Decades

Prodigal Son

            It’s midday on August 8 as I enter this grand stage of clowns and fools. Warm Mediterranean wind moving out of the Sahara desert blows over the capital city as I take my first breath. My mother holds me in her arms near an open window as she displays me to my father. On the same date, a decade earlier, U.S. President Richard Nixon announces his resignation over the Watergate scandal.  I am blissfully oblivious of how politics affect human lives while my mother cradles me in her arms. On the same date, a few years later, Iraq occupies Kuwait, which leads to the Gulf War shortly afterward. I am unaware of what war is even as in my own country a civil war approaches. I am not aware of much at all.

            I am watching a cartoon that is interrupted by breaking news. Footage of tanks rolling down roads is broadcast. It has begun. I ask my mother why has there been so much news reporting lately that they even have to cut into my favourite Looney Tunes cartoon.  She clumsily tells me that it is always been like this, trying to shelter me from the harsh reality but the reality finds ways to intrude even on a silly cartoon. I am a young boy who is slowly becoming aware of a dreadful concept that is war. The innocent delight of childhood slowly begins to evaporate.

 I am walking into my elementary school for the first time. The teacher informs the parents that the students will not be required to wear the red handkerchiefs around their necks, which was a symbol of communist allegiance. The communist regime referred to students as pioneers. It was such a grand designation to put on a bunch of seven-year-old boys and girls. I wasn’t deemed a pioneer but the world was starting to look more wild and unstable and in dire need of such. Things were changing at a rapid pace. Old vestiges were falling off. I was born into change. Changes are all I know. There was peace, now there is war. There was communism, now there is a despotic dictatorship. My parents were married, now they are divorced. I was watching cartoons, now I’m watching tanks.

In 1952, Albert Einstein concludes that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. Each moment we experience exists forever. Fifty years later and I’m witnessing the past slowly fall away. The past always carries the seeds of the future in itself. It births the future and dies off itself. In an attempt to stop the irreversible, some of the teachers organize and make the first graders wear the red handkerchiefs again. It is finally discontinued the year after that.

 I walk into a classroom where one of my teachers, Mr. Flea, still has the picture of the long deceased Communist Dictator hung above the chalkboard. The dictator has always been referred to among the people as Marshal Joseph; the highest military rank title was always used when addressing him or when talking about him. When I first heard about him from older people, I actually thought that Marshal was his first name.

The older generations mostly spoke highly of the time when they lived under his rule but I believe that the only difference then was there were no wars so in retrospect that time seemed more appealing. To me he was still just a dictator, one who preached equality and communism but lived in luxury himself, smoking Cuban cigars, wearing white suites, and lounging on his private yachts. All I see is just another dictator smirking in the black and white photo while our country burns in living colour.

I grow to despise the picture over time and I start planning to remove it with a few other students while the teacher is outside the classroom. After much deliberation, we decide against it fearing that the stunt could potentially shock the teacher fatally. The photo suffers much abuse over time, from shooting spitballs at it and sticking gum on it. Mr. Flea goes to great lengths to preserve the portrait as each class would start with the picture freshly polished, with all the gum and spit balls meticulously removed by our frenziedly fanatical teacher.