Greece: Thoughts from the bonds of captivity… (letter from Nikos Romanos)

Walking in the yard, forty steps top-to-bottom thirty five steps left-to-right. Then the wall. Up down, up down, left right, left right. After a while you start to memorize creepy details from the stone borders that are stopping you from making your forty first step, where various scribbles are, where each bump is. I think that it makes sense since I meet them numerous times in front of me.

The clock I hide in my body, has frozen too. Even if I know that my time is counting backwards, I’m troubled, the mathematical calculations of my prison time here disgust me. 3/5 for full release, 1/3 of the sentence for a leave, you have this much prison with working days, this much without them.

I always hated the mathematics which define my life. If I had an inclination towards that I would probably never have chosen such a life. A simple equation from the bureaucrats of revolutionary logistics would have convinced me. Anarchy + urban guerrilla= illegality= death or prison, they would have said and now believe that that were proven right. I would tell them to leave me alone then and now. Human life does not fit into fractions and equations. And the passion for freedom is not haunted by any ghost of capitulation. Simple like the mathematics equations of defeat I despise so much.

But let’s get back that internal clock. While I was underground, my internal clock had gone to the horologist, who sent it to the psychiatric clinic. When I asked him why, he told me that is where all the clocks which reside in the bodies of those who fight the fate of the eternal slave end up. The official diagnosis was that it was wound up by abnormal hands.

But it defied the commands and invocations to return to the normality of the smoothness of surgically calculated promiscuity. Thus, one beautiful night with a moon it made its leap to freedom and escaped from the white chamber of the psyciatric clinic. It met it again in a conspiratorial rendezvous, where each of us had taken the necessary precautionary measures. An honest word, beautiful promises and a big decision.

Never again slaves, never again with bowed heads, never again alone. For ever on the other side, for ever rebellious and sacrilegious, for ever on the path of free people.
For ever, you hear?

I hate those who have the perversion to demand submission. For them bowed heads and silence is like a ritual where the masters require a slave, worthy of serving them.

I also hate the logic of the slaves who feel that submission is a form of atonement for their suffering. I know that very few are those who will escape from this labyrinth. I think that there are thousands of pages of history where revolutionaries try to carve escape routes, to show the thread of Ariadne. I conclude that it’s probably pointless because those who escape do not follow a trodden path, they simply listen to the beat of their hearts.

I take a deep breath in order to return to prison. Here my clock has frozen for good. I can say that it has been completely disorientated and the reference points have been lost together with any hope for something significant.

Even so, I have found the way, even if temporarily, to break the ice and listen to it for a few minutes of the hour. It is the moment I go out to the yard and put on my headphones to listen to music.

There lies the secret that puts in motion, my plans unfold in front my eyes, images, thoughts and emotions dance to the rhythm of music. I will limit myself to describing them in one word. Revenge. I know that they cannot keep me here for ever. I also know that many would have had the same thoughts with as me and then limited themselves to a constant postponement. I do not worry, besides every step is a small insult to the statistics of the theoreticians of life.

I swear to myself that every threat will become action, they will pay, they will pay. For the organized paranoia they offer us, for every day of captivity, for every correctional insult to our individuality, for every year of prison they will throw at us, for every good morning we say to the people we love through a fucking payphone, for every goodnight said with a shaking voice with the sunset in the backround between the mountains, behind the barbed wire. And when that moment comes I will laugh, when terror visits their houses uninvited. I will laugh and no one will be able to stop me.

The hate inside me grows day by day, it becomes a fire and hides in my guts. For a moment I dream that I become a dragon and sit on the highest peak of the mountain seen from the yard. Just before the raid this irrational monster decides to act rationally, like anarchist bombers who warn about the explosion of their rage, it takes only its friends on its wings and places them on the peak.

– You must not miss this show, it tells them.

Immediately it opens its wings, stands above the prison and unleashes the fire which has burning inside it for so long, over the rotten structure, its sad residents and the “honest†workers. Then it returns to the highest peak where it had left its friends and watches the fire which as a faithful ally, completes its work.

The 8 o’clock news bulletins spoke of a tragic account and blind violence.
Everyone rushed to compete in the contest of the most unequivocal condemnation.

But there were exceptions. There were those have felt the roar of slow death under their skin, the oppression of human feelings, the nightmare of the extended captivity that will accompany them every day. It was those who in the morning woke up with a big smile. And from every corner of the earth hundreds of voices repeated simultaneously

FIRE TO THE PRISONS

“If I were wind I would become a storm, if I were fire I would burn the world, if I were water I would become an impetuous torrent to drown it, if I were a god I would send it to hell, if I were christ I would behead all christians, if I were a feeling I would flood the people with rage, if I were a gun I would go off against my enemies, if I were a dream I would become a nightmare, if I were hope I would burn inside the souls of the insurgents like a flaming barricade.â€

For now, I send all my love to those who arm themselves with dreams in order to fight the civilization of authority. With the urge to escape together with their clock from the world of order and go on to attack our oppressors, with all means.

Now and always!

Attack the social machine!

Long Live Anarchy!

Nikos Romanos

Avlona prisons
November 2013