Ilias Karadouman: Enclosing ten years in a circle
Greetings to Network of Imprisoned Fighters (DAK)
Walking in the paths of freedom I realize that this much-coveted commodity, is a priceless element that you carry inside you.
Imprisoned is not the prisoner, but oppressed humans with their countless unfulfilled dreams.
I mingled with the oppressed of the busy streets of Athens, far from the narrow corridors of the prisons, and I was terrified by meeting so many oppressed looks hiding under slanting eyes that immediately disappear in a few hurried steps.
A massive prison decorated with all sorts of bars.
Bars at school in order to limit kids’ thoughts. Bars in houses in order for you to feel safe and sheltered from the “ruthless enemy” – which is a result of capitalism itself – giving it a gigantic form through the Means of Mass Intimidation which try to disorientate public opinion from the real enemy of freedom.
A prison city.
The smartest way to curb a society is to create enemies, undesirable intruders and inconceivable terrors, in order to push the mass to raise bars at every corner of freedom. Miserable people, trapped in a sterile reality, too weak to turn against their torturers, thus pushing some to leave the mass, everyone taking their own course.
This personal course of each one is capable of changing the predetermined rota that the master State has decided to use in order to turn a whole society towards complete enslavement.
I programmed my own personal course with accuracy, planning every detail all these incarcerated years of my captivity. A course that aims at complete freedom, without obstacles, without laws and rules, without prohibitions and intimidations. From the first strides of liberation I began step by step to head towards my personal target and each one brought me closer to it, I saw it glowing alive like a bright star inside the abyss of misery and nothingness.
Inside the darkness of the abyss where they have thrown us, it is obvious that many hands will touch you, try to hold you back and prevent you from your targets, so, dispirited, you start to say that you will abandon them one by one. This is why I say that life is a constant struggle.
A battle with time, with fate, with the predetermined and its worshippers.
I am not here to count my years and go.
You cannot confine the miracle of life inside four walls and let time pass you by and mock you. That is what prison aims at anyway. To lock the restless spirit in a few square metres of metal and cement and let time swallow it. Time however, found us against it, its eternal enemies. And of course by saying “us”, I refer to the friends and comrades from the Network of Fighting Prisoners (DAK), but also all those people I met in the asphyxiating corridors and damp cells where each of them with their bluntness and their own personal truth, left an indelible mark on my memory.
Today some of them live free, some are escapees, some continue to be held hostage in the cells of democracy but all have one thing in common: They never abandoned their aims, did not calm down, did not get trapped in good behaviour, and that is why they have a special place in my heart.
But I want to dwell on the members of DAK with whom our common aims brought us so close that now no conjuncture can separate us.
Comrades, some paths never divide. Some of our discussions have been carved in my memory and time cannot erase them.
We met under conditions of confinement, having different sentences, different crimes and many times different points of view, but these differences of ours were not capable of bringing us to rupture because the aim was one and only: the continuous attack on the correctional system and by extension on the State itself.
The struggle never ends. Each end is a new beginning.
The climate of unity and solidarity I felt through DAK was one of the reasons the flame inside me never ceased to burn.
I send militant greetings and impatiently wait for our voices to meet again accompanied by the physical presence this time.
DAK is not faces, it is an idea and as long as there are prisons there will also be the core of deniers and insubordinates who fight for the obvious.
The door opened…
I went through it without there being obstacles. By leaving I released my love, my hate, my rage, my loneliness, my sorrow, my moments and memories that accompanied me all these years.
I left nothing imprisoned. All I left was a little piece of my heart for those who stay behind.
And the first night someone came into the cell who had lost his face… And he placed the lamp he was holding on the floor. And his shadow grew on the wall. And he asked “where have you hidden the weapons?”. And he, no one knows if coincidently or in order to answer, put his hand on his heart.. [..] And morning came… And night came.. Forty days.. And at times he thought he would lose his sanity. And he was saved by a small spider in the corner, tirelessly and patiently weaving its web. And every day it started again and it was ruined again and it started all over again. For eternity.
Freedom to all. Until the destruction of the last prison.
Ilias Karadouman 28-6-15 Athens
Translated by Act for freedom now!
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Ilias Karadouman was finally released on June 24th and remains in Greece, where he can meet up with comrades from whom he was separated by prison walls for ten years.
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