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 Devils 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. Clich. What was not clich 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 didnt 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 thats 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
wasnt 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
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. Thats
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,
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 peoples
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
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
whats 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.





CHAPTER 2: MESSING UP WITH THE WHITE MANs 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.
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:






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! Thats 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
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
ones 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,
thats what he was doing to me. Licking me for scientific purposes. At
least, thats 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
down with the others and checked everyones 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
havent spoken yet. I dont know what language they speak. They dont
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
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 didnt 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.
Lets say their numbers were more than 26. Lets say they had 32 teeth
instead of 26. Lets 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
others 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
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 days 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
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. Lets 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 dont 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.
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. Its 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 dont 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, its 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 others 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: PLATOs
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
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. Its 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 doesnt care. For him,
whats important is that the fire doesnt 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 dont 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. Its Him and his soldiers!
They dont look uneasy in those seats which are made of human
skeletons. It does not bother them at all. And they are laughing constantly.
But whats 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. Hows 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 dont try to get out of the cinema;
they look like they are enjoying themselves. They dont look terrorized
by human deaths at all. They have been laughing at the bloody scenes of
wars.
Soc. Well, didnt 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, didnt 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, arent 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, doesnt that excessive pleasure these
people have in the tragic, painful scenes of the movie mean that these
people are themselves insane, sadists, dictators? Arent they staying in
this cinema just to enjoy bloodshed a little bit more?
Ion. Very true Socrates.
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. Its not just one, its many, and its 26! Can
you see it? Maybe the answer is in there. Maybe the answer is in him.
Maybe hes 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? Its swollen. Its totally diaphanous and I can see whats 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. Its His coat. Hes
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. Its 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
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.