أحيك أحلامي فوق غيمةٍ فضية.. أتزحلق فوقها و أرسم أغنية ً لحنها شفتيك و كلماتها عينيك.. مسكنها حديقة ياسمين بين قلبينا.. مطرها لهفةً لا تعرف السبات.. تسقي طفلاً لا أراه إلا بين أهدابك.. يشبهك و يشبهني.. ينطق كلمات تعلمها منك و يحدق فيك كما أحدق أنا فيك..
So many people will cry tonight. Families will cry tonight. Not necessarily because they are incompetent, not necessarily because they didn’t invest in their chances wisely, nor because they have sinned.
They will cry because the greedy capitalist machine knows no human soul. They will cry because “corporate citizens” only know one word; profit. They will cry because in the eyes of the world’s bloody handed monsters they are merely a number. Nothing more than a number. Nothing less than a number. A number that equals time equals money.
Their names do not matter. Their families are fictional. The fires of hell they are about to be thrown into are of no concern. The dreams they had built, their aspirations, their trust are but rosy fantasies.
So many people will cry tonight. So many people will cry tomorrow. So many tears will shed, and so many households will be wrecked until the corporate machine is dismantled and crushed.
نذهب لنتلقي مرسيل
What is happening? Did someone read Nineteen Eighty-Four and thought, “oh, seems like an excellent idea, lets try it here and see if it works!”
Because, the ever-so-concerned parliament is drooling over its proposal to ban alcohol everywhere in the country (they hadn’t succeeded in neither solving poverty nor, their favourite topic, terminating prostitution). What’s next? Covering women up in burqas and public execution of shaved men in football stadiums? What happened to the Island of tolerance and diversity?
Every village in this country has turned into a war zone between frustrated brainwashed youth and savage dramatic gunmen. Walls are covered in black, there are remains of burnt rubber in every corner, speakers are louder than ever and helicopters crackle around day and night, warning those who survived the nineties that they might not be lucky enough to survive this decade. We are constantly in a state of war.
Affordable, let alone free, leisure is nonexistent. Children are now playing stupidifying electronic games in malls instead of running around a grassy playground or looking for squids and shells by the beach. Sightseeing means looking at big neon-buildings and exploring new malls, instead of visiting mystic wells, remote islands and traditional houses. There is no stimulation of the brains of the people whatsoever. These poor creatures are being molded into succumbing zombies.
And, the most disgraceful project out of many, the TRA is about to issue a law that permits Big Brother to monitor every electronic means of self expression. Great, so now we have the good old fashioned agents on the ground and modern technologically advanced agents in the cyber world.
These are only few of the rotten attempts of surveillance, repression and control. Soon enough we will be witnessing the real, ugly face of the Orwellian nightmare right here in our own country. If we do not wake up and smell the stench, that is.
-to "i"-
I grew up in a school where we were taught that, as Arabs, it is extremely shameful not to have strong command of Arabic as a language. The tiniest spelling, grammatical and expressional mistakes were not tolerated. Wherever we came from, whatever culture we were exposed to, we were to be responsible with the use of our Arabic. Speaking broken Arabic meant carelessness towards a vital symbol of our soup of a culture; a source of shame.
The first lines of the 2002 constitution of the Bahrain state that “The Kingdom of Bahrain is … [an] Islamic Arab State whose population is part of the Arab nation and whose territory is part of the great Arab homeland.” Since these lines focused more on “Arab” than “Islamic”, so will I.
As an Arab country, and in the face of the capitalist global campaign to “blend” all cultures together and implant a consumerist heart in their core, it is our duty, as responsible citizens and as businesses and as a concerned government, to preserve one of the few identity symbols we have left to be proud of; our language.
Advertising agencies have conquered the Bahraini market vastly over the past 5 years, racing hurriedly with their wealthy clients to launch campaigns that may appear visually attractive, but fail to connect with the average Bahraini consumer due to failure in constructing meaningful sentences. The reason why this happens is primarily because most of these campaigns are thought of and created in English. The Arabic versions you see are merely translations (and not transcreations) of the English versions.
The result? Offensively weak Arabic communication that is very alien to consumers. Who’s the biggest loser? Mainly businesses, as they are just wasting their recession-threatened money, while they come across as inconsiderate foreign brands with little regards to the local culture.
Preserving the mother tongue of this country is an ethical and moral obligation that falls upon every person in charge of creating and producing Arabic communication. Whether we are competent enough is irrelevant, our responsibility is to ensure that this beautiful ancient language of ours is not tampered by negligent copywriters.
سقط القناع
