Revolution – Nidal Hamad
ترجمة ليال أيوب – لبنان
ثورة – بقلم : نضال حمد
I remember a day, a day when I was young, as young as first graders, I lay on my sponge mattress looking at the zinc roofing sheets of our home… got irritated by the sound of the wintry showers more than the daily whirr of bullets… I asked myself: are we the only ones who have these zinc sheets?
And I replied: there must be others living the way we live.
Not far from the old railway, the abandoned railway, which in previous years was transporting passengers freely from Lebanon to Palestine, I saw verse poems, houses made out of clay and others of zinc sheets, new tents and barracks and ready graves… I couldn’t understand the word Refugee and I was astonished at the insistence of a policeman speaks Arabic with a foreign accent to repeat the word Refugee… I thought it’s like my name or nickname…
I closed my eyes and woke up to find out that my eyes were staring at the word Revolution, the word that was written on the door of the room…
I always loved to write it on the doors, the door of my home, the door of my closet, the door of my neighbor, the door of our school, the door of our shop, the door of the outhouse where we used to answer the call of nature as well as on the covers of my books and on the walls of the quarter.
Revolution!
A short and a brief word…
After I grew up a little bit…
I tattooed it on my hand…
Years later, I drew it with my blood…
In the hospital, I woke up from a coma and didn’t find it…
They told me it sailed a few days ago or a few weeks ago…
I looked at my hand, I didn’t find “My hand” and I didn’t find “My Revolution”…
I didn’t worry about my forearm, but I did worry that they had cut off my revolution’s forearm.
*Extract from the diary of (A Commando Who Never Feels Tired).
**Nidal Hamad Beirut- directly after the siege and the massacre -at the beginning of 1983 American University Hospital – Beirut
