Over 6000 Days of Solitude...

Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues

A few days ago, I learned that Kamel, 56 years old, has been detained by the Americans. They stormed his house at dawn, took him out in his pyjamas and since that day we have not heard from him or his whereabouts. I have been unable to sleep. I twist and turn in my bed, counting the minutes... I keep wondering what "they" are doing to him... Are they torturing him? He is sick, are they giving him any medication? Are they brutally interrogating him? Does he sleep standing up amidst hundreds of others? Are they giving him water? Do they feed him? Did they kill him? Is he dead? Where on earth is he? What has he done? Did he perhaps glimpse Omar in the crowd of the 100'000 prisoners? And so it goes in my head, on and on...running in circles (...) So I started multiplying 365 by 4 . Hey that was easy - 1461. I needed something more to trigger me into dozing off... So I went for 13 multiplied by 365. That was more difficult - 4745.Now I added up the two figures in my mind - 6206. Six thousand two hundred and six days... That is over 6'000 days since the barbaric embargo and the occupation... Over 6'000 days of savagery, brutality, violence, destruction, rape, torture, imprisonments, starvation, neglect, abandonment...Over 6'000 days of living in the obscurity, to the blind eyes and deaf ears of the rest of the world... Over 6'000 days of being left on the margins of the international community, marginalized into shadows, into ghosts with no names, into a subhuman category, into a void of total despair, left to fend for ourselves...

continua / continued