No Exits

Rising with Red. Fading with Black.

Maheed is my own roadside prophet. His blood hot tarpaulin, makeshift home welcomes this passerby with warmth usually unheard of in most of the uber-urban world. I desist from such pleasantness, it often leaves a cynic with a bad taste in their mouth; that the world can actually be a nice place.
He is a man without a country. He ran away from Iraq no sooner than the insurgency strengthened its hold over his miniscule village north of the capital. Even in his flight, he was caught at a check post and held in detention for longer than a month. His time in captivity was defined by cruel and unusual torture practiced on his then 19 yr old mind and body to extract information about his Persian father- a rebel and a writer. His parents had transgressed the laws of geographical sanctity when they married – a Persian and an Iraqi Kurd. His escape from the prison is a story that warrants patience and courage in its narration as in listening.
Now he sits in front of me, in a makeshift world living a makeshift life. For the rest of the world, he doesn’t exist beyond a number or a statistic.
This is the status seeker, the absent human being. A person whose very existence negates itself.
When men are demoted as the untermensch, when lives are abandoned because the fear of loneliness is too much to bear, when you have to kill yourself in a foreign country just to prove that if they sent you back to your own, they’d kill you there as well.
Refugee is a bad word. It’s a seven-lettered curse of the nations. It’s a fragmented life on Guinea’s tough and darkness-laden prong or the erstwhile descendants of Guadalajara trying to flee and dissimilate into an American frost. Its potential as a threat is inescapable, its reality even more so.
The non-existent people, the forgotten tribes, the random strangers you don’t see: the undefined vacuum that holds their stories and their survival. UN camps for asylum seekers essentially embower the first pathway to hell on earth.
How do you expunge records of your only child’s existence from your limited memory?
Fatality is no more a cause or concern, it’s a revolving door now. You pass through it so many times, it feels rational to stop expecting a decent life and start yielding in to the indecency of a half-death.
I can’t correct much of what’s wrong with the world, am a leica carrying troubadour at the best but my spine feels a rivet loaded burden of bedlam and calamity every time I step into a camp of this nature. Stoic in its ample conscious credence. What a significant injury to the heart, a prolonged and tinny laugh that sometimes escapes an incompletely gashed throat- I am dying and am invisible to you.
Automatism for death and the dead. We will allow an entire race to perish. Murder writ large over our hands and our conscience.
We don’t care.
We can only generate provocative paradoxes and sift through archived accounts of racial cleansing and live burials. Of children roasted as meat, of women split open by the firing end of a sinister rifle. Of families shot to ground on whims of a rabid regime.
What skin are you made up of, baby? Where are your dubious angels? Where is your laying ground? Your trifling wish?

Temptation scales further and the man inside wants to defeat to bits those who are generating this excruciating exodus, your manhood is often threatened by the collective inaction that perpetuates this inconceivable violence of mind and body.
What is sacred or maybe nothing at all?
Is it worth its weight in bloody dollars or euros the lack of sleep you experience even on a pills-induced night?
I didn’t say we are on a lookout for heroes, just people: like you and me, like Us. Who see and care and feel. People who can wade through waters of reproach and regret to find a home for those left in the middle, to view, not as lumbering incursion but a necessary realization – We are here together. Not separate islands but one mass of subsistence and evolution. You gotta do it now, baby. Now.