1001 Nights Cast

Something is flapping around my head. It’s dark. All I can hear is the flapping and I feel the air shift against my face. I’m screaming out but I’m not sure if I’m actually making any sound. I run blindly, knocking into walls and falling through doors. I fall against a door and hit my head. The door closes.

My head hurts a bit, but not as much as before. It’s more of a kind of emptiness. I wish it weren’t so dark. I can hear noises in the distance, the sound of drunks singing and then glass smashing. The drone of cars travelling along streets, and then the dry scrape of footsteps.

The air in here is stale with the smell of cigarette butts and urine. I search my pockets for my tobacco and clumsily roll a smoke in the dark. ‘Ah yes, I have a lighter.’ Sometimes a smoke seems like the best friend in the world. I’m still trembling but I can’t remember why. I can’t remember what was on the other side of this wall.

Apart from the darkness in my head I don’t think I’m hurt. I begin to explore my body. My legs, encased in denim, move slowly, a little stiff but okay. My hand moves to a wet patch on my t-shirt. In the glow of the cigarette I can see a dark liquid on my fingers. I lift my shirt and hold up the lighter flame. There is blood on my stomach and above, between my left ribs—a tiny incision.

* * *

A rainy night in Perth. The usual crowd are gathered at the High Street Café. Sometimes I dread poetry readings. Anything can happen when you offer an open mic. Okay, you do get the occasional moment when you think ‘AH Yes.’ But often it’s the hippies off the train who want to read straight out of their journals. They get up and say ‘Oh well I just wrote this on the train on the way here.’ And it’s all about someone who does not love them, and how they wished that person would. And open mic is only five minutes and the person has been going for ten and you politely ask them to finish up and they get insulted and refuse to leave the stage. And you think why?

I’m sitting at the door with a coffee thinking about getting home, going to bed, how great it will be to get some sleep, when two people arrive. They are carrying folders of papers and look serious. He is tall and has very black skin. She is also tall with dark hair and white skin. He has the stooped demeanour of a tall person. He leans down and whispers, ‘we have some poems. I will read in my language, my friend will translate.’

After the break they get up to read. The tall man begins. He reads in Arabic. As he speaks his whole posture begins to change. His body straightens up to its full height and his face is a motion of joy to despair and back again. His hands flutter as if they too are signing the language. At first I am lost and can’t tune my ears to the sound of his words. Soon I am listening and without knowing the vernacular, pictures appear.

There is a desert. It is hot and dusty. There are many, many people in constant movement like a bright kaleidoscope. There are armoured cars and men on horseback with guns. There are cars that come in the night, usually around midnight in the town of Alhasahisa, to take poets from their homes.

In a place called Reception Meal there is a small cell and words are written on the walls, sometimes in blood, sometimes carved into the stones. One message written in blood says ‘Vive for the struggle of the Sudanese people’.

There is no paper in this place, no pens, no keyboards, no computers. The poet begins to write inside his mind a poem for his friends who have been in this space before him and have died here.

One day he manages to get a small pencil which he hides in the lining of his trousers. At the ablution block he tears a very small piece of paper from the wrapping around the soap. He writes down his poem in a tiny circle on the soap wrapper.

When people on the outside of the walls hear about the place he is in, he is able to get two sheets of white paper. He believes that he has never ever, neither before nor since, received such a great gift. He uses the smallest writing he can and fills up every millimetre of the paper with the poems he is holding carefully inside his head.

The tall man finishes his reading. He bows his head slightly and whispers, ‘thank you.’

When the woman gets up and translates the words, they are about ants knowing the gravity of elephants, and roosters waking the world, and a man pulling the earth by its ears.

The coffee machine is silent and the man who usually laughs and jokes and makes coffees behind the café bench is weeping.

* * *

I can’t hear anything. There is blood on my stomach and above, between my left ribs—a tiny incision.

I press my fingers to the wound. Strange there is no pain. Only blood, like purple ink weeping from the cut. If I could only remember. That is the worst pain of all. The black space inside my head. It is so loud, the sound of forgetting.