Like magic...

Parody of a country…


She sat down on her kitchen floor, spread her crayons all around, and readied herself to draw new signs for the demonstration. So many things happened since she last did this. So many new affinities shaped her new moral grounds. She reached in the cupboard under the sink for fresh papers.
(Fresh papers for fresh ideas for fresh starts… a brighter future.)
She smiled, recognizing the marginal significance of what she’s doing.
She took out stacks of colored boards and papers. some used. some new. She looked at the old ones with a tinge of disgust, wondering how on earth did she buy into all this ‘crap’ before. “Indict Bashar”… “Syria out!”… “Stop the war”… “Stop the terror”… “No to America”… how different she is now, she thought… and she is different.
She put the old slogans aside, planned to destroy them as soon as she’s done, thinking that she wouldn’t want anyone to see what she was cheering for in the past…
She started working on her new series of “ana mesh ma3 hadane”… to accentuate her neutrality toward the whole scene of protests and protesters… to denounce all the parties, and thunder a new voice of neutrality, of independence… to teach people what independence really means. to show them how original she is… how defiant. how Lebanese. she is the true Lebanese, she thought.
“Ana mesh…” she started in red.
Suddenly she remembered her mother saying, with scolding looks and a severe tone “ma hadane la hadane ya mama”, and wondered sadly if this is where we are all heading. where they are all heading, she corrected herself…
Then she wondered whether - if anything - her neutral position was of the most aggressive. passive-aggressive… didn’t she owe it to herself to declare her war, her inner war on all that’s around her. didn’t she owe it to her children to scream at the top of her lungs like a mad woman slogans of disparate unity…
The national anthem.
she started humming the national anthem…
up to the point when it speaks of ‘fitan’…
up to the point when it speaks of men sprouting from mountains like lions…
up to the point when it speaks of the protection of god…
until she realized how far she is from all this…
from a declaration of ‘fitan’ right in the heart of her national core, like a stigma, to carry on forever…
from a sexist aggressive tale of lion-men roving the earth… she the feminist tigress who stood up for all she believed in more than any lion-man she knew…
from a god that she never believed in…
This deceitful little tune that speaks of work of literacy and labor but never mentions compassion. an anthem suitable for the most fascist of institutions…
she started to wonder if this is really her country… just like a child wonders if her parents are really her parents… then realizing that she has her mother’s eyes and father's chin, thinking in amazement how different they are, her family and she... or her country and she at that.
She wrote a different slogan “ma hadane la hadane?” and felt, really, that her question mark not only marked her indignation, but also her utter surprise at her mother’s intuition into life. her mother knew… but then, she remembered her saying with teary eyes, her head slightly tilted to the right “ma 2lkone gheir ba3ad ya mama”… she fell into despair…
For she realized… isn’t this just a travesty of what a real country should be like?
With a thick black marker she crossed all her old slogans, one by one, and below each she wrote “ma hadane la hadane?”