For a long time I have felt that I need to scream beyond my small world, beyond the school I teach in, beyond the tiny village I live in to the open free world. I have felt suffocated and needed to be heard, to be listened to, to be taken for what really I am, a free mind and a tortured soul.
Sometimes you create your own prison, and I did. It is strange to think that language is a prison at the time it is the very way to express yourself to be free, it is the medium to break shells and to be open to the world. It is strange how I created language to be my own prison, my own alienation solitude, my own private world. How was that? Don’t ask much, but when you live a language you choose your audience; I lived English and eventually my audience were English speakers, though I mastered more than one language other than English.
English was my own prison and also my way for another world to break through.
Once, a smart teacher of Maths told me: You know what Sami? Teachers of English learn English to teach it, but you learned it to live it, you live English, you personified it into you …. I was perplexed at that smart note but it was damn true that I had to rethink it for days and even months.
Trying to break the shell, I thought that English is my only way to, that within the tool itself you can make either a prison or an open horizon; English was my own prison and also my own way out to the extensive horizon.
Even if you think you are smart, you are just an individual that lives within his own world, others got their own world too, and accordingly you got to break the shell into their own small individual world and reunite in a big community. When you think you have a message, any message, you got to break the shell of the other individuals and get into their closed world.
Men tend to be more free to move than women and for long time I have thought how would it be with women, it is even a greater prison they live in, and a smaller shell surrounded by or enclosed within outer shells of family, society and religion.
To have a message is to fight for it and open more eyes to the reality of the collective prison that we all live in, in different degrees; I decided to break the shell, and language would be my own way and tool.
So, Lets all make English a window to break through into other horizons, but not just another shell to dwell within!!
Palestine Momentum 