Smara, Morocco – Since the very beginning of sleeping, all what we have been doing has been sleeping. This is not something new for us as Arabs.
Proudly speaking, it is one of our traits and crucial characteristics. All over the world, Arabs are known by the images of being great sleepers. If you doubt this, you can check books of history, Orientals and biographies of famous travelers who visited our lands and saw and wrote the truth of our being engaged in sleeping all the time.
In our Arab world, some sleep to get up and others get up to sleep. Whenever you ask about some people, the only response you get is that they are sleeping or they are lying down, putting their heads on their pillows or their pillows on their heads getting ready to sleep. Some others are hunting sleep. It is their hobby to chase sleep at home from room to a room or from a corner of their room to another. They rarely wake-up to wake-up, to the extent that the Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar said in one of his poems that the alarm has rung asking him to get up as it is time to sleep.
In our homes, when you ask parents about their babies, they say “please speak within the doors, the baby is asleep.” And when you ask the children about their parents, even if they are at home, they tell you, “they are asleep”, and when you ask them: “why you didn’t do your homework or why were you late,” the answer, as you might already have guessed or already answered, is “the sleep took me’, which is a verbatim translation of the expression in Arabic to say, “I was sleeping and I didn’t get up on time.”
Without exaggeration, sleeping is, in our nations, both a sickness and a medicine. When people talk about lazy students, they say that they are sick of sleeping. They can not stay up with their eyes open. When they get homework or an exercise, or something to read or to perform, instead of doing their tasks and duties, they sleep.
As far as marital or family life is concerned, a lot of women hate their lazy husbands because they are always sleeping or wanting to sleep. They never quit their bed to work or ever go to work on time. Others, whenever they are angry, mad and sad, justify this because of lack or shortage of sleep. When you have an appointment with a friend early in the morning, he never comes either because he slept early and didn’t have time to get up or because, he didn’t get to sleep early enough, thus could not get up early.
Some husbands divorce their wives because they are all the time asleep. They sleep in the morning, before and after breakfast, before and after lunch and they sleep before and after dinner as well. They sleep before and after watching the movies or hearing the news. They sleep before cooking and after, before and after eating, before and after Hammam (taking a shower). They pray after sleeping or before sleeping. They make love before sleeping or after sleeping and whenever you want to have a rendezvous with one of us, whether a male or female Arab, you have to take into consideration the timing: either before sleeping or after sleeping.
When we have headaches, the best cure an Arab doctor prescribes is: “go have a nap and when you get up and you feel that you are not yet feeling well, sleep some more.” When we are nervous, we always believe that the best (calment) remedy is sleeping. When the baby is hungry or sick or when he/she cries, the husband gets mad and orders his wife to take him to the other room and make him sleep.
As babies, when our parents beat us, we slept, when they fed us, we slept, when they washed our bodies and hair, they would take us to bed and throw us there, beat us and compel us to sleep. When we can not watch TV, we sleep. When we cannot have what we like, we sleep. When we have no work to do, we sleep and we also sleep when we have work. We even usually sleep at work and work when we are asleep. You may think this is weird, but we are used to this unlike other nations who can not sleep if they have work.
As adult men and women, we have grown up with that same habit. When our rulers beat us, torture us, oppress us, let me ask you this time, what do you think we have to do ?… I think you get it and you already know the answer; yes, that’s it, exactly, very good. Yes, we s…………le….eeeeep. When they eat our food and sell our national wealth and funds, we sleep.When they imprison us, we sleep. When they deprive us of our human rights, we sleep. When we ask them for our rights, they advise us to go to sleep, and as we like sleeping, we feel so happy by that response so that on the spot and without hesitation we go to sleep and even when the rulers do for the people what the husbands do to their wives when they are asleep, we either sleep or pretend to be asleep. We like it.
This is, ladies and gentlemen, how we are and who we are: innocent sleepers born to sleep, living to sleep, and dying to sleep and between the birth and death, all what we are good for is sleeping. So thank God for this blessing of sleep and thank our rulers for creating all the necessary conditions for us to sleep. It is our duty to thank you for your affording us this right of sleep without ever daring to wake us up when we are asleep and for making sleeping a human right in our constitutions. Thank you so much for employing millions of soldiers, policemen and buying them all new weapons to protect us while we are asleep and to ensure that we never get up and that we are asleep. And also to protect you from us.
A last request, as people living in a world that affords us the democracy of sleeping or a sleeping democracy, if we might call it so, please, we want you to take this request into consideration for the coming institutions and reforms: we need a ministry of sleeping. We would be very happy if we see this request taken into consideration during elections. That’s all what we need, no more, no less.
Well, at the end I should thank you dearest readers, for depriving you of some minutes from sleeping as you were before reading this story about sleeping. But here is the good news you have been waiting for before you go to sleep: please get up, it’s time to sleep.
Edited by Benjamin Villanti
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