Animals in Our Days by Mohamed Makhzangi

Animals in Our Days by Mohamed Makhzangi

Author:Mohamed Makhzangi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780815655626
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2022-04-08T00:00:00+00:00


Demonstrations broke out in our city the day after protests blazed up in the capital. On Tuesday evening, news from the capital reached the city, and the next morning, political graffiti, which I had helped to write the night before, covered the city’s walls, demanding freedom and justice. Before noon, student demonstrations set out from the university, joined by the residents of lower-class neighborhoods. Floods of protestors broke through police barricades and provocations on Corniche Street and headed toward the provincial government building. Their numbers multiplied to tens and hundreds of thousands, and by midday, a rumbling octopus of half a million demonstrators filled the streets leading to the provincial government building from all directions. For some reason that lay within the spontaneous movement of the crowd, which was now beyond the students’ control, the collective pressure zeroed in on the governor’s mansion. I was there, excited, heart pounding, my spirit with the popular uprising in the street and my heart behind the concrete wall and the iron and frosted glass. The anger and suffering of the common people had been let loose. In a few seconds, the glass of the lights on the mansion’s walls shattered and fell to the ground, and a few moments later all the frosted glass that obscured the view within went flying. The mansion was revealed, exposed to the street. There was no longer any trace of the soldiers I had encountered before. Lace curtains swung back and forth behind the glass windows, revealing feverish movement within. Some men appeared in civilian garb, hurrying in the direction of the garden overlooking the river. I was roused to action by a horrible notion that struck my brain, which I confided to some of my friends, the student leaders, who were standing near me: “This entire uprising will be stained with disgrace if there is any assault against a woman in the palace. The arrests will be bloody—and justifiable, even to people who have been sympathetic to the uprising so far.” The noise was deafening, and it was difficult for us to hear each other. Through the congestion of sweaty faces, elated at discovering the pleasure of protest, I only succeeded in reaching the ears of two friends. The three of us tore through the crowds of demonstrators pressing up against the front of the gate, and we called out to some of the palace employees who we could see behind the bars of the fence as they hurried by. From their gesticulations, we understood that the palace’s occupants had already left. From the swarm of people around us, we heard voices confirming that the governor had fled and that his family had been evacuated in a small boat to an unknown location across the river.



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