Children Are Sparrows But They Don’t Build Nests In Dead Trees

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Imagine a child.

This child is brought into the world not of his own choosing. This is a choice made by others. This child is hopefully loved, protected, will be guided through all the harsh realities life will eventually throw at him. This child will one day develop a sense of self, a sense of life, develop interests and a personality of his own. He will become an individual. He will become us.

Say this child, from a very young age, is drawn to creative pursuits — art, music or writing. From a young age he is already envisioning his future, what he wants to become. Everything he experiences in life will be the raw material for that art. He will continue to pursue it, continue to create, and in the process will develop an even deeper sense of self and an even greater sense of the world in which he lives.

Then one day what he creates threatens someone else, those in power, those who always fear others with an independent mind, those who dare have opinions of their own. He is arrested, thrown in prison, and a death sentence is put upon him. He didn’t do anything horrific or inhuman, of course. He merely expressed himself through his art, the art which he had been developing since feeling the first stirrings of creativity in childhood. This child, now a grown man, is no longer a human being. He’s become something else — a symbol, something ‘political’, a threat to those who with an unbridled thirst for power who have taken it upon themselves to decide whether this person now lives or dies.

Ashraf Fayadh was once this child.

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The title of this piece is a line from a poem by Ashraf Fayadh called The Last Line of Refugee Descendants. The son of refugees from Gaza, Fayadh is a poet and artist currently serving time in a Saudi prison for ‘apostasy’, ‘promoting atheism’ with his book Instructions Within which was published in 2008. Originally he was sentenced to death but his sentence was commuted to eight years and eight hundred lashes. The poems in his book were used as ‘evidence’ against him. Not that this ‘reduction’ in his sentence is any better. The fact that he was even arrested and sentenced at all is a crime against humanity, a crime against free expression. He is not the first artist/writer to be imprisoned for his work. Nor will he be the last.

We in the west, who live in democratic societies, where freedom of expression is sacrosanct, can’t imagine anything like this. Most couldn’t care less, for unfortunately the west has a penchant for turning a blind eye to the suffering of those who live in so-called ‘third world countries’. It doesn’t happen here, so… It never dawns on them that it can, that a ‘first world nation’ can lose control of its senses, become the horror they can’t imagine. Argentina, Chile and Uruguay comes to mind, when they descended into military dictatorship, censorship and disappearances in the mid-1970s. My fellow Americans always believe that ‘it can’t happen here’ but history has shown time and time again that it can. All it takes is for its people to fall asleep, for as Francisco Goya once observed, ‘the sleep of reason begets monsters’.

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Unfortunately Fayadh’s situation isn’t unique. There are many around the world either imprisoned — or have been killed or ‘disappeared’ — for their beliefs or for ‘daring’ to freely express themselves like the human beings they are. I don’t think anyone is surprised by the Saudi government’s response to Fayadh’s work, for many others have been imprisoned and executed for the same thing in Saudi Arabia for decades. They aren’t exactly a paragon of human rights. Yet the United States, despite picking and choosing who it will do business with based on a nation’s human rights record, continues to support them, defend them, is willing to shed American blood for them. It remains silent over Fayadh’s treatment and countless others like him.

However it is virtually impossible for these repressive regimes to completely silence ‘the masses’ over such injustices. We now live in an age where news of such horrors can spread like wildfire, reach corners of the world never thought possible before. The internet — and social media in particular — is now the conduit in which we can become aware; and even though the more repressive regimes have it within their power to silence these voices within the borders of their own countries, by the time they do it’s far too late. The world knows, news spreads, and people of good conscience respond.

Such is what happened regarding Ashraf Fayadh. People of good conscience immediately took to social media to spread the word about the injustice being inflicted upon him and they responded. Some of us may not be able to do much other than make people aware, perhaps write essays such as this, but in the ‘Information Age’, sometimes that is enough.

The world knows about Ashraf Fayadh now and had it not been for the technology that now exists perhaps he would have been just another of the countless ‘disappeared’ around the world.

The whole world is watching now. Perhaps, with some introspection, there will be those who understand that this man was once a child for whom the whole world lied before him; that this child can be any one of us.