Author: Tantalize Copyright © 2006
Blog: Tantalize: Truth Embezzler
Location: Kuwait
Theme: A Kuwaiti resistance fighter’s personal retaliation of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and how he changes (conditions) the more he tortures Iraqi soldiers as they torture his land.
In a bathroom mirror stands a man staring hard at his reflection. The brilliance in the room is half naked. The walls are covered with black debris and dark blood which have both settled from enveloping time. The smell defies civility. Nasser looks in as he tries to map out his sore and bruised forehead, comfortably caressing and picking at the dried flesh and flickering the remains nonchalantly away on the ground. He pauses without fully comprehending the image he sees in front of him. It is his very image that hounds him into stillness. With focus, Nasser stands calmly glaring into himself as if mesmerized by what he sees.
His eyes stare in their reflection as if rhetorically pondering, as if curiously searching, as if hungrily decoding. He waits a little longer, a little further; a little deeper. He waits by giving a harder look into his image. He does it but without receiving a clear answer. Over and over throughout the days, Nasser does the same exact thing, and again and again, he is left with the same conclusion: digression.
He then migrates away from his general reflection and towards his brittle beard. It has been seeping out in dry carelessness, and in honest nakedness. The hair is rough and dirty due to lack of shaving, but more importantly due to his carelessness of wanting to shave. His eyes mirror sleeplessness and his mouth hangs indifference. He takes a deep concentrated look at his forehead and then welcomes its symbolism. The bump is huge, but he is hugely proud of boasting what he has done to achieve it. It’s a bump of insignia. Not pain. Nor humiliation.
Why doesn’t it hurt as much as it looks? He repeatedly probes himself but without wanting a definitive answer. Why doesn’t it spread and infect the rest of my head? Isn’t infection just that? To start and to continuously run into unfeeling despair? Allah yister (God will forgive).
After haphazardly cleansing himself in the bathroom, he readies himself to head back to his wife and kids. He zips out of his filthy waste management uniform and dresses into a very bleached and starched white dishdasha (local traditional male garment that hangs loosely from top to bottom like a woman’s dress). Smoothly, he puts on the rest of the gear which is the headdress that is made up of a qitra (a curtained loose-fitting head cloth that hangs down below the shoulders to ward off the sun’s heat and maintain air circulation), and an igaal (a strong circular black piece that fits on top of the head to hold down the qitra). His entire outer appearance transforms from a common manual worker into a respectable looking gentleman.
The family thinks he is coming back from a day of hard work at volunteering. It was his job to pick up and dispense waste that was building up all across the country, on a daily basis. Kuwaitis had never used to physically deal with waste management themselves. So, to Nasser, it was a unique and primitively new experience.
His new vocation is the same type of manual labor that Kuwaitis used to transfer to impoverished Asians who had come to Kuwait seeking better opportunities and fairer treatment. They were paid miniscule salaries, a small fraction in comparison to their Kuwaiti counterparts. Overworked and underfed, they were kept under tight surveillance, when habitually mistreating them was a normal occurrence.
Now, however, Kuwaitis have finally become a majority in their own country. Not because they wanted it so, but because two thirds of the country’s population were expatriates who systematically fled in any way they could through Kuwait’s borders. Ironically, it is only in time of war; in time of desperate need, and in a time of equivocal human transparency that Kuwaitis have gained full control of taking care of the most basic needs. The very same needs that used to be taken for granted are now of the utmost necessity.
They are now unified and working together to resist the Iraqi occupation. Shiite and Sunna Muslim Kuwaitis alike are unified in their resistance against a nationality that has come to test their patriotism, and personal convictions. This is also a testing time which manifests into agony and brings forth the most natural characteristics of humbling humanity.
Most of the expatriate workers have left in exoduses out of panic and desperation. They weren’t getting paid and many of them abhorred Kuwaitis’ air of arrogance and elitism. Some Kuwaitis have left as well. But, more have stayed, and ironically, they have ended up becoming the lowest manual labor they have never known to be. They as a minority take up the very jobs that Indians, Bengalis, Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians, Filipinos and others used to sweat their souls over. It’s the same identity they helped to erect as a country foreign and totally unemotional to them. The recycled monotonous labor has now been handed to Kuwaitis as a major responsibility. Nasser, being one of them. And, women and children included.
Young and old clean the filthy, overfilled, garbage dumps. They are at times swarmed with dead and forgotten human remains. At other times, cats and sheep drench them, while houseflies and maggots eat away at the flesh that once marked what Kuwait proudly yet shallowly stood for: incessant arrogance. They don’t simply take the waste to sights - like it used to be done - for basic burial or adequate containment. They terminate the remains in one place, and they do it with great humility.
Their faces are covered with dark ash, and their bodies reek of filth. There are not any smiles or any sign of hope that rest on their weary humanity. Their task is simple: to pick up any trash they can and dispose of it anyway they see fit, whether it be by incineration, burial or decapitation of human parts for animal consumption. The task happens after the human parts have been tortured and torched by special interrogative Iraqi forces, or ravished by wild desert dogs. They are then obliterated into unidentifiable specs of memories. There isn’t any money involved nor are there any rewards for the volunteers. They are doing it to try to maintain any sobriety of their civil life they have remaining without falling into barbarism.
However, their characteristics are slowly altering to a softer and lesser form of the ugliness that humanity sometimes conjures up. They are falling victim to depravity. Their strongest hope fraternizes with Islam while their weakest desires collaborate with death.
Burning it all in its place is all they can muster since the country is slowly falling into daily decay and disorder, from both sides of the equation. The stench proves how inhumane humanity can be in times of desperation and savagery: war. The only cleanliness that remains aloof out of all this is their humility to help the dead and to try to maintain any sense of civility, all in a country that is immediately submerging into a deep sense of human frailty.
Nasser’s routine escapades into this volunteer work, in which he tells his family, flatly hide the truth he masquerades. Interrogating and torturing Iraqi prisoners and many Palestinian co-conspirators, and justifiably killing them, is where his volunteering seeks truth. Loaded with muscular biceps, hardened knuckles and a sincere hatred towards anything Iraqi, Nasser validates his killing as justice rendered for what Saddam is doing to his beloved Kuwait. Daily, he hears and sees the erasing of unarmed Kuwaiti youth and the raping of Kuwaiti women because under-soldiered and out-of-shape-rural Iraqi men have been granted powers that their lives have never known. They exercise it as godly as possible. The result is Arab to Arab death: Muslim to Muslim shame.
The head bumps fostering on his head are a result of head-butting Iraqi soldiers, who are old enough to be his father, or poor enough to be his disciples. The same killing spree that is taking place outside what used to be a servant’s room in a nearby Kuwaiti residential home has now been turned into a cell of torture and everlasting torment. Every time Nasser makes a martyr out of a Muslim Iraqi or collaborator he physically humiliates, the more he believes his reasoning is pardoned under Allah (God).
Well into October of the Iraqi occupation, Nasser and a band of other resistance fighters hot wire a truck they find parked at a nearby khabaz (Iranian bakery). The truck, which is originally Kuwaiti but with fresh Iraqi license plates that were recently put on after the owner was forced to do so by an Iraqi decree, provides them with the extra confidence to chase any Iraqis they see – whether in uniform or undercover – and to try to side rail them in any which way in order to shoot them or take them hostage. So far, Nasser’s team has exterminated handfuls of Iraqis since the Invasion started. They have done this by either setting fire to their cars or maiming them by shooting at their arms and legs, or ramming them into school walls, where they are left to slowly whither away.
Most of the victims are poor, uneducated, elderly Iraqi men from rural towns in Iraq. It doesn’t matter what Islamic sect they come from– Sunni or Shiite - because the whole invasion is in essence un-Islamic to the likes of Nasser. This justifies the equal punishment these Kuwaiti resistance fighters seek. They are resisting in order to equalize and set balance to Islamic and traditional doctrines they see as being just.
Back at the torture cell, a 26 year old Iraqi Republican Guard named Qais is being tormented. Torture in the forms of electrocution and needles is programmed all over his body. Hung from the ceiling by his wrists, Qais weeps in pain. The walls are listless and uncompassionate to his calls.
He is calmly given waves of pain. The vocal pain surmounts the entire room and house where the cell is located, and still Qais does not respond according to Nasser’s questions and tormenting statements. Fret doesn’t gain on Nasser, though. It only stimulates his reasoning to gradually eradicate Qais’s existence.
“Have I told you how your mother was pleading on her knees after I had my cock up her anus a few times?” Nasser asserts. “She was good. Damn good, alright! Even her cunt was so tight that she felt like a born again virgin. I don’t know how she birthed you.” He teases with a smirk.
“She even seemed to like it more than she did with your father,” casually whispers Nasser into Qais’s ear. “The ass on that woman. Incredible!”
Qais tries to repel his psychological warfare by raising his head in defiance; to only have it slapped down by Nasser’s fists.
“Is this what you want to hear, Qais?” Nasser nonchalantly states with a devilish smirk flashing across his face. “How pleasing your mother was in bed and what sort of filthy bitch she is?”
“I told you. I know nothing,” Qais remonstrates with a whimper. His bodily energy is depleting to almost lifelessness.
“You do know and you will tell me, you degenerate Iraqi filth!” Enforces Nasser. “I am here to make sure you fully understand what pain is, and what Iraqi patriotism isn’t, if you do not.”
With what little enthusiasm Qais has remaining, he attempts to comfort Nasser; “Do you think that I want to be in Kuwait fighting you? I don’t! Saddam kills our families or us if we resist coming here to fight. And If I talk and tell you what you want to hear, I will surely die, also.”
Nasser listens attentively trying not to give way to his compassionate side. “You and I are Muslim brothers. Hurting other Muslims is not part of my agenda. I believe you are a decent man and have a reasonable heart to understand my position,” Qais interjects trying his best to get himself out of the situation.
“Yeah, the very same Muslim brothers you chose not to kill during the Iran-Iraq War, right? How many millions of Iranian Shiite Muslims did you help to obliterate? Hmm? As he confronts Qais in his face. “Now, you are helping to kill Arab Muslims and demolishing our nation, trying to erase our history, confiscating our livelihoods, raping our women, and even depriving our newborns the chance to live and breathe in adequate hospitals. Yes, Qais. Of course I feel for you, Muslim brother, peaceful follower of our Prophet Mohamed, and righteous Iraqi. Of course I believe and side with you,” as Nasser sarcastically cajoles closely into Qais’s face with unsettling piercing eyes.
Nasser then lands a hard punch across Qais’s face, where a previous bruise has been inflicted. He watches his Iraqi prisoner suffocate on his own pain and shame through his gagging and wallowing. The humidity in the room reeks of blood and sweat. Little to no oxygen is circulated. That is the purpose. The reason is to squeeze out and greatly embarrass each and every prisoner into desperation and eventually oblivion. Slowly, but surely.
“If you are just a simple soldier carrying out orders, then revealing them would be as simple, wouldn’t it?” Volleys Nasser, condescending Qais into greater anxiety.
“I don’t know anything. Please believe me!”
“I will only believe you when your heart can understand what your neighboring Muslim brothers are suffering as a result of soldiers like you.” Remonstrates Nasser while he starts to burn into Qais’s skin.
Smoldering is used to assist in promoting not only the pain but also the results that Nasser is looking for. Still, no budge. Qais’s body tries to withstand the excruciating pain it yields because of the severed skin that hangs down from his right eye. Still, he attempts to hold out, to test his punisher. And, to test his own strength in the midst of rounded pain.
After hours of repetitive tribulation, Qais gives in and provides some crucial input into the schematics of when and where some Iraqi platoons will be congregating. This is useful since Kuwaiti resistance fighters need to break off Iraqi command chain, disrupt supply, and secretly converge with the allied forces stationed just on the other side of the Saudi border.
Shortly after giving Qais some drinking water and feeding him some Iraqi samoon (oval shaped bread) with homemade cheese from typical Iraqi neighborhoods, Nasser slightly bathes him to gain his trust.
“You don’t want to be here fighting your Arab brothers, do you? Save us both the insult and tell me what it is that all of you hope to accomplish here in Kuwait,” Nasser pivoted as his more humane side came out. “Express to me why you would want to leave your beloved Iraqi town and family and come here and fight for someone who cares very little for you. For someone who has killed so many of his own people for little reason, and for little purpose. And, who has commanded you to kill fellow Arab-Muslim brothers.”
Qais returns with, “I am poor. We have all been sent here to help average Kuwaitis like you expel the Al-Sabah family from rule. Isn’t that why you invited us to come?”
Nasser takes a break by listening to how Saddam’s government has used the trickiest disinformation as a propaganda tool to have his army invade Kuwait and believe it to be justified.
“Have mercy on me. I don’t come from such a great wealthy country as you.” Qais pleads. “I just want to feed my family. Being in the army is involuntary. I have to be here. I am forced. And, I need the money,” he tries to continue but his face hurts so bad that tears jolt out of him as his manhood cracks in agony. He tries again but can’t continue. “Please, have mercy.”
“Spare me your useless dramatics.” Nasser knows that Qais is cracking and feels victory coming over the horizon. “Here, Here. Have some water. This will help you to replenish yourself and think straight.” Qais pleadingly tries to drink down any of the water. “That’s it. Drink it down. Easy, now. Slowly,” as Nasser then hurriedly and deliberately unloads the glass onto his mouth and across his face to tantalize and disgrace him. As a result, Qais chokes on the very little water he has received.
The master of pain looks Qais up and down with little sincere empathy. He waits quietly without giving the suffering Iraqi any inkling of what he might do next. In the next cells, Qais hears pain from other torture victims. He cringes. The staunch smell of sweat and blood on his own body tranquilly haunt his mind. Neither is talking. They are both waiting in silence for the next move. The eerie quiet now starts to haunt both of them, and Nasser doesn’t have the time or the elongated discipline to wait it out.
Without wanting to continue his reverse torture tactics, he quietly smiles onto Qais to reassure him that all will be alright, until within a few seconds, he takes out Qais’s Russian-made military knife that was was strapped on him, and immediately slashes his throat. The slit was direct and clean.
Qais’s howling pain growls but quickly diminishes as Nasser presses his right hand against his mouth to ease the death. Each of Qais’s breaths is inverted in which they numbingly take out his life, breath by breath. His whole existence is enveloped. It’s all over in what seems a flash but unmeasured ages to the one taking it. The killer’s eyes descend into and through the victim’s eyes in search for a repenting soul. Nasser gets none. Instead, he foresees a tiny glimpse of Allah’s wrath, but demonstrates little inclination of being scared.
One more close up look into the prisoner eyes reveals peaceful oblivion. It is the same place Nasser wishes to go. Yet it has evaded him because of the heavy burden he must authorize himself into as a protector and judicial liquefier of his country and way of life, of the immense crimes that have been caused upon his people by a similar people of supposed equal faith. Suicide cannot and will never be an option for Nasser. It is one of the greatest sins a Muslim can carry out.
It’s dawn now. The day of killing in revenge has come to an end. Nasser goes to the dirtied bathroom, which reeks of human slaughter like an Islamic cattle slaughter house, and smells his hands before closely studying them. After a few minutes, he licks some of the blood off. He does this as a means to verify the small amount of killing spree he has undertaken that day. He does it to empower himself as a testament of his active resistance, even though Islamically tasting such blood is sinful.
But, the lives that Nasser takes pale in comparison to the ones that the Iraqi army will do in days and months to come. He is aware of that and that is partially why he primitively tastes the blood off his hands. He does it because it stimulates the equation he knows Iraq will perform on Kuwaitis but in much greater numbers. However, this is his day. And, this is his definition of temporary justice. Through the most basic tendencies of human nature, bestiality takes him over and his social conditioning starts to demise; exiting him without guilt. Without care. Without much faith. And entering him into a new condition.
As he arrives home, he immediately goes to do watho’o (washing before praying). In his Islamic worship, he submits, prays and resigns himself to God. Peace is what is sought. Forgiveness is what is expected.
He seems to have received none from Allah on that particular day.
Then, he goes to his two children and gives them tight hugs, and rests his focused eyes on their mother as an indication of family strength and unity. She notices the fresh bump on his head. He acknowledges her perception of it and what the bump might entail in accordance to their relationship. She changes gear and masks her true curiosity in front of the children. Her love for her husband and the Islamic duty she has given herself to is stronger than wondering where that bump may have derived from. She is constantly conditioning herself to cater to her beliefs, even if that means that her personal curiosity may be stamped out or put into digression.
She nods a return look of acceptance back to Nasser. He smiles. Their family continues its solidarity.
It is stemmed from years of love, from decades of tradition and from centuries of Arab heritage. Nasser also gives her a stare that conveys an equal amount of hate that is equated with the deletion of foreign aggressors off his land. She doesn’t fully compute the stare. Nor does she want to know the reasoning behind it. Ignorance is sometimes bliss, and in this context, it is that much more blissful for not knowing the dark secrets her husband hides to protect his wife and children.
The whole ordeal becomes an addiction of murder that is justified as vigilance for sovereignty, without seeking repentance for something un-warring and loving societies could ever permit. In a context that is situated in a time of severe aggression, not only has Kuwait become a no man’s land, but so has Nasser’s sobriety. He has lost grip of what his function as a Muslim Arab should be with a new emerging function of what he never thought he could be. His humanity has been debased; stripped of what is socially just; of what is truthful.
There is a highness; a calm seductiveness in his eyes that love usually shows, but today it is a similar highness that hate loves to hold.
He is home with his family. But, he is alone in his internal cry for Islamic, traditional values. Above all, he is setting himself for a new balance that is a result of a traumatized conscience, which is cancerously ruling his social conditioning.
Primitiveness is now grasping him as it conditions him into a foreign mental state. The similar foreign state that has come to occupy his land is now internally stealing him away. It is also doing so with the least clarity and purpose. The Arab in Nasser is metamorphosing into a debased entity and the Islam in him is violently slipping out of his hands. It’s the type of violence that has transcended, that no monotheistic God would ever accept as a member of its communed religion.
The mosque behind my house is in between, tucked away residential streets. It rests on a corner; appearing uneventful. The walls are a dull sandy color like the blotches of desert around it. Few of the air-conditioners half work. Cracked walls on the outside of the building reveal layers of fresh paint that are haphazardly slopped on. It’s a Sunni temple. Privately funded by elderly neighbors who are approaching death, repenting for their younger lives by donating as much as possible for their earlier sins.
Valentine’s Day is approaching. Stores are intelligently displaying multitudes of ornamented white, to pink, to red flowers and merchandise to catch the gullible consumer’s eye and deep pockets. From birds to bears to other stupid cupids will be hanging from the fore fronts of stores waiting for female monetary consumption. Men are the ones who will be paying of course, while women shadow their own desires behind expectations of receiving whatever they want. Ultimately, men become shadows as women have their whims aerobicized.
that was dubbed “The Highway of Death” just after the allies bombed it into obscurity during the first Gulf War in 1991. The destruction was unfathomable. The annihilation was inhumane. Iraqi solders and civilians were trying to leave Kuwait as a last ditch resort. They were trapped by America and the rest of the allied forces’ promise to allow Iraqis to leave Kuwait without violence. The outcome, however, was nowhere close. Unrelenting aerial bombardment decimated entire convoys of Iraqi peoples trying to make it back into Iraq. The result was incineration of bodies, displacement of humanity, and an unnecessary massacre of hope.
I am there now. It’s late. It’s about midnight. It’s dark and frightening. I sit alone and think back to what had happened almost 15 years ago. I keep on thinking. In my thoughts, I lose home. Instead, I am justified by the empty and howling road’s haunting death. My mind slips into the recesses of my subconscious. I am there and faint into it. I leave this reality. I sense the blackness. The rawness. The unclearness. The exquisiteness that paints over my existence. My curiosity is stunned by it.
As I contemplate further, the massacre seems very delicious as I empathize with the bombers who wasted so many lives and covered their lies to the media. The Iraqis’ deaths seem primitively tasty now. Their deaths taste so human now. It is as if I am digesting and rationalizing how death is alright because I as a human may have a killing spree that is natural in all of us but is rarely shown and exercised.
The next level of sexuality after homo-/bisexuality is trans-sexuality. (See photo) It’s as if it is on a spiritual and hierarchal march towards heavenly pleasure. Sexually shifting. Transgendering. It’s shifting an original gender into another. It’s taking, for example, a man who fully, physiologically, and, of course, surgically, alters into a woman. That’s fresh breasts, vagina, and a continuous cocktail of hormone injections for those of you not in the know. And then, dating a heterosexual woman. Sometimes even a bisexual man or woman. If not a transgender. (No, no! That would be too competitive!). In between the two, one identity is lost while another is gained; however, the molding seems to still be caught between both. And more often than none, it is neither lost nor found. Would that entail asexuality as the next step?
The hallway lay buzzing with activity. There is plenty of sound. It smells like the place has been overly disinfected with chemicals. The walls are ultra-clean which go hand in hand with the tiles on the floor and the white lighting. But, cracks are cunningly hidden at the top and bottom portions of the walls by thick white paint, and away from immediate sight. It feels cold. Unemotional. Lifeless. Until, a cringing scream echoes from a distant room that is somewhere down the hall and around a corner. The sound is that of a woman in pain. It is in the early hours of the morning during rush hour. The pain blends perfectly with other layers of anguish drooling out of other rooms for different reasons within this Kuwaiti hospital. The agonizing sound, though, is cause of illegality, but it’s not apparent to any of the other patients, or even to most of the doctors. Abortion. That is what the doctor is conducting on a young Kuwaiti female. Illegal abortion that is, which is taking place by legal doctors and for illegal money. This is the thriving medical black market.
How do Kuwaitis search for and meet potentially worthy spouses for marriage? They examine the concept of marriage first before the character of the person they want to marry. For marriage in Islam is primarily about procreating children for its faith than the faith of up keeping an individual’s personality. They also pre-fabricate an ideal image of all the qualities they’d like to see in that person, without wanting to think of any negative consequences of their choices far down the road. And they expect that person to instantly materialize from one or two shallow meetings, like going through a drive-through McDonald’s and expecting a presentably edible and conveniently delectable combo-meal.
The bass took over while the sumptuous gradual rhythms sassied us into submissiveness. That delicious techno, which was dancing with our minds and preying with the 5 shots of agave tequila, mesmerized and hypnotized all of us into a borrowed reality. The DJ escalated. The dancers orgasmicized. We were awake in a new depravation of sleep: Enigmatized.