9 February 2011
I am Awake
Chapter 1
I see a child clutching the body of a woman—his mother. He’d awoken to the sounds of her being drug out of the house and beaten. Now, he’s soaked with her blood. She won’t wake up. The 7 year old now knows why daddy didn’t come home last night. He won’t be coming home. It wouldn’t matter anyway. The house is on fire. His older sister is being raped as he cries over his mother’s corpse. Her screams draw his attention. Filled with rage, he runs over and begins to punch the man with all his 7-year-old strength. He takes the rifle off his sister’s throat and swings it into the boy’s face.
He wakes up to see his sister being drug away and thrown into the back of a truck. He runs toward her, his world bursting with pain from where the rifle had struck his head. He reaches the truck just as it pulls away. He manages to jump on. The driver accelerates and yanks the wheel hard left, slinging the boy off and into a brick wall. His two younger sisters, ages 5 and 3, scream in the background as his world goes black again.
He crawls back to his mother’s body, where the girls lie whimpering. His 6-month-old brother screams from his sling on mum’s chest. He realizes he must now become the man for his family.
Chapter 2
The sound of gunfire wakes me from my dream. I takes me a moment to realize that it is not a part of my dream. It is from this world—the world of my adulthood, not my childhood. In the 25 years since the day I watched my mother be butchered and my sister taken away into sexual slavery, the older of my two remaining sisters and my brother have both lost their lives. No. Had their lives stolen from them. Ripped away. Kamilah died in crossfire returning from the market one day. Kalal had joined a terrorist group, determined to avenge the injustices done to his family through violence. His head was taken from him.
I rise from bed quickly. Like every morning, I feel the emptiness of the other side of my mat. My baby girl cries from her crib, and my older two begin to whine from their own straw mat. This is our home: a room, with a bucket in the corner (our toilet), a cardboard box (our table) with a bowl (our drinking water) and a glass of rice water (our food for the day) on it, our two mats, and a second cardboard box for my daughter’s crib. We have the clothes on our back and a toothbrush. We do have one small luxury item: a rearview mirror from the army truck that provided my razor—a piece of the steel frame that I removed from my leg when a bomb turned it into shrapnel.
I only have to shave one side of my face; the right side was blown apart in the bombing that took my wife from me.
I work with my younger sister, gathering bits of rusty metal, bullets, small rocks—anything that will serve the rebels in making their bombs. At night, we siphon fuel from parked cars. Often, we find ourselves in groups of 10 or 15, canvassing the landfills. Always the distracted type, I find myself away from the rest of the group as I hear engines pull up on the other side of a trash heap. Gunfire is followed by screaming, my sister’s voice clearly distinguishable among the rest. I run around the corner and duck behind the remnants of a sofa—no doubt once belonging to some rich foreigner. They’ve all gone, their houses burnt down by the rebels. But it’s not the rebels this time. The government soldiers have come to punish us for aiding the rebels. Three men already lie dead on the ground, another moaning in anguish, 4 bleeding holes in his stomach. He’s put out of his misery. More accurately, the soldiers silence the obnoxious shrieks of pain. One woman makes a run for it and is shot in the back.
The children who have been conscripted, averaging 10 years of age, are called forward. Each is ordered to take out his field knife. I know what is next.
Chapter 3
I watched my cousin do it to his own father. The most ruthless in slitting their victim’s throat will be awarded with alcohol, heroin, and a woman for the night. Our upstanding army.
As the knife rips into my sister’s flesh, I wake in a cold sweat, gasping for air. Blood drips from the nail marks in my hands. Today is the day. I’ve been saving since the day she died. I finally have enough—more than enough, actually, because I know they will raise the price. The problem is the walk there. It’s a 40km trek to the wharf. There’s a government check point for vehicles every 5km, and rebels hiding in the bush. I must sneak, with my baby girl, 6-year-old boy, and 9-year-old daughter, to the sea. Walking along the coast is suicide, as is rafting. The ocean road is hopeless, and the bush inland is psychotic. Our only hope is the 20 meter width of dunes between the ocean road and the beach.
It has been an exhausting but uneventful 15km. The baby has let out the occasional whimper—it’s the hardest thing having to gag your own son through his cries—and my son has done his best to squelch his sneezing fits. He has both allergies and a cold. Suddenly, my daughter is struck by a snake and lets out a yelp. A 5-man sentry on the beach immediately begins firing. Thinking the soldiers are firing on them, a contingent of rebels begins firing back from the bush. An incredible stroke of bad luck put the beach sentry, the rebels, AND a road block in the same place as the snake. The panicked road block begins firing in all directions. We are caught in the crossfire, and the soldiers are closing in. We duck and run for all our life, me dragging my two older children along as their younger sister bounces against my chest in her sling, screaming at the top of her lungs.
When we finally stop running, it is eerily silent. Something is wrong with this silence. Suddenly, I realize the problem. My daughter is no longer crying. In fact, she makes no sound at all. I close my eyes, knowing the worst but unwilling to face it. I slowly look down, opening them. Blood soaks my shirt, just like my mother’s did so many years ago. But this time, the warm life flows from my child, and she grows cold. I continue walking with her lifeless body held against me.
39.5km down. I can see the wharf just before us, the stingy old fishing boat the most beautiful sight of my life. It is the symbol of a hope of freedom. The tears, still wet on my cheeks for my baby girl, begin to flow again as that hope fills my soul. It is overpowering. We begin to run. So excited of the future that lies ahead. My boy runs ahead, my girl beside and just behind me. As we run, the ground leaves my feet as a shock of sound and heat and light blasts me forward and left. Even as I hit the ground I scream my daughter’s name. I look and feel for her, but I am blinded from the flash. As things slowly come into focused, I see her standing there, in shock, with a hole in her side. The blood loss is incredible.
Chapter 4
I awake to the sound of my own screaming. I’m stowed below deck in a fishing vessel, my lifeless child against my chest, my dying child in my lap. I stroke her blood-matted hair, feeling her shallow breathing against my thigh. I have never felt her heart beat so hard or so slow. Suddenly, I realize it is her last breaths. I turn her eyes to mine. “I’m scared daddy. I love you!” “I love you too baby. Goodnight.” The sobs come slowly this time.
Chapter 5
I wake slowly. The terror of sleep is something I’ve come to accept. I embrace it each night, entering it fully. I wake each day just to see you, my son. Today is the day. They are sending us back.
You should know, my son, that I would have brought us here through the proper channels if I could have. It was the work of my life to get you and your sisters here. That they did not make it is something that I will never forgive myself for, whether I could have helped it or not. The dream of my children growing up safely consumed me. The staff of this processing center tell me that if only I had done it the right way, we could have stayed. They have denied my search for asylum because I do not know the information they need, because they do not believe my story, because they do not know the danger they send us to. I tell you, my son, even if I had known the proper steps, even if I could access the paperwork, even if I could read, even if I could write, even if I had found the means to post the request, your government would have killed me for trying to leave. Treason, punishable by death. And I would have left you to the life I lived before you.
If I return, they will kill me. And you will still return to the life I lived before you. But they will not send you alone. Upon a little child without a family, they will have mercy.
I find the irony unbearable, that this place is called Christmas Island. But finally, I can give you a Christmas present. I have never been able to buy you any presents, let alone a proper meal or scrap of clothing. But today I give you the greatest present I have to offer. I give you my life.
I do not do this because I am afraid. I don’t do this because I’m selfish. I don’t do it to escape the nightmares, images that neither leave me in the light or in the dark, with my eyes open or closed, sleeping or awake—a running film behind everything I see, through everything I do, that takes my focus off the world. Except for when I look at you. You make the world calm. You make the world right. You are my world. I will give the world for you. I would brave a thousand lifetimes of the terror and horror of those nightmares for you. It would be my joy and my honor to live them for you, just to be with you.
But this is goodbye, son. This is to make hope become joy. Have faith my son. Keep my love in your heart. Never forget the value of the freedom I give you. Live each day of this new life fully. Drain every drop of vibrance, vitality, beauty and joy from each moment. I love you. Goodnight.
Chapter 6
In my eyes are flashing the last image I had of my father. He lies in a pool of his own blood at the foot of the processing center. The image was burned onto my 7-year-old brain. They would not let me run to him or hold him. My last look at my father was had straining against the arms of Australian police securing a suicide scene. Slowly I open my eyes. Birds are chirping outside of my home, just South of Sydney. It is a beautiful sunny day. And I am free.
Some people say of my father (inasmuch as they say it about the asylum seekers intercepted on Christmas island; my father is of no note or significance to any Australian citizen, and his memory has faded from every mind but this one, as any record of his existence has faded from every logbook and document, in both this country and the one of our birth) that his death was a political move. Some people say it was self-centeredness; that he simply wanted wealth beyond measure, and believed that he wouldn’t have to work for it here. They say that if he had been willing to do some hard work, he would never have come in the first place. Some people say he WAS running for his life, but only because he was a criminal of the worst degree, the type we didn’t want in this country. Some people are asleep.
I remember the constant fear. I remember the gunfire alarm clock, the straw mat, the cardboard boxes, and the three sips of rice water for the day’s food. I remember the snakebite that would have taken my sister’s life if the mine hadn’t. I remember the explosion too. I remember the baby’s warm blood leaking from her body, like a leaky faucet that desperately needed fixing, but couldn’t be stopped. I remember my father’s warm tears falling onto her cold body, as if they could replace the blood flowing out. I remember the life he gave to set me free.
The words you have read in the previous chapters were the words of my father, recorded by a fellow asylum-seeker on Christmas Island. He was in need of political asylum, and therefore highly educated. The moment the last words were penned, my father leapt from the rooftop. They were given to me, but I was unable to read them for several years. I did not ask anyone to read them to me, because I knew that, at least for now, they were just for me. Still, each day that went by, I wondered how my father could leave me like that. I couldn’t understand why he would do that to me, why he would give up after all we’d lived through. I began to believe some people.
Some people say that my father was less than a man. I know better.
I am awake
