How sweet will be the victory of the
wretched, and how great!
How sweet will the songs be on that
golden day,
how brilliant the golden sun of the
wretched as it blazes.
How sweet this dangerous dream
~
that hopes will be realized, that
wishes become true.
That a dream will become
reality,
that the wretched of the earth will
have their state.
~ Muammar Al Gaddafi ~ THIS
DANGEROUS DREAM
A review by David Seals
June 17, 1998
Posted November 19, 2011
A few pages into Muammar Qaddafi's 'Escape to Hell, and other
stories' a strange feeling came over me; I didn't realize what it was at first.
Under the heading of Part I: Novels, I read the first sentence,
"The city has been with us since ages long past, but regard
its plight today!"
It quickly became apparent this was no ordinary work of
fictional entertainment with characters and a narrative plot. It wasn't going
to fit into any genre of post-modernist minimalism, much like Qaddafi himself
does not fit into any one place in the world as a political or religious
figure.
This is the city: a mill that grinds down its inhabitants ~ Children are worse off than adults. They move from darkness to darkness; from three darknesses to the fourth, as in the Quran.
Then it struck me: I was hearing the same voice of the Libyan
people I had not heard for a third of a century, since I was a teenager living
in Libya from 1962-65 as a dependent of the United States Air Force.
It was the plaintive directness I heard in our houseboy Mobruk
when he said, in October '62 as Tripoli erupted in anti-American riots because
of the Cuban missile crisis, "We don't all hate Americans." He had
tears in his eyes, as if his country's exuberant idealism had been laid bare.
We were two teenage boys from different corners of the world
terribly afraid of a world gone mad.
Most Americans sneered at Libyans back then and called them
"Mos." A Mo was very poor and his country was very hot. He was an
incompetent servant or laborer at best, he drank foul-smelling green water from
dirty sandstone wells and hepatitis and dysentery were rampant among us
foreigners.
Not one road in his city or country was free of huge potholes
and donkeys and camels slowing the speed of our American Century. The women
were treated like slaves in full-body barracan robes and were bought and sold
like goats.
A Mo was very poor
and his country was very hot.
Their religion was
an alien apostasy from Christianity. Libya,
to the Europeans and Anglo-Americans, from the time of Caesar to Rommel, was
only a strategic outpost of the central Mediterranean shipping lanes,
and a ripe resource of oil from olives
to petroleum.
The Greek historian
Herodotus called them "Barbarians", after the indigenous Berbers.
Theirs was the infamous Barbary Coast of pirates on the shores of Tripoli, to
which President Thomas Jefferson first
sent the Marines
O wise, kind-hearted people..., humanitarians: have mercy on children, and do not deceive them by making them live in the city. Do not let your children turn into mice, moving around from hole to hole, from sidewalk to sidewalk.
But there was always that haunting voice, and Qaddafi's book has reminded me of it,
as the muezzins reminded us five times a day of the memory of another strident
voice crying simply in another desert, from Arabia 1400 years ago, for
Allah, al-Rahman, ir-Rahim.
Libya
at the time of King Idris
And there is something else in 'Escape to Hell', a self-criticism and self-irony not heard
in this country from a national leader since Abraham Lincoln.
Back on the streets
of Tripoli and Wheelus Air Base in 1962,
Anglo-Americans hated that voice
like they hated Arabic music on
the radio. Qaddafi articulates
why he and his people were so hated back then, when he says in 'Long
Live the State for the Wretched!' in
Part II: Essays:
This is the true secret for their hating you: you are not of this world, you are not wealthy, and for this they hate you. You are not oppressors, and for this they hate you. You are not pretenders, so they hate you. You are not hypocrites or liars, and for this they hate you.
Not until I read this book did I realize why Libya has also haunted my
dreams for a third of a century, and perhaps why it haunts the world still
today out of all proportion to its size. In another chapter titled 'Death to
the Incapable...Until Revolution', an essay like a chapter in the odd novel:
Although the world of the incapable has no meaning and no effectiveness, is null and void and silly ... and although they create nothing and change nothing ... despite all of this, the world of these incapable ones is the richest, most fertile, most teeming, and full of literary meaning. For the world of these people has its culture; it has an ability to accumulate psychologies and narratives of literature, myth, and metaphysics.
Now of course the
Libyans are hated even more because they are wealthy, having taken over their own oil resources for the first time,
and building up a powerful defensive military
capability from incessant attacks by those same heirs of Caesar and Rommel.
They have turned over their annual oil revenues in the billions to themselves, making themselves anew, from being the poorest country on earth in 1951 (before oil was discovered in 1959) ~ with a $50 annual per capita income, lower than India's ~ to the best in Africa, and higher than England's.
They are building a Great Manmade River in the Sahara from vast subterranean seas of water, next to the oil oceans, and dams and irrigation canals thousands of kilometers long to turn the desert into a green agricultural resource.
But we don't hear anything about that.
According to an article on the Green Book internet website, it is this River Project that has caused a lot of American paranoia (Qaddafi's 'Green Book' came out in 1980, delineating the social and economic structure of his unique system of governance):
Moammar Al Gaddafi with Libyan people
They have turned over their annual oil revenues in the billions to themselves, making themselves anew, from being the poorest country on earth in 1951 (before oil was discovered in 1959) ~ with a $50 annual per capita income, lower than India's ~ to the best in Africa, and higher than England's.
They are building a Great Manmade River in the Sahara from vast subterranean seas of water, next to the oil oceans, and dams and irrigation canals thousands of kilometers long to turn the desert into a green agricultural resource.
Brother Gaddafi
prays in pipe of The Great Manmade River
But we don't hear anything about that.
Qaddafi and his Libyans are branded one of the greatest 'Terrorist
Regimes' on the planet.
Why?
His book provides a
lot of clues, helping to explain their national consciousness behind the press
clippings and quotes, such as the one he made in 1996 when he opened the second multi-billion dollar phase of the Great
Manmade River Project,
"This is the biggest answer to America and all the evil forces who accuse us of being concerned with terrorism. We are only concerned with peace and progress. America is against life and progress; it pushes the world toward darkness."
Mommar Al Gaddafi ~
Libya and Libyans
According to an article on the Green Book internet website, it is this River Project that has caused a lot of American paranoia (Qaddafi's 'Green Book' came out in 1980, delineating the social and economic structure of his unique system of governance):
I laughed at the absurdity of the question then, but I was quickly shamed when I saw tears in his eyes again. "We have to pay many sheep and goats to a girl's father. It takes many years of hard work."The newly-inaugurated stage of the project will provide Tripoli and the surrounding region with fresh water pumped from sub-Saharan aquifers and transported over hundreds of kilometres through vast networks of pre-stressed concrete pipelines.Because a mountainous formation known as 'Jabal Nefussa' blocks the natural flow of the piped water from the areas where the aquifers are located to the coastal plain, it was necessary to drill a tunnel through the mountain and install a pumping station.It is this tunnel, located at Tarhunah that U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry earlier this year threatened to attack with nuclear weapons on the pretext that it was a chemical weapons factory.Mobruk once laid bare some of my own most basic emotions, in 1962, when he also asked me, pointedly, "Do you buy your wives?"
I think now about how my arrogance must have looked to
him, for I had girlfriends, a transistor radio, money to spend on soft drinks
and movies, F-100s roaring overhead day and night from our super powered NATO
Base at Wheelus.
I think now about
how we bombed our own base in 1986 and
killed hundreds of Libyan women and children in downtown Tripoli and Benghazi,
including Qaddafi's own 16-month old
daughter Hana.
1986: Bombs
killed hundreds of Libyan and Qaddafi's own 16-month old daughter Hana
So I was pleased to
hear Mobruk's disturbing grassroots voice again as I read the first chapters of
'Escape to Hell'. Maybe it can
only be a personal excitement, and you can only care about someone if you've
lived with them and shared couscous on
the ground with them, and listened
to the lovely Suras of the Quran in musical Arabic while sipping chai in
the little servant's shack behind the big white American villa. But then the
best books evoke just such emotional reactions, and I found Qaddafi's direct passion very moving.
He takes me back
into the Suq and the Casbah of the Old City where Mobruk took me, where it was
forbidden for Americans to go. In those dirty reeking sewers of poverty I can
hear Qaddafi's anger and piety, too.
Whole tent cities for refugees from the
desert, Bedouins and Berbers
looking for non-existent jobs in the
booming new oil industry, were constructed and fenced off on the
perimeters of Tripoli and our consciousness, reminding me of Andersonville and Auschwitz.
The stink was
indescribable, with open sewers in the dirt trails running between cardboard
shacks, miles and miles of
concentration camps fenced off and patrolled by NATO policemen. (While at the same time the U.N.-created King Idris presided over
a Constitutional Monarchy from one of
his huge palaces)
He takes me out
into the baking hardscrabble fields where the women toiled like mules, and I was never never allowed to even
look at them, let alone talk to them.
Tripoli in 1990
Today I am shocked
to see pictures of Libyan women without
barracans working in modern hospitals as doctors, and in a whole New Tripoli of superhighways and
skyscrapers as engineers and teachers. They are
wearing fashionable short dresses with high heels and chic Italian stockings!
The Libyans tell me
today,
"You wouldn't recognize it. We have 3 or 4 cars in front of every house, and everyone in the country has a home, and the world's best health care and education. You should find yourself a good Libyan woman. There are lots of them!"
Qaddafi evokes
the spirit of the Libyan people and their land.
It is a wildly
unfamiliar joke but the easy laughter is a good friend. There is a lot of that kind of humor in Qaddafi's book too,
in the irreverent-reverent sarcasm of the chapters 'Stop Fasting When You See the New Moon' and 'The Prayerless Friday'.
These are people
who are human first and foremost, but, like their "Guide" as Qaddafi
is called, or "The Brother Colonel", they are as passionate about the
forbidden topics of politics and religion as anybody I've met anywhere in the
world. There was never a shortage of good conversation and stimulating new
perspectives, and here again Qaddafi
evokes the spirit of his people and his land.
Revolution: when feelings of impotence penetrate every part of the life of the incapable, and they lose the feeling of impotence and the decline that it involves. When neglect, ignominy, and baseness fail to provoke, the life of the impotent reaches zero, a static level of silliness and marginality. The countdown to approaching nothingness begins...'Escape to Hell' is a philosophical fiction intended as a test of the reader's willingness to really consider new possibilities for the next millenium, as the Libyan people themselves have been tested; and even without the amazingly complicated political and religious pre-conditioning most First Worlders would bring to this treatise by one of the world's most notorious outlaws, it is a challenging mixture of post-Socialist Islamism that Qaddafi calls "a radical social progressive trend."
He calls it a Novel
as much as an Essay because he is his
own great fictional creation. The persona of Qaddafi reminds me of the way Sitting Bull got in the face of the 19th century, until he was like one of Qaddafi's own
larger-than-life paintings (which I saw in the lobby of the Libyan UN
Mission in New York) on a big white horse in flowing romantic robes and
headdress.
And it is this grammar of genuine myth that went far
beyond psychology, making Sitting
Bull's image the dominant face of frontier America.
After all, who has stood the test of time
~ the "Savage Red Devil"
or President Rutherford B. Hayes?
Muammar AL Gaddafi larger-than-life
Will Qaddafi's
green revolution in the desert survive Bill Clinton's highway bill?
What is the real nature of the pan-Arabic hostility to Zionism?
These are important
questions and we cannot just dismiss Qaddafi's voice in the heretofore uneven
debate. We have not heard much from the Arabs and non-Arab Muslims. Qaddafi's
book is a valuable addition to the debate.
Arafat is routinely demonized as one of the generic
"Terrorists" in popular cinema and journalism. It is just as unfair and counterproductive as the one-dimensional Hollywood stereotypes
of Sitting Bull and his people.
1992, Qaddafi visiting
Arafat in the hospital
It would take a lot
more than a book review to explore the truth of Libya's real place in our
geopolitical paradigm at the end of the millenium, and Qaddafi himself probably
doesn't know the half of it. "Flee, flee the city" he exclaims
in the second chapter titled 'The
Village'. "Leave the
irritation behind, the anxious places, the sealed locations." Here
we can begin to see his characteristic Libyan idealism shining through:
How beautiful the village and countryside are! Clean air, the horizon before you, the heavens without pillars thou canst behold [Quran, sura 13, verse 2], with their divine lanterns above.A structure and a fallible human purpose start to become evident by the next chapters of 'The Earth' and 'The Suicide of the Astronaut', in which he says, "You can leave everything, except the earth ... Land has been the context of the conflict ... Whither then are you going?" The astronaut, modern technological man, goes out into the solar system looking for meaning, but ... " ... man returned to the earth, dizzy, nauseous, and fearing doom." The astronaut then committed suicide "after he gave up on being able to find work on the ground that could sustain him."
All this builds
quickly to the revealing core, which is the enigmatic title of the book.
'Escape to Hell' begins with one stunning statement after another:
"The tyranny of the masses is the harshest type of tyranny"; "I love the freedom of the masses, as they move freely with no master above them."
Suddenly there is
the personal cry of the author that lifts it all out of an interesting
sociopolitical news analysis by a famous public figure into a Dantesque journey
of the soul: "What terror! Who
can address the unfeeling self and make it feel?" What is this?
Before I could switch nonfiction-fiction gears he goes back to "a
collective intelligence" and "social conflagration", then back
again in one sentence to "a society that loves you yet will never show you mercy." He himself is feeling the terrorism.
Within this mass of people, who poisoned Hannibal, burnt Savonarola, and smashed Robespierre, who loved you but failed to reserve a seat for you at the cinema, or even a table in a cafe, who love you without expressing this in any simple way ...
This is what the
masses have done and continue to do to such people. "So what can I ~ a poor Bedouin ~ hope for in a modern city of
insanity? People snap at me whenever they see me: build us a better
house! Get us a better telephone line! Build us a road upon the sea! Make a
public park for us!" A poor lost Bedouin
without even a birth certificate, with his staff upon his shoulder. A Bedouin,
who will not stop for a red light, nor be afraid when a policeman takes hold of
him.
“Leave me in peace to
tend my flock."
Is this, as
suspicious Americans might say, the
same lament of other billionaires like Howard Hughes or Nero who felt so
totally centralized by all the
wretched masses yearning for money
that they went crazy, retreating into isolation and paranoia?
"I am an illiterate Bedouin ... I do not know what money looks like ... the mad people of the city constantly ask me for these things ... I am a poor simple person ... leave me in peace to tend my flock."
Or is Qaddafi more like Sitting Bull, the unelected Medicine Chief, a poet-king like David personifying all the wealth and all the myths of his people?
"I am an illiterate Bedouin ... I do not know what money looks like ... the mad people of the city constantly ask me for these things ... I am a poor simple person ... leave me in peace to tend my flock."
Or is Qaddafi more like Sitting Bull, the unelected Medicine Chief, a poet-king like David personifying all the wealth and all the myths of his people?
A simple Bedouin in
a tent, running an Empire?
What a great character out of fiction, following his
own Virgil into the inferno while simultaneously ascending into higher Hegiras:
"I have decided to make my escape
to hell.
The Mediterranean and the Sahara will do that to you. I swam in
those same crystalline seas also, where Odysseus and Calypso played in the Blue
Grotto.
The Berbers talk of pictographs of pyramids in the remote Kufra Oasis too.
Qaddafi mentions an Arab prince discovering America long before Columbus, and Aladdin, and a genie's ring, and a magic golden helmet. He is just as torn by this sublime modern dilemma as we all are, between mythology and psychology:
I will now tell you the story of my experiences when I made that journey, that escape to hell. I will describe the road that leads there, describe hell itself for you, and tell you how I came back by the same way. It was truly an adventure, and one of the strangest true stories ever, and I swear to you that it is not fiction. In fact, I escaped twice to hell, fleeing from you only in order to save myself......
First of all, hell has wild, dark mountainsides, covered by fog.
There is volcanic stone which has been burnt black since time immemorial. What is truly strange is that I found wild animals on their way to hell before me, also making their escape from you, for hell meant life to them, while life among you meant death.
Everything then disappeared around me, except for my own existence, which I felt more strongly than at any previous time. The mountains shrank, the trees dried up, the animals bolted and melted into the jungles of hell, seeking refuge and fleeing mankind. Even the sun became obscured by hell, and began to disappear. Nothing remained clear except hell, and the most distinct part of it was its heart. I headed toward it, with practically no difficult.
This rings of Lao
Tzu's 'Tao te Ching' ("The blackness within the blackness"), or what
Sitting Bull spoke of in the Siouan cosmogony as a Thunderbird obscured in the
black misty mountains of the west.
The Berbers talk of pictographs of pyramids in the remote Kufra Oasis too.
Qaddafi mentions an Arab prince discovering America long before Columbus, and Aladdin, and a genie's ring, and a magic golden helmet. He is just as torn by this sublime modern dilemma as we all are, between mythology and psychology:
...the hell on earth never gave me the time to spend time with myself, contemplate it, and commune with it. For we ~ I mean me and myself ~ were like dangerous criminals in your city, subjected to searches and surveillance. Even after our innocence was proven, and our identity became known, we were placed in prison, guarded closely. Your purpose was always to prevent me and myself from coming together, so that you could sleep easily and contentedly. How beautiful hell is compared to your city! Why did you bring me back? I want to return to hell, and live in it. I would travel there without any passport; just give me myself so that I may go. The self that I discovered had been disfigured by you, as you tried to corrupt its innocence.
I came away from
this book knowing a lot more about Muammar
Qaddafi, and the historic
transformation, the apotheosis, of Libya. His other stories about
redemption and the death of his father,
who fought Mussolini's Fascists who
killed hundreds of thousands of Libyans in the 1930s, and his identification with Joseph in the Quran
and the injustices that have been done by 'Jacob's Cursed Family' to Joseph,
and the 'Blessed Caravan' of Ishmael's tribes who rescued Joseph and took him
to Egypt (which was originally called Libya, as were Arabia and Canaan), make
it clear that Libya is not a backwater
outpost on the fringes of
civilization as Americans saw it in 1962, or a third-rate culture with no tolerance of literature, liberation, or
modern progress.
How sweet this dangerous dream
But it is more like
the mythic subconscious Homer called The Land of The Lotus Eaters, where
Odysseus shipwrecked on his way home, and which Qaddafi describes as "this dangerous dream":
How sweet will be the victory of the wretched, and how great! How sweet will the songs be on that golden day, and how brilliant the golden sun of the wretched as it blazes. How sweet this dangerous dream - that hopes will be realized, that wishes become true. That a dream will become reality, that the wretched of the earth will have their state.
ESCAPE TO HELL, AND OTHER STORIES
Muammar Qaddafi
(Stanke Press, Montreal/NY, 1998, 193 pp.)
Africa and then the Americas and then the World by the enemies of God and His faithful by today's Satanic Machiavelli and Mephistopheles in one and Satan's lies about peace being orchestrated to crush the world
ReplyDeleteThank you for this thoughtful and poetic reading of Escape to Hell. The first and only critique I have seen in English. Gaddafi was an exceptional man who was exterminated from the earth by the jealousy and lust for power of the West. I miss him and I wish I could see him again. I hope he knows how valuable he was.
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