| Issue october 2000 | Archive | © Diana Matar and related links reportage Meat for thought Navigate this story: Back | Next | 10 of 12 |
|
| A sale had been completed. A truck reversed and stopped at a platform with a ramp. A man opened its back doors and stood there waiting. A newly- purchased camel was pulled up the ramp. Not knowing how else to resist, it buckled its legs and collapsed. to continue reading click here or scroll down |
|
Two men started to wield their shoomas; the man at the back of the truck, dragged the camel vigorously, hitting it at the same time, his American-style hiking boots skidding on a mixture of camel dung and early morning dew. Creatures that you hit seldom choose to come closer. There is a wicked metaphor in all of this - one that reminds the Arab of what he once was and what he has become. It is cruel and heartbreaking. The Sudanese camel dealer and I have become two pieces of flotsam from a once glorious ship, floating helplessly on the tide, unrecognisable, deformed, lost. Haunted by memories of the past, we live with the endless contradictions of our present. We inherited the awareness of knowing what it means to depend for one s life on a camel; we have inherited the respect, but the supporting social architecture has disappeared and we are left with the architecture of money, meat, blood and butchery, of howling beasts and shrieking men. Our inherited memories live on in stories, phantoms we call upon at times when we seek reassurance; we summon them and like reluctant spirits they appear, defaced and deformed by our idealised sense of the past. For the rest of the day, I could not forget the eyes of one camel, its pink and bleeding gut absurdly hanging from its anus, waiting for a butcher to give it mercy. |
|
| Navigate this story: Back | Next | 10 of 12 | |