The invisible have a face
We were shadows. Shadows in what you refer to as “everyday life”. Countless invisible figures that you walked by in the streets. Faces that reminded you of something but you were never sure exactly what.
The pint of beer on the bar that is full again
“I’ ve ordered a pizza half an hour ago but the delivery boy isn’t here yet”
Supermarket shelves and shiny floors
“ Where is the girl to empty the ashtrays?”
Put your helmet on, your raincoat, on your motorcycle driving across town
“Position 146, how can I help you please?”
Behind the stalls, folding clothes, in the arrays organising books on the shelves
“It seems a bit tight around the waist”
In front of computers answering phones
Circling small adds “female wanted, person with former experience needed”
And sometimes queuing outside OAED
“Signing checks every Monday-Wednesday-Friday”
Stage programmes, seminars, “new job vacancies”
Never here, never there. In constant motion, in an endless nerve-racking stand by.
Selling out ourselves, our whole lives in order to survive. Always present, always invisible, alien in our own cities.
And suddenly a shot…
“ Have you heard the news? They murdered him the bastards!”
“Who did they murder?”
“ They murdered that boy, man!
Murder. Violence. This word rings a bell. Yes, it does…
Early morning wake up for work. The stamps they didn’t give me. The rent that I need to pay every month. Suddenly hitting the brakes and the creepy sound of crawling on the road. The nights that I stay in alone. My boss calling- fuck…I need to be at work tomorrow. My struggle to get paid what I ‘ve worked for. The peering eyes of the customers on my body when I serve them. Counting my stamps- can I go on the dole? Classified adds. The clock at work that seems to be stuck and my boss has just bought a new car. And in all these the sound of a shot. He was murdered. All in the streets, man! Rage. Rage for the killing, rage for our everyday death.
We meet in the streets. We yell at their faces together. We build road blocks together. We break pavements apart and we put the stones in our pockets.Tear gas is suffocating but we go on. We continue, all of us who until yesterday we spoke a different language, all of us who until yesterday we were invisible. We go on because after this nothing will be the same again. Away from all those who tried to represent us, away from politicians and syndicates who speak a strange, foreign language, away from all those media experts who still wonder where we all came from.
We have no demands. No, we don’t. We fight for every reason in the world. We want back the life that everyday they are steeling from us. The cop’s violence who shoot the boy is the condensation of violence we suffer everyday. It is to this that we revolt.
We are no shadows anymore, although we started as such…
