Elie Mitri's Hair Cut

Night is my preferred time in the 24 hours. From my space ship, or, in other more earthy term, from my bed, I watch some T.V. Then I join my theatre, my now more dimly litted bed, to play a scenic reading of some novels. Novels, finnished, and unfinnished, take the roles chaoticly, moodly. I read "Je t'Offrirai une Gazelle" of Malek Haddad once in Arabic, and twice in French. Yet, I sometimes read some of its lines again before I sleep. The novel is about an Algerian novelist and his manuscript of a novel that he refused to put his name on it. He said, trying to explain, that " the benefactors to dreams travel incognito".

As far as I can remember, no novel had entered into my dreams. Yet, I have dreamt before two days of a Lebanese singer named Sabah. I saw Sabah the day before the dream in the T.V. talking frankly about her life including the strange accedent of her brother killing her mother and her mother's lover. Anyway, in my dream, I was with Sabah in a trip somewhere in my Iraqi neighbourhood, in a place that kept being mysterious to me since it is covered by rich trees. Young lovers in our neighbourhood used to go to that site to meet. In the dream we discovered a secret site where Inas (an Iraqi actrice that played the role of Affifa Iskander in an Iraqi series) was hiding.

That dream passed away without much revelance to me. But yesterday's dream was funny. And because of it here I am writing to you.

I dreamt I was with some resident doctors I knew from Hilla in a balcony. Our enemy was on the other side of a river. It was night. It was me who dared to start shooting on them. I was very accurate and professional. That passed as if a scene from a video game. The balcony was empty, or almost empty few seconds after that. I went walking in a beautiful place which is unknown to me but it seemed to me, in the dream, that I was in this same place in an other old dream of mine, and I remembered that old dream while I was dreaming. Anyway, let us go to the funny scene.

The funny scene started when Elie Mitri came to fight a man he thought he can win. Another man joined the fight and Elie Mitri fell on the ground. The men kept fighting each other while Elie Mitri stood hardly. Bullets came from the side of the scene and passed through Elie Mitri's hair cutting it fastly and sharply. Stunned he came walking to me and said: "And here I got a new hair cut!". His hair was cut beautifully actually. That was very funny that I can still giggle when I remember it.

Till The Camel Reaches the Sea

The scene is not strange to my eyes anymore. The scene kept repeating since years. Still there is that particular strange day that puzzled me. He keeps promising that we will reach the sea. I am still hoping to see the sea, although I realized from the very first day that he took me from the oasis that we are walking in circles. He takes his watch for a compass. Anyway, what can we expect more, from a man, with a big hole in his marine hat through which a boucle of tortuous hair dances to this desert wind funnily. I was just weaned from my mother when he chose me to accompany his journey. He calls me a "ship". I am still waiting to see the sea he promised me so that I can see other kind of "ships" as he said to me once. He told me many things during those passed years. He told me once about somebody named "Freud", and kept talking about an "Iceberg" and an "Unconscious". An "Id". Well, in English they call us, Camels and all other animals, by "It". And I can assure you to a degree that we, Camels at least, have nothing but an "Id", and we have nothing called "memory" cause, all what is in our brain is, memory. Future doesn't worry us much, cause we got no "Great Expectations". In our memory, nothing erased, nothing forgotten, we live as we dream, we dream our life. So the scene that kept repeating every night, that scene that the owl told me later it is called "The Captain's Memory", is not strange to me at all but, but that don't means that I understand it. Repetition doesn't merit understanding.

Why should his memory be so strange? And why that particular night he woke up shouting at the owl with those meaningless words? Well, here is the story to you, and to me too, hoping in the future we can decode those symbols of this vast desert, until we reach sea.

The scene begins every night, when the captain decides that we sleep, to complete our journey the coming day. Just as he take off his pierced naval hat, the anchor that is embroidered in the front of the hat, starts to separate, getting bigger and bigger floating in the air, and "DOOM!", it falls deep into the sand. The captain starts at that particular moment to snore very strangely and funnily. An owl wakes up from his head and fly to a nearby hill. Then an anvil, a hammer, and plenty of nails appear. The nails, one by one, stand on the anvil, the hammer falls on them. Crooked, the unfortunate nails fall on the ground. A tortoise then appears from his head always yawning and complaining from the useless clamor of the "iron tools" as she seems to call the anvil, hammer, and nails. I don't know if she includes the anchor in her term. She never speaks to me. The tortoise always walks slowly to a deep green lettuce head that I always miss finding it before the tortoise head to it. It seems that the lettuce head appears as the tortoise head to it and starts biting it slowly and chewing. I like the calming sound which almost declares the end of the scene. The end of the scene for me, at least, cause I usually fall asleep on that calming sound of the tortoise eating the lettuce head.

But the problem was that particular day when I woke up at the captain's sound yelling at the owl in the middle of the night: "Fly and catch those Rats!! Fly and get me rid of those Rats!!" It was the middle of the night and it wasn't the time for the owl to go back into the captain's head so she started to fly anxiously not knowing which way she must go. I failed to see any rats nearby. The hammer stopped in the middle of its work opening his mouth astonishingly. The tortoise turned her face from the lettuce head and was gazing the captain calmly but still chewing slowly. The captain yelled at them all: "Why you are playing Seek-And-Hide with me? Why?"

To my surprise he fell asleep again. When the morning was about to come, they all, except the crooked nails, went again into his head. He woke up. And we started our journey again. The crooked nails always stay surrounding us in the morning but the captain never cares. It is me, after all, who got to step on them, with the captain above my hump.

The scene repeats itself, without the captain's midnight turmoil and yelling. But I am little more confused that I used to be in my oasis where I was born. I started to have a future to care about, a great expectation to see the sea. I started to think about that "Freud" the captain told me once about. I started to think about what happens when I fall asleep. What can get out from my camel head? Do I have an ID? A Camel's ID? Do my memory plays Seek-And-Hide with me and erase my dreams?

Hoping to find some answers, meanwhile, I'm still hoping that we reach the sea, someday.