“Does he know his sentence?” “(the explorer)”
“No” “(the officer)”
“He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed on him?” “(the explorer)”
“No” “(the officer)”
“There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body” “(the officer)”
“Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow” “(the officer)”
“honor thy superiors!” “(the Harrow)”
(honor thy sky!) “the old wisdom”
(you evil bitches!) “the neocolonial wisdom”
(honor thy king!) “the old wisdom”
(you scums of society!) “the neocolonial wisdom”
(honor thy husband!) “the old wisdom”
(you!) “the neocolonial wisdom”
(honor thy son!) “the old wisdom”
(Before the woman was released, that is to say, after she was clubbed nonstop for an entire month, she received orders to bathe at a creek in a remote area. When she took off her clothes, the same ones she was wearing the day she was captured for no apparent reason and put into a so-called “mind-heart-soul” reform camp under the command of a new commandant [one more US-backed dic-tator, a.k.a. “Your Excellency”] [for there is never a shortage of them]–after all the police had to fill a certain quota of women [300 out of 60,000]–the woman went into shock from what she saw. Her whole body was blue! There wasn’t a single part of her body that was not blue from the savage beatings. She thought she was the only blue one, but the woman next to her was also blue! The woman in front of her was, again, blue! And the woman behind her was totally blue!) “the investigator”
(blue x 300!) “the translator”
Excerpted from DMZ Colony (2020) with permission. Some lines are from Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” translated by Willa and Edwin Muir in The Complete Stories (Schocken Books, Inc., 1971); others are from Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” translated by Ben Brewster in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, 2001).
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