‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ well in the 21st Century; liberty is a kind of death. For example sixty women are raped daily in the Congo in search of this liberty; there are more than 300,000 child soldiers in the vanguard for liberty; boatloads die in canoes en route to Europe on the promise of liberty. No, liberty is a kind of death.
What is it worth? What is freedom worth? Not much if Nazim Hikmet is anyone to go by. And he is. ‘…you are free to slave for others/ free to make the rich richer…you have the freedom to become an airbase/ free to be arrested, imprisoned or even hanged/ there is no need to choose freedom, you are free/ but this kind of freedom is a sad state of affairs under the stars.’
What it means? At one point in time it meant America. Before that Paris. Today it is a hyphenate and an ideal: self-determination. Here there are no degrees, only absolutes. And in a world that doesn’t really believe in them…well, we cannot stop doing a good thing merely because it is a paradox.
And for me, it’s Paris still in a sense. I let my handkerchief fall into the sea once while I was crossing the ferry. I want to have a home by the sea because…I want my children to know what it means. What the sea means. The quest for freedom is the search for meaning and the meaning of life is what cheapens death. We need that. I need that. Take a penknife, carve your name on a tree or in the world. Freedom is one of the fundamentals of existence.
To ponder freedom we have to look at it from the point of those who have none. The oppressed, the warring, the suicidal and insane. Even those fighting invisible demons. Jean Amery says for example with the sad wisdom of a professional concentration camper of Auschwitz: ‘we emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out and disoriented- and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom. Still, today, we speak it with discomfort and with no real trust in its validity.’ Amery and counterpart Primo Levi both committed suicide. There are those who can never be free.
Freedom has never been a Kenyan preoccupation. Kenyans abhor thought. Besides the occasion never really arose to ponder it. It was always for the others; the Somali, the Rwandans, the Congolese to explain to explain why they were only subhuman. Why they were broken and chained. Why they weren’t free in that way that could only be described as Kenyan.
Space? Wind in your hair? Freedom is an aspiration of the soul. It means, ‘living beyond a yes or no’ of another. It is also the feeling that in some way, metaphysically significant, you are a part of the world, that your existence means something and is secure. Political theorists posit a social contract. A bundle of rights and expectations that man has of society. Though life never really promises you anything, it subtly build up these expectations in you. They grow in and on you. The feeling that the world wants you as a part of it. In essence what Amery calls ‘trust in the world’. Freedom is the permission to feel real and present in the world. It encompasses the search for truth, beauty and purpose.
My heart flies to Egypt from Tunis, to Libya, to Bahrain, to Yemen in days of anger, of fury, of violence…of rage. Know these stories by heart of men who pledged their lives to each other and died clutching at a piece of earth.
But freedom is not an end in itself. According to Dostoevsky, a man as long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than to find as quickly as possible, someone to worship.
Freedom is not even something you have to believe in it is something you have to practice, to become. You don’t have to choose freedom…you are free.
