are paralyzed. I did not feel any contagious diseases when I tasted their sweat. However I have serious doubts whether they should be shipped directly to America to work in plantations. They might carry some kind of specific disease we have not named yet which would harm our cause, the process of colonization. I fear thousands of other negroes in the plantations might get infected by this troublesome sickness. In my personal opinion, they should first be sent to Europe to be physically examined further. These creatures and their possible sickness have to be classified first. Then we can use them in our advances throughout the world. Under these circumstances, I conclude that they should immediately be shipped to Bristol harbor to be further inspected by a team of scientists by my permission and personal escort. He had that skill to manipulate every situation for his own cause. If there was something wrong in the process of colonization, if there was something strange going on, if we had 26 teeth instead of 32, if European science failed somehow to define something at any single parcel in the world, it had to be explained, otherwise, they would not proceed, otherwise they would stop thinking and start running away from it, otherwise it would be fiction for them and when fiction became reality, they would go mad, stunned, paralyzed. They would watch it take over all their values, beliefs, sanities. Fiction was a monster eating them secretly deep inside their brains. They would not stand it. They would deny it. Fiction was the other, it was the adopted kid, and fiction was eating their science, geography and algebra. It was eating weapons, irons, clothes, societies, countries, men, women and their set of values. Fiction was ghosts and invisible curses echoing in their ears, fiction was the deepest parts of their brains. It was an unstoppable enigma that was forcing to come out and bring an end to the order of the people. Fiction was catharsis itself. They feared from it, they pitied it, without realizing they were a part of it. Fiction was their unwanted dreams. Fiction was lying
- 10. under the ground right here, beneath the sand. We could hear it; it desired to come out like a giant who could destroy thousands of armies. Fiction was hidden beneath his feet. It shrieks, cries, roars. Fiction itself was our kids waiting for us to dig, help them get into the surface. It was bigger than him, his name, his politics, and his manipulations. It was bigger than his society and its members. FICTION was bigger than people. It was bigger than his army, which came a long way to discover this island and pack us to work in the plantations. Fiction was bigger than the colonies. It was what we were going to become, if we didn’t dig. We still could hear the kids cry. If they tried to take us away from the island; if we were going to be shipped to England, or America, they would die. Fiction would die; this story would just end in here with a full stop. We would be sold to people to work in the fields. We would be named as slaves. There must have been something to do to break the chains. The kids were still breathing. It was this last hope that made our last stand. It was kids breathing and whispering to our ears that gave a shockwave to our muscles. We had to stand up to him and his overbearing omnipotence. We had to make a hole in this text, a huge gap for the kids to breathe some air, a way for them to come out. We had to challenge his will to occupy and domineer this island. We stood up against his pen and his perversive manner of using his pages. We stood up against his indifference towards the fact that we, too, had a life, a community which had been settled here for so long. A society that was different from his, which had a different set of values, beliefs, sense of freedom which was strange to him. We stood up because he wanted to delete it; our existence. He simply ignored it and invaded here by force with bunch of soldiers and iron weapons. We had to stand up against his overbearing means to colonize this island. Above all, it might have been any group of black, any African tribe, living on this island, living in huts, growing vegetables from the ground, collecting coconuts from the trees, who could have lived happily without his interference. Let’s say their numbers were more than 26. Let’s say they had 32 teeth instead of 26. Let’s say they were perfectly normal Africans. They had kids who were running along the shores of the island free and laughing. They were catching fish from the shores where the ship was then anchored. They were running back to their parents to show how many fish they caught. Imagine all the members of the family enjoying each other’s company with good mythical stories after a fine dinner. Would not that hurt those people to be chained and stacked in the ships to work in plantations, never to return to their homeland? They would be tossed into a world where there was nothing similar to their home where mama could
- 11. not cook the fish the kids caught, where they could lose each other because they were transported by different ships. They would come to a place where they had to seek refuge in a different language, a different culture, and a different religion. They would slowly start to forget who they were, where they came from, and would begin to behave like master, Him, as the master always had the power to feed them, or punish them. They would start losing their identity. They would forget the taste of coconut. The kids would see their fathers getting whipped by the master when their old bodies failed after a hard day’s work. They would be swallowed by the big world and its illogical demands. They would not take it when people call them animals, slaves, or negroes. They would not take it when they were beaten to death because of the color of their skin. They would grow up in misery. They would wish to see their homeland one last time before they closed their eyes for eternity, for the empty pages to come next centuries which would name them slaves. We stood up for them, as their freedom was no different than ours, as their kids’ happiness was no different than our kids’ happiness. We had common fate. We were on the same page. Fiction was kicking from below, Africans were suffering from slavery, kids were crying. It was time for us to make a huge hole in the history. To his surprise, we rose from the ground, cleared out the sands on our shoulders. We looked at the circle fiercely, every single one of them were terrified by this unexpected behavior of us. We could see fear in their eyes, we looked like the monsters haunting their dreams, moaning, screaming, and yelling for the freedom of the island. We were a threat to their circle, we were the anarchists. Had one of us opened our mouth, they feared it would swallow them all. He looked terrified, panicked. He yelled. “Arms up!” All the soldiers took to their weapons. That bastard was peeing his pants, we could feel it. All we could hear was the insecure murmurs raising from the circle. We started digging with every single muscle cell in our bodies, in front of his gaze, in front of his army. That was a mutiny, that was a riot. That was a Textual Revolution. Each one of us worked on one big hole in the sand, to reach all the kids at the same time. The faster we drilled the ground, the larger the hole got. We were coming for the kids, without fear, without the sense of imprisonment. We were bending his gaze. We were setting his luxurious mansion on fire. We were stealing what he stole from us. Freedom of narration. He yelled, “Aim!” The soldiers pointed their weapons at us while the hole was getting bigger. He did not seem to yield so easily, he was going to shoot us. But we did not really care; we were already at the point of no return. We were going down and the hole was getting deeper and bigger. No signs of the kids yet. We wanted to face what was expecting us down on
- 12. the ground. The kids were either dead or not. We had to see it ourselves. We faced the risk of extinction as thousands of soldiers were aiming at 26 of us. But it did not really matter, whatever was buried deep in the ground had to be brought to the surface. He yelled, “Shoot!” There w s de dly silence for two or three seconds. We were still digging in ecst sy. One of the bullets shot me in my tooth, I dropped it on the ground It w s too l te to look for it. I still h d to dig bec use I still h d 25 teeth nd the kids might be dying. The hope w s not lost. Let’s go on! While they were refilling their guns, we he rd th t the ground shook. It sounded like huge e rthquake. Did we drill too deep? Did we m ke too much hole in the story? Where were the kids then? It w s not enough! We kept on drilling, left, right, left, right, left, right. Once more the ground shook. He ordered his soldiers to re dy their we pons one more time. The hole w s getting bigger and deeper. We could re d the fe r in his eyes. fter they relo ded the we pons, they shot us once more. We wounded and bleeding p rts of bodies. They shot more, and once more. no bottom of the bodies . We the hole the biggest no kids There bloodshed everywhere we did not give up. something str nge, hole, We fell down They fell down into the byss. D rkness. CHAPTER 3: GOOD OLD SOCRATES AND ION There is only black. The blackness of the hole. I can still remember the saint essence of the silence which was constantly spoiled by His and his soldiers’ desperate shrieks when we all fell down. I don’t know for how long we fell, but after some time, the sense of falling down disappeared. First, gravity abandoned the story; then, the shrieks died down. I think He and the soldiers were imprisoned somewhere in the hole. Then, the past tense left its place for timelessness. There is only light, lightness of being. Stars start to appear all around and the hole gets brighter. As the stars scatter through a wider space in the hole, I realize that it is not just a small, dark pit where the kids originate before we take them to the surface of the island. It is an enormous space covered with the shining stars. Wait a second this is not a hole! I am in the middle of a Galaxy! The density of the air starts to change. I feel like I am in a different dimension which is beyond the atmosphere; I can smell the change. I do not feel any pain. I have no missing tooth. I am not bleeding. I am alive.
- 13. My friends Team 26 are all safe and alive as well. I can see star fields scattered around the galaxy, all bright and shiny. I can feel the blood circulating through my veins; it is freedom and the unbearable lightness of being. Ink is everywhere, black ink; black as Africans. I can see them all. They are among the fields of stars, looking at me; there is a smile on their faces. Some are women, some are men. But the important thing is that they smile all the same. They all wear their traditional clothes, they all believe in their own gods. They have their own fears and happiness. They are not interfered by any different society. They are original. They are 26. No, they are more than 26. They are millions. They are stars themselves. They shine upon us. They whisper to us in their own native language. It’s quite the harmony of millions of different voices. This must be heaven. This is such a beautiful hole, this space, the galaxy. They start to move towards us. They don’t walk, they fly. It is so magical to see them getting closer to us in that bright galactic cloud with their shining faces. Their faces are getting closer and becoming one with ours. They are holding our hands now. They turn their faces and smile at us. Millions of them, pure and innocent as stars... Their happiness multiply by the whole existence of the galaxy. This wholeness inside me, this completion of freedom and existential reality of us and them start to pull me towards the huge galactic cloud. Some might call it the Milky Way, but for me and us, it’s the definition of textual beauty. The reality in the hole, the fiction itself which wakes up from its sleep, a dream that never ends, brotherhood, sisterhood, parenthood, freedom, perfect union of the languages, harmonic sounds of the black tribes which are free, flying up in the space, smiling. They all pull me towards the center of the bright galaxy. No sense of speed, no definition of time. We are floating nice and smooth, all together, a perfect union of eidos, going to the center of that cloudy mass. It is getting blindingly shiny and I like it. As we get closer to the center, it is getting white. We are reaching to the perfection of a blank page. I can feel that, we can feel that. It is light and white, and we are going at the center of it, holding each other’s hands. It is millions of us, so different from each other, yet so perfectly combined. We are one and whole, we are different and millions, we are the combination of everything, which cannot be defined by scientific formulas. It is that magnetic union of us, that pure beauty of the hole, that sweetness of the sand we dug, which is pulling us towards the center of the galaxy; I can figure it out, in the middle. There it is, there it is I see it. There is a rectangular sign. It is made up of bright stars. The sign says: PLATO’s CINEMA. They are pulling me towards there, to that climatic point, where the fate of the heroes are decided, where the end of the story tantalizes, where you decide to hold your breath and start to read the
- 14. words attentively. I am getting there, my hands are bright, all my 26 teeth intact, I, us, we are pulled by the beautiful hands of stars. We all stop under the sign. They are looking at us in the eyes, pointing the entrance of the cinema, and smiling at us, applauding their voices of freedom, they will speak their own language, and they will never ever become slaves. Here they go, flying slowly, going backwards and still smiling at us. Their faces are slowly fading away. The further they go, the better we can see their bright and black shapes of freedom. It looks like there is no door around the sign; rather, down by it, there is a cave-like entrance, made up of galactic stones which are connected to the cinema with the stairs. We start to walk towards it and one we reach it, we start to go down the stairs. There is still some brightness behind us, the reflections of the galactic cloud, however, as we follow the walkway and go down, the light gets weaker. And the density of the air starts to change. We feel lighter and smoke spreads all over the place. It smells funny, like a Cuban cigar. To be honest, I cannot complain about it. It has its own way of attracting people to itself. It’s pulling us down towards the bottom of the stairs. As we go down, the smoke gets more intense. After two or three sentences, we come across a door on the left side of the walkway. Smoke comes from the room behind it. We can see that it makes its way up the stairs from the bottom of the door. On the door, there is a sign: “Employees Only!” We open it as smell of the cigar attracts us. It can barely be called a room. As we get in, we figure out that it is a rather high platform which is built for a movie reflector. There are two men. One is standing behind the reflector. He controls it and makes sure the movie plays without a cut. The other one is a chain smoker. He stands at the back of the reflector guy. He smokes his Cuban cigar and when finished, he brings out a new one from his pocket and lights it up. The fire on the cigar never dies out and it burns constantly. The platform is full of smoke because of this chain smoker. But he looks like he doesn’t care. For him, what’s important is that the fire doesn’t die out and the taste of the Cuban cigar is so sweet anyway. We walk up front to see the how the lower part of the platform looks like. You can see a big screen and thousands of seats. The reflector works perfectly fine. It reflects the movie onto the big screen. The quality of the image looks really nice. One can say that the movie is almost as real as life itself. The seats are made up of human bones. They don’t look comfortable from here. The audience watches the movie attentively. There are thousands of people sitting in thousands of seats. And interestingly, they look familiar to us. We have seen them before. Not a long time ago. It’s Him and his soldiers!
- 15. They don’t look uneasy in those seats which are made of human skeletons. It does not bother them at all. And they are laughing constantly. But what’s on the screen looks like a horror movie, as I can figure out there are brutal scenes, where people kill each other relentlessly. And they are laughing as if they are in ecstasy. At that exact moment, the chain-smoker starts a conversation with the reflector guy. Soc. How’s the movie going, Ion of Epidaurus? Ion. Very well Socrates, they are done with First World War scene, they have been watching it for a long time now, for years, for ages, they just sit in there, laugh and watch at the disastrous moments of life, when thousands of people died as a result of the abominable wars brought upon the humanity by sadist, dictatorial leaders who enjoyed the bloodshed. They do not move their heads. They don’t try to get out of the cinema; they look like they are enjoying themselves. They don’t look terrorized by human deaths at all. They have been laughing at the bloody scenes of wars. Soc. Well, didn’t they laugh at the scenes when the white man killed many black people and threw them into the sea mercilessly from the ship Amistad? Ion. Very well Socrates, they did. Soc. Well, Ion, didn’t they enjoy themselves during the scenes of the Boston Massacre, when the soldiers of the British Army killed five civilian men in Massachusetts Bay? Ion. Very true Socrates, they did. Soc. Well, my friend, aren’t they going to take delight in the Second World War scene, when German soldiers take the Jews into concentration camps, starve them to death, burn them alive in the ovens and make lamps out of their skins? Ion. Very true. Soc. Well then, Ion, my fellow, doesn’t that excessive pleasure these people have in the tragic, painful scenes of the movie mean that these people are themselves insane, sadists, dictators? Aren’t they staying in this cinema just to enjoy bloodshed a little bit more? Ion. Very true Socrates.
- 16. Soc. Do you think, my friend, that in any moment of life, they can stand up, look back, and get out of the cinema, and figure out that the source of their laughter is bitterness and suffering of others who are silenced, repulsed, subjugated by the tyrant? Can they realize that they are not actually the audiences but the slaves of the cinema, that they are doomed here and they can never get out. Can they realize it? Is there any sign that could show them that the people they enslaved and killed as a result of their tyrannical nature are actually up there at the center of the galaxy, talking their own native languages, living in harmony, without the audiences’ invasions and wars? Can they know who the real slaves are? Can they reach emancipation and find the truth up at the exit of the cinema? Is there any language that could show them the way to salvation; that could show them how the universe is bigger than their countries, their colonies, their wars? Ion. Look at him Socrates, look at his swollen belly. He has something about to come out of his belly. It’s not just one, it’s many, and it’s 26! Can you see it? Maybe the answer is in there. Maybe the answer is in him. Maybe he’s got what you are asking for. They are both looking at me now. I am just bending my head over my belly, and suddenly waves of shock surround my entire self. My body is see-through; I can see all my organs, my heart, my livers and my belly. My belly? It’s swollen. It’s totally diaphanous and I can see what’s inside. The kids! They are alive! They have been in there for 16 pages! They want to be born! Socrates takes a puff from his cigar, and looks at my belly again and then smiles. His smile is escorted by the smoke coming out of the cigar. Soc. You may climb up the stairs my friend, your story, your kids have to be born up there and tell it to the stars and the galaxy, tell it to all the bright lights that they are alive and roaming free in the space, just like anyone subjected to tyranny, they are not going to yield to any dictatorial behavior, they are the stars shining in the space; they are free, the text is free. He offers me a cigar and I take it, light it up, and start to smoke. I get out of the room and close the door. I can feel the contractions coming from my belly. There is a red coat around my shoulders. It’s His coat. He’s dead because of a heart attack the reason of which is laughing too much. On my right hand, there is a cigar. I take a puff from it. I have got a huge bag on the other. It’s full of sand. The sand I dug back on the island. Such a painful process it has been, yet the most precious duty in the world. I
- 17. am climbing up the stairs leaving Socrates and Ion behind me. Ion, such a guy who answers every question with a good old ‘very well’. I hope he lives happily with that chain-smoker. The contractions enhance. I am coming to the exit of the cinema. I look up and see the brightness. I am in pain. The kids are pushing so hard to come out. There I see it, Miles and Erato are waiting for me and the others, free Africans, 26 settlers, the island, the source of life, where everything came from, all forms of creatures, plants, animals, organisms, matters, objects, caves, fire, seas, oceans, myths, anything you can imagine are there for me at the exit. I reach it with a pain in my belly. They all hold my hands smiling, assuring me that I am going to have the most precious kids across the universe. The kids are coming out of my stomach, each one of them crying out of happiness, as they are not dead, they are saved from the voice of the tyranny and they find a life in my belly. They are so happy to be the sound of the universe now. Here they go, fly across the galaxy, free. I can die happy now.