I will never kneel for you

I will never kneel for you

Summary: When the government of Irathania, a third world country suffering from poverty and civilian unrest, is taken over in a coup by Aesthia, the actions of one group of people will determine the fate of their country in what has suddenly become a war.

Disclaimers: This story is based on a fictional country, fictional characters and a fictional situation. Character opinions are fictional, and do not necessarily represent those of the author. The foreign words are Indonesian, and explained after in English, the Goddesses mentioned are Japanese.

I will never kneel for you

My name is Sri, and I am a native of the small country of Irathania. The tale I am about to tell is the tale of a night I am both proud of and ashamed of. A tale of Irathania, a tale of a woman trying to find her place in an unforgiving world… a tale of madness, of greed. It is a long story; forgive me if I take a while to get to it. I consider myself well educated, having won a scholarship abroad to study, staying briefly in Euriwa, only to return because there was ‘no place like home’, as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz. Unfortunately, this proved my undoing, because when the government changed abruptly, so did the laws.
Overnight, I who was once a free person am now a prisoner, those I once considered equals- my enemies.

It all started with whispers. Whispers and secrets, words passed around like shadows after dark, people hidden in corners muttering. The government was coming to an end, our traffic and customs restricted, the borders being closed. The other countries were talking about taking action, and the peasants, the poor class didn’t know what to think. The people of Irathania exercised their right to vote, but made a poor choice, a choice that would be paid for in the blood of our people. Irathania had a weak government who didn’t stand up for themselves and they didn’t stand up for us either. Corruption was rife, and things unthinkable in a first world country were everyday occurrence in Irathania. Rape, Mutilation, Abuse, Extortion, Murder… they were dark times, true. But what people who live in a ‘first word’ country don’t remember is that when you are in incredible poverty, there are always dark times. We do what we have to in order to put food on the table, to survive, and sometimes, that requires us to dirty our own hands.

Torture by police was common, people went to gangs, not the courts to solve problem- an imperfect system yes, but we never had the funds or the time to change it. Aesthia, our rich, first world neighbour suspended our government, and set themselves up in the meantime, claiming they were going to train replacements from our country to work in their system. Of course, we didn’t like this much, preferring to select our own representatives, even if they were flawed. A major difference between Aesthia and Irathania? They have money, therefore they have trained soldiers with guns. And they researched our world before stepping in.

We went to sleep one night dreaming about schemes to implement, to boost our near non-existent health system, and when we woke, the world had turned upside down. It might as well have been snowing in our tropical country. Half of our own army were desperate enough to have had their loyalty bought out, and soon, white soldiers were standing on every corner in their crisp uniforms, toting guns and watching us as if we were the ones who didn’t belong. It makes me nervous- throughout history, when countries are conquered, it’s always the ‘savages’, the natives who lose out. How can we compete with education and so much money?

I suppose I should point out here that I don’t like tourists, and I don’t like first world people. It’s hard not to resent them, when they live in their ivory towers, and they drive their expensive cars, and here we are, dying of diseases that could have, should have been eradicated years ago. We aren’t exotic flora and fauna, like Hengha tried to classify their natives, like a dirty, dark stain. So you tell me now: why shouldn’t I be angry as they fawn over their cultural ‘bargains’. Those orang jahat, the evil people, take advantage of our inability to charge them enough to feed our damn families. Perhaps all my travel, all my educational adventures have just armed me with bitterness when I see what they all take for granted.

But back to darker thoughts still. I’d been returned to Irathania for almost a year when it happened, when the coup d’etat occurred. It’s now two months after the coup, and for a surprise no one failed to see, none of the invaders seem any closer to letting go their positions in our government. My fear is they never will, that over time, their presence will become the norm, inevitable, acceptable. It’s not. The worst part about their presence, is the effect they have on our society. Our country is so small, that when they came in force, their ‘side’ is about a quarter of our population. Any orang putih (literally meaning “White person”) has higher status in Irathania now. In shops they are served before locals, because it is well known they have more money, more powerful connections than any of us. They can buy us all, and they have. It shames me.

Likewise, anyone connected to them has had a rise in status- their most famous puppets enjoy the same privileges they do. They need someone to parrot back their propaganda after all, someone to blithely smile to the rest of the world “Yes of course, they are helping us!”. Even I, who has travelled overseas, who has the education to rival the average university student world wide… I am nothing but an ungrateful native in their eyes, someone who can’t understand they are just ‘helping’ me, and it makes me angry. Racism at its best. What we are seeing now is a class divide. How long before our culture disappears, fades like it has never existed? How long before we as an individual people, the Irathanians, cease to exist?

Perhaps the worst thing of all, is the women. With the onslaught of foreigners, business is booming- in the bars. Women dressed sexily, wearing slips of clothing, play flutes and charm snakes as white men drink and clap. They laugh uproariously and write home about all the ‘exotic babes’. Women dress in sarongs and mutilate our traditional dances for their appreciation, sell us out for a few dollars. Now, in society, we stand out, we ourselves are the outsiders. We whore ourselves and our culture for them, and it saddens me… and cheapens us all. Just yesterday I was propositioned because I am lebih rendah, lower than the first class, therefore mudah, easy. Who are you that you can label me, you who know nothing of me?

One night, one decision, one bloodbath. One country’s revolution, one war in the making. And I made the hardest decision I ever have, adding my support not to the “heroes” but to the blood spilling the streets, the hands of corruption and the blades which cause tears to the mothers of Irathania. Choosing what I consider the lesser of two evils, I joined the gangs clamouring for our Irathania back. There has been so much pain, so much blackmail, smuggling, so many murders… and nothing has changed under foreign rule. What little we did have is eroded, the murders now coming from those traitors who support our new white overseers.

I had first heard about it some weeks earlier, when I was at the market place. A group of women were hustled in the corner, talking in muted, nervous tones about the gangs wanting to take action. The new government had come down hard on the gangsters, ripping their power from them as they put down the small riots that occurred as the takeover was effected. Every gang, from the murderers to the “good” gangs was disbanded forcefully. It put the seed in my mind, and as each rumour reached me, it clicked together like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, becoming a whole. Only the fallen women talked, only women who were associated with gangs knew.

And each time the white men pushed ahead of me in the shops, each long, lingering look my body got, every time I saw the women of my fitting into the sexy, exotic outsider role, every time I saw the soldiers heedlessly stepping on the small, delicate offerings we left on the streets for our gods, I thought a bit more. And then the rumours started, that Aesthian soldiers were forcing Irathanian citizens to dig in the mines for them. It was all just rumours, until the Aesthian soldiers took citizens from my town into their press gang, and opened an old mine. That had to be it, we knew they wanted something from us, and they wanted it for free.

But what was in the mine? What was it that was so precious they would go to war for it? I remembered it had once been a Diamond mine, but surely that was not what they were after. Thinking furiously, I reached my conclusion: the time to act was now, before they got their hands on our resources and destroyed Irathania from the inside out. Research was needed- further more, they treated this like a war, it was time we did too. We needed spies. It’s an evil deed to bring war to a place without it; cruel. The thought made me both angry and afraid. I like to think I have the foresight to understand the possibilities, spanning out like a billion paths, only one of which I would set my feet to.

What if my actions pushed our country into all out war? Could I live with the blood on my hands? I would no longer be innocent. I would be but one of the soldiers. And if I didn’t? Would I live a coward to my dying days, watching my people suffer and my culture decay as Aesthia grew richer, wondering what might have been? Now, more than ever I resented being forced to walk this thin line; I was standing on the precipice, and my next decision would send me snowballing down, too fast to stop and rethink my decisions.

Many times later, I came to regret my decision, many times I cried myself to sleep with the faces of the dead swimming in my mind, accusing me. Did I make the right choice? I have to hope yes. I went to the Gangs.

They saw me with some sceptism at first, wanting an explanation, wanting to be sure I wasn’t a mole. In the end, I put it on my Goddess' honour, and pledged my loyalty to my nation. The gangsters are many disgusting things- but disloyal to their Gods and their country, they are not. It is something they take very seriously. They put me in touch with Dina, ironically, a snake charmer. She had once run a stall, but it had been decimated in a clash between the gangs and the invaders. That’s when she’d turned to snake charming; thankfully she’d found a non-poisonous snake, which is more than I could say for many other unfortunates. She’d been bitten 7 times already.

Dina was to be my partner; the Gangs had divided us into cells like terrorists, and partnered us up. She was lovely to look at, rich chocolate skin where mine was merely a half-way step between ‘white’ and ‘black’, thick luscious hair, heavily lined eyes and purple lipstick. Gold dripped off her when she was snake charming, fake of course. She couldn’t even afford gilt paint, as a result, she had to carefully boil each piece of jewellery and repaint it once a week or she would get an infection. Her ears could be covered by her hair, but the veil she wore over her nose was gauze, see-through, so if she got an infection in her nose or belly piercing she would not eat that week. The invaders would pay coin to see a sexy, scantily clad woman who was mysterious and dangerous, not an ordinary woman who was diseased.

The plan was to infiltrate the government, find out their strategies and their weaknesses… become terrorists and spies. Dina talked to me quite candidly, as an equal, and what she said shocked me into realising just what I had agreed to. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how I would be helpful… no, I correct myself, it didn’t occur to me to wonder how I would be placed to gain the information we needed. Now it was flashing across my eyes in bold red letters, and I dragged myself to a seat. Dina laughed kindly, recognising, I think, the gulf between us. Dina realised I had never been forced to sell myself, as some of us had. On the surface, looking at me, her eyes held laughter, I looked deeper: shame, regret and something infinitely more frightening – pure rage – swam in her eyes.

They say that the eyes are the window to the soul… I felt, and still feel that Dina was a good person, but everyone has darkness tucked into the recesses of their souls, and Dina was no different. Dina wanted revenge. I would be ideally placed to seduce a soldier- sell my body for the cause of war. I did not know if I was ready, I did not know if I could. Selfishly, I hoped I would never see the same shame and rage in my own eyes. Understanding I needed some time to process this, Dina agreed to meet me later in the week, and still in a minute form of shock, I stumbled home, ignoring the soldier who reached out to try and touch me.

I stopped outside the place I called mine. It was quite small and cramped, but had enough space in what passed for a backyard for a to other people in Irathania, I was living the good life. I laid out my offerings, tiny weaved baskets with a small portion of rice, and vegetables, as well as a stick of incense. One was to my patron Goddess, the Goddess of Autumn, Tatsuta-Hime, whose season I was born in. Another offering I made was to Kishimo-Jin, Goddess of compassion, protector of Children. If our children ever needed protection, now was the time.

Again, I was disturbed by my premonitions of spilt blood, spilt innocent blood. When I slept that night, it was sleep tormented by dreams of unreachable Gods, and the maelstrom looming, waiting to explode upon us. My final dream that night was a strange version of my third prayer, to Wakahiru-me, the Goddess of the rising Sun. I was bowed before a shrine, but all I could see was black stretching endlessly around me, inky tendrils trying to touch me, corrupt me. And I remembered my prayer:

Wakahiru-me, my Goddess, I pray… cast your light on our land… for we have fallen into darkness.