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March 05, 2003
Bound in a Nutshell
When they put me in front of the firing squad, I have to admit I was a little worried. But they explained to me that it was just for practice. I can't be sure that they weren't lying to me. Maybe they just wanted me to stop crying so loudly. Some of them, I think, were also embarrassed at the urine running down my leg and into my socks.
I am not a very good political prisoner.
The island that we live on is a dictatorship, but no one here much minds. The Chief, so named because he is both head of our people and head of our military, inherited his mantle from his father, and his father's father before him. All I inherited from my father was a typewriter, a recipe for wheat paste, and a poor sense of self-preservation.
My father died because he was hopping along some rocks on the cliff along the ocean. He landed on one that wasn't anchored too firmly and fell into the waves, never to be seen again. Wait... he was seen once. Manny said he saw my father float by his fishing boat, but he usually fishes drunk, so I can't be sure.
Anyway, soon after my father's death, I decided that what our island needed was a good old-fashioned revolution. My mother blamed the American's radio station, which reached our island, for the punk music they played that she thinks warped my fragile islander mind.
"Why," she used to ask me, "weren't you born a daughter?"
Every time I would answer, "I don't remember being asked one way or the other."
The Chief is an all right guy, I must say. He doesn't have to let prisoners eat as often as they do, or provide us with shelter from the elements. He doesn't have to enforce his decree that all political prisoners (right now, only me) are to be held in prison for two years, just to give him time to change his mind about killing us.
About killing me, I mean.
Anyway, the revolution. I decided that since the entire world was going to meet its end because of nuclear warfare (or so the punk music maintained, and I had no reason to doubt its earnest singers and thick-fingered guitarists), it would only be fair if every society rotated its leadership so that any one of us could try being in charge just once before we all baked.
I used my typewriter to type up my plan for a new government. Executive power would be shared... a new Chief every thirty minutes. They way, no one could get into serious trouble, but people sure could try. Our island has no nuclear weapons. We have a large number of sharp rocks (some along the coast not anchored very well in the dirt) and we have a few small arms for hunting. I figured the worst any Chief could do in thirty minutes could be undone for the most part by the next Chief.
I typed up ten copies of this manifesto and used my father's wheat paste recipe to pin it up about town. I had put up five before the Chief came along and asked if I needed any help. I told him I could handle it, but he insisted, and we had eight of them hung up before he read one and took offense.
"It's not about you," I said. "I just think--"
"Not about me? Not about me?" The Chief's big red nose, his most striking feature, had gone pale with anger. "It'll never happen, Anaton, and let me tell you why."
I like to think of myself as a reasonable person and was willing to listen to his opinion about things. Unfortunately, while I waited for his reasons, he summoned his guards and had me in chains before he got around to telling me.
Each day that I pass behind these mud-daubed walls is another day he's neglected to talk to me about the need for shared responsibility among our people. The guards have also proven resistant to the idea. They mock my plan for a better government by making me change the room I'm imprisoned in every thirty minutes, or by having a different guard trip and slap me every thirty minutes.
My mother visits on occasion. I have heard her voice on the other side of the prison yard's solid walls, but all she ever does is ask me why I wasn't a daughter. Or she berates me and tries to hit me with rocks she tosses over the wall. I do not say much to her. I still love her, of course, but I don't want to give her any help in making her aim more accurate.
The days go by and the Chief, somewhere out there, keeps ruling. I'm allowed two thirty-minute sessions out in the yard each day and I spend the time looking at the sky, wondering if today is the day the bombs will come. Wondering if today is the day the rest of the world will go up in flames, the punk bands will be proven right, and the guards will come to me weeping and saying that they are now sorry that they never had their thirty minutes as the Chief.
I would have liked to see what they would have done with their time.