Libya is modern state, but the population lives removed from the present reality. The story begins from just after the end of a World War, which left millions of people dead, but also united countries relishing a map drawn by victorious nations.
The real problem is that the Libyans believe that Libya is just this generation and they forget about the future generations and those who were here before. They are people who live in one nation but believe in other nations.
Libya is modern state, but the population lives removed from the present reality. The story begins from just after the end of a World War, which left millions of people dead, but also united countries relishing a map drawn by victorious nations.
The real problem is that the Libyans believe that Libya is just this generation and they forget about the future generations and those who were here before. They are people who live in one nation but believe in other nations.
The whole issue stems from the idea of estrangement and shared history. The sense of belonging to the land – a precedent of humans – will continue to remain beyond humans. Every Libyan hangs a type of collar around his neck to declare that he belongs to a specific group despite the fact that if we calculate the average age of Libyans, it would be impossible to tell when they first came to Libya. This is an impossible mission and it is also a ridiculous one.
The disaster is when generations, one after the other, inherit one reality, which cannot be verified because we are a group of migrating people. This migration hasn’t been witnessed by any of us, because this history happened before all of us were born.
A nation is not just a piece of land. It is a meaning; a meaning of common and shared life between those who live in it regardless of the origins of those underneath it. From the illusion of the indigenous people, the legend of the Arab or Amazigh nation or even the Islamic nation, we cannot reach any place. We are all living on a land and everyone wants to fly above it because in the end we have no other land; there is no history of extinct people as long as we are still alive.
Libya’s history is the history of Libyans, regardless of its reality or our capacity to burden the damage which it carries and the false feelings of pride which we embrace. Our conditions are similar to the conditions of all countries of the world who are colouring their black history with bright colors although none of us really knows what happened. The main idea of belonging to the history is to give us the capacity to continue to live on the land as one bloc called Libya.
We are all Libyans according to the documents of the United Nations and international reality, and we cannot change this reality but through the changing of the world itself, which is almost an impossible mission, if not the mission of a person who is deceiving himself and calling deceit a reality which cannot be denied or ratified at the same time.
Libya is a state that hasn’t yet become a state. It will not become a state because the Libyan people refuse to be people with roots extending beyond the Libyan land regardless of the stories told by ideologists, creators of doubtful historical stories and the intentions of those who wrote on legal immigration – which we shared with all the people of the world and ended when they arrived to a certain land, where they became mere sons of immigrants, citizens of the modern world, because these people do not want to be immigrants in a land in which they have nothing apart from their nationality. This is stupidity par excellence.
Libya starts with the beginning of humanity, and its history does not end up where we want it to. The story starts when Libyans were naked and when they were drawing the pictures of their brothers on the walls, or even much earlier than this date. Thus, Phoenicians became Libyans centuries after this and they started to be related by marriage to those who were living on the Libyan land, who were Libyans too, Romans, Numidians, Ghadames slave traders, the inhabitants of Cyrene, the sons of the Libyan Patos. At that time, the immigrants from southern Greece became Libyans too as well as Marcellinus, the Libyan leader of the Roman Libya and the Libyans fought a civil war under Pompeii’s command.
The Libyan people have their roots in history. They did not start yesterday with the al-Fateh, February or the Idris independence. They are the Pūnicus and the Numidians too. These were aslo us although some of us have become Egyptians such as Shoshenq or Romans such as Septimius. But all this cannot negate the fact that Libya did not start yesterday.
Libyans were Catholic when Christianity was the only religion in the ancient world, or at least this is what Augustin, the Algerian saint said. This is only one small part of Libya’s history which does not end if we start talking about it regardless of our feelings or intentions when we do that or even the facts and events we mention.
History ultimately offers agreed upon lies. However, the idea is not history itself. In reality we all agree as Libyans, despite the wishes of many of us, that we share this history in order to walk forward and in order to change it, at least towards the better. However, for history to put emphasis on an undefined ethnic group, who everybody has called indigenous people, because it is smaller in size to contain the history of the semi-Libyan continent which Herodotus describes as: surrounded by water, is nothing more than another proud betrayal.
It is a question with no possible answer. How many corpses should be buried under the ground to build a nation on the ground. In the end, 1 + 1 equals 2 unless one of them is an immigrant. It is then that the nation loses its entire people and becomes a series of zeros that can do nothing other than insult the place and date of the wrong birth, above the earth which will continue to laugh full heartedly while watching desperate attempts to exhume the graves of unknown ancestors. While they are busy doing this, new sons and grandsons will be born cursing the grave where they live and which everyone calls a nation and a homeland.
