Ahmad Sleiman

Romantique 2011 ( Author Ahmad Sleiman

The Axes and saws you see are not for cutting down trees and what you see is not water nor it is a lake. All that matter is that the Lumberjacks carried the leftover fragments and set the forest on fire. Although most of us will embrace the future and welcome it with open arms, some came from swamps to preach their beliefs using a history that concerns none of us. Therefore, the necessity was dire and brutal when all those bodies have fallen. In our lands lived mercenaries and opportunists alongside mobs and criminals, so did fools and thieves. Many overwhelmed us with useless empty discussions that imitate nothing but women's gossip; they cried out the name of a god whom they dragged out of a book soaked with the menses of virgins. We thought that their religion was theirs and only theirs, but we were mistaken, for they declared invasions and conquests, opened slave markets, and started debating whether we should be gunned down or slaughtered by their hands. Some new arrivals benefited from this massacre, they declared self-governed protectorates, some were religiously based while others were based on ethnicities, and they got protection from countries and other groups. Therefore, the land became a place where ancient conflicts are seeking to be settled. While all that was taking place, containers of bombs and rockets were falling off from the planes the president who destroyed the land and its people using nothing but the land's own army. Ahmad Sleiman