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Julian Delia Apr 2018
THE DILEMMA OF A GENERATION

Mohamed Bouazizi
Represents not just the struggle in Tunisia
But of an entire generation –
His life was a consolidation
Of a series of injustices
Of economic apartheid.
After all, let us not hide
And call this tragedy what it really is.

Mohamed’s life and death
Was one of many terrible examples
Of the depth, the breadth
Of the gap between the rich and the poor.

If you think to yourself,
“I’ll never be that desperate,”
Think again;
You are fortunate
If you’ve never worked and worked until your fingers chafed raw
Yet it was not enough.
You are sheltered
If you’ve never experienced
The yoke of the owners of the world.
You are blind
If you do not see that we have ‘freedom’
That is built on top of mass graveyards.

This yoke
Has served to choke
Not just Tunisians,
But everyone who was not born with wealth
Or the opportunity to make it;
The millennial’s dilemma
Is common across the globe –
Do I lose hope?
Do I succumb
To a life of fast money and being numb?
Do I stop caring, focus instead on the life I can enjoy?
Do I ignore the stolen livelihoods, hushed, covered up and coy
Do I fail to think about the exploited labour
Of suffering human beings,
Of the ****** of my country’s neighbour?

Do I simply sidestep my knowledge of all of this?
Complacent, lacking the will
Unaware, perhaps lacking development of the skill
To realise that our world is dying
Not a slow natural demise
But of humanity-induced suicide.

Or do I, instead,
Pull up my sleeves, avenge the dead?
Do I sacrifice my well-being,
My opportunity to reach that thin demographic of the population
That fragment of the nation
Which lives a life of luxury,
In order to change the world around me?
Do I go against the swirling, swishing current of life
Give up all opportunity for power, leave this society that is rife
With abuse?
For if I don’t,
The sick world we were born in
Will perpetuate its unholy cycle of sin
I will be an instrument of that process,
Whether through complacency or an excess
Of loyalty towards the state.

If I don’t fight back,
If we don’t fight back,
Who will?
Our stillborn children?
The posterity that will be born
To a world that has no clean air,
A world that is built to be unfair
A world that separates people like an algorithm
Those above a certain monetary threshold
And those below it?

No.
It must be the millennial who fights for rights,
Before they are sold off completely and stocks run out,
Before men and women in power with infallible clout
Turn us all against each other
And make us destroy ourselves.
The final part of a poem I wrote to commemorate the life and death of Mohamed Bouazizi.
Julian Delia Apr 2018
PART II – THE CATALYST

Mohamed Bouazizi –
He who lived as a prisoner of poverty, and died a martyr.
His last moments
Were eighteen days of a comatose state,
A body burned all over, twisted with hate
Hatred for those who chose
To oppress and control, to steal and cajole
From people who could barely afford
What one needs to survive.
Mohamed
Died as a symbol of resistance –
It was his insistence,
His dissatisfaction at living like a slave
That served to dislodge
The Tunisian nation from its slumber.

Suddenly, the agonising death of one man
Was all that was needed to ignite a revolution,
It was not a solution but rather a convolution
Of pain that was already existent –
He was a catalyst of sentiment
A man who gave up his life so everyone else could open their eyes and realise
That we are all victims of a system that does not care.

“Farewell Mohamed, we will avenge you,”
Is what the people chanted.
Like a nest of hornets
They angrily took to the streets
A populace enraged to this day
Eight years of delay, a delay
Of justice being served, of the dire recalibration
That Tunisians now demand
Of their corrupt nation.
Part II, as promised - part of a 3-week series on the life and death of Mohamed Bouazizi and a reflection on the Millennial generation.
chaouki Jul 2019
what do you see in tunisia's future? we always get asked that in a denial of our present.
i don't like that concept for me not to fill up my mind with more stressful thoughts.
is the present not satisfying enough for us to travel further to the future?
i see myself as a dancer, a guitarist, a pianist, a scenarist, a writer and an active thinking and responsible intellectual.
however these are no good concerning these unsatisfying conditions.
how do i see myself in the future? more precisely in tunisia's future.
i'm certain i'd be exactly one of those mindless spinless creatures guided by money and lust, having those peaceful moments at night when i think twice about what i used to do.
i wouldn't relate to anyone of my future enviroment and no one will look or sound the same in a denial that we are all suffering inside.
unsatisfied we lay down and believe the lies we tell ourselves.
i see those herds of zombies heading to their office, to their jobs, thinking about the tasks they were ordered to do.
creating another generation of dead walkers.
same way we were raised, we'll also raise our kids.
i see trees falling down in the future, animals being deprived of the freedom we had when we were young impeccable and cleanheaded.
with every fallen leaf, we made a decision we regret.
one more reason to grief.
the future is relative, my thoughts are negative.
in the near sorrowful future i already feel neglected, we'll all feel rejected.
from a deadly society, we're headed to a deadlier one.
to the ironic anti-social society.
in the future, inside an estuary of waste, i fix my eyesight up to the industrial foggy sky seeking a tiny glimpse of the stars, praying to escape this monstrocity.
my childish imagination creates this spaceship that lands right infront of my thoughts.
i prepare my answers knowing that these extraterrestrials are gonna quention our existence.
the image blurrs and the aliens fade away, "run" i'd say "leave, don't be a victim of this cruel globe"
i pity whoever joins us humans,
us humans, us tunisians, we'll be known by overlooking the valuable bonds.
friendship love and affection, wouldn't be holy and true anymore. would be just another ficiton written on pages, forgotten through the ages.
at a similar time, in a similar situation, hypocrisy would be contagious, trust would only be a part of our imagination,
thrown away by inhuman archers, i would rather die than to join those emotionaless marchers.
to all my future surrounders, admire, forgive, love, give, for the damaged souls.
enjoy, live, hurt, heal, close the slits cut open by the ruthless life knife, but try not to to relive.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2018
unlike the British Isles...

     are the Silesians
like the Welsh?

  and the Kashubians like the Scots-
of Poland...

sure post-Colonially -
when Ukraine had
its civil war...

   and Poland injected
so many number of Ukraine migrants...

as Germany did their Holocaust
denying Tunisians...
**** yeah!
h'America go!

     what?!
*******....
                is this the health-service
******* hanging around?
ever heard about the ghost patients?
you know the ones...
the ones who were apparently dead,
but were somehow still alive...
because some bureaucratic unreasoning...
dead-ghost patients...
tax payers what?!
          the patient is dead...
but he / she is still receiving treatment?
how much money does
a doctor need?
         how much...
does a medical bureaucrat need?
to do what, exactly,
visit the ******* opera?
                really?
               visits to the *******
opera?
         what with the dead souls
of patience
giving the bureaucratic *******?!
                   free come free go...
these "doctors" do not
    require said earnings -
                   what they require
is a whip and ***** to fathom
their earnings...
      no opera, no open feud...
              just your blatant:
ivory husk in terms of
               a lost weekend
to attend to
    the troubling medical scenario
of:
   my life's sacrifices,
                       for the saved life.

— The End —