Fariha’s Reviews > A River Dies of Thirst: Journals > Status Update

He felt hungry. He searched for tins of sardines and brown beans and found they were past their sell-by date. He smiled and muttered: 'Heroism too has its sell-by date,' and realised he had done his patriotic duty!

And he, raised shoulder high like a victory flag, almost· lost his name in the flood of epithets. Shy as a bride on her wedding day: 'I did nothing. I was just doing my duty.' Next morning he found himself alone, recalling a distant past that waved at him with amputated fingers: 'Our hero! Our hope!'

They shouted 'Hero!' at him, and paraded him in public squares. Young girls' hearts leapt at the sight of him, and from their balconies they pelted him with rice and lilies. Poets hostile to poetic convention addressed him in the rhetoric required to inflame the language: 'Our hero! Our hope!

Can I choose my dreams, so that I do not dream of the unattainable, so that I become a different person who dreams that he can tell the difference between a live man who thinks he is dead and a dead man who thinks he is alive? I am alive, and when I'm not dreaming I say: 'I didn't dream, and it did me no harm.'

Waking up is when the real arises from the imaginary in a revised version, when poetry returns safely from the heavenly realms of elevated language to an earth that doesn't resemble its poetic image.

I will make my dreams from my daily bread to avoid disappointment. For dreaming is not seeing the unseen, in the form of an object of desire, but not knowing you are dreaming. However, you have to know how to wake up.

Noticing how many of my dreams are lost, I stop myself demanding too much water from the mirage. I confess I have grown tired of long dreams that take me back to the point where they begin and I end, without us ever meeting in the morning.

It's an insect which likes your blood and can smell it from twenty miles away. There's only one way you can bargain with it to make a truce: by changing your blood type.

And when you open the book, to glory in your victory, there's no sign of the mosquito or the words. Your book is blank. The mosquito, and I don't know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is not a metaphor, an allusion or a play on words.

You turn on the light again and resist the two of them, the mosquito and the sweat, by reading. But the mosquito lands on the page you are reading, and you say happily to yourself: 'It's fallen into the trap.' And you snap the book shut: 'I've killed it ... I've killed it!'