Free Transit by Abdourahman A. Waberi Page B

Service du Fichier, the data agency behind the only high school in the colony—attended mainly by children of expats, let me say in passing. You had two solutions: confess all the sins of Israel and you had a very slight chance of being released, broken but alive, intellectually annihilated but still hanging onto life by the guardrail. You would return home, but it was an open secret that you'd been turned; appointed by the secret services and their slave forever, you'd be constantly on edge now: you'd take to your heels at the sight of a dead caterpillar. The other solution: you had nothing to confess, had committed no crime, and your corpse would be carried by the tide between Haramouss and Loyada or, at two cable-lengths from town, between the slaughterhouses and Boulaos, half-decapitated by a shark, twisting in a net of seaweed, your skin eaten away by salt and the sun of the Last Judgment as an eyewitness. Of course there were a few exceptions, widely bruited about and held up as examples to hail the kind indulgence of the white chief. Again and again they told of the case of such-and-such, a young man from a good family led into the temptation of rebellion, the harmful influence of friends quickly detected, the virus eradicated, the young man miraculously saved from deadly waters, God recognizing his own, God always works in mysterious ways with resurrection at the end of the road, blah-blah-blah, once he was put on the straight and narrow the young man was sent off to study in France with a scholarship awarded by the Territory like that Vic Lebleu and his silly nickname.
    Despite battalions of paid informers, the wrath of the people never ceased to explode during the two decades of the Aref regime. The people found a way to express itself creatively, each link in the chain doing its job; with no clear leader, the resultswere obvious nonetheless: now the people was building barricades in poor neighborhoods, driving the Legionnaires away with stones, occupying Gabode prison, derailing trains, boycotting French products and schools, and refusing to pay taxes of all kinds, as in August 1966. Everything would suddenly calm down for a while, and then, without advance notice, start up again with renewed vigor. The staccato drone of helicopters grazing the rooftops and the heads of the demonstrators, the suffocating smell of tear gas, the neighborhoods locked down, the main roads blocked, the headquarters of the labor unions sacked, the arbitrary arrests, lashes of whips, pointless humiliations, expulsions from the country, the corpses of activists on the sidewalks—everything was catching fire again. Then back to calm. The cycle of struggles would begin its rounds again elsewhere, tomorrow, based on spontaneous anger, underground activism, the slogans of poets and singers, the ruses of the multitude—the thousand-and-one faces of solidarity. The multitude is the old woman who carries in water to soothe eyes smarting from the gas; it is the women who gather stones and give them to the men and to the children who have taken the vanguard— mater dolorosas and amazons all at once. The multitude is the muezzin who calls for insubordination and at the same time for prayer and return to the bosom of God. The multitude is the rage of the rebels, most often adolescents, confronting forces stronger than they are, biting the dust and getting up again to charge the enemy. The multitude is repetition, too. Starting again, always. Resistance and desire are present in every moment of life. Raising an old bush song to rally, relay, reconnect, wake sleeping energy, shake the genealogical tree. The old underground laws show the tip of their nose. Raids, razzias, fantasias, vendettas, last-ditch stands, everything that could frighten the good organization of the colony. Depriving the high commissioner of sleep, and his local native, too.Telling the outside world, seeking out potential allies in the enemy camp. It is impossible