DaMidget in the Mirror

By Baba
Galleh Jallow

Gyant
DaMidget suffered from a severe case mental emergency that made him allergic to
mirrors. His growing rage and paranoia threatened to swallow him in broad
daylight; he felt like he was physically shrinking in his skin, getting smaller
as the world got bigger. His formerly rotund body now shagged like a skeleton
under his giant boubous. His face was visibly smaller and darker than it used
to be. And his lips were growing drier by the day. He tried to put up a brave
face and to maintain his habitual bravado. But deep inside, Gyant DaMidget felt
as if he was literally sinking into the ground and there was nothing he could
do to arrest that frightening prospect.

With
every passing day, Gyant DaMidget’s obsession with clinging onto power grew
more consuming, more blinding, and more painfully acute. Threatening the west
did not work, but he continued barking at the west anyway, like an angry wolf
howling and barking after the passing clouds. Taking the many precautions
prescribed by his hordes of marabouts, sorcerers and oracles did not help
either. His routine sacrifices of innocent humans, black bulls, black dogs,
black cats and black cocks in the middle of the nights seemed useless. The burning
rage in his rock-like heart grew hotter with every single minute, as if a red
hot furnace blazed stubbornly in his chest, burning away the flesh even in the
middle of the coldest nights. Yet while his heart felt like fire, his soul felt
as if it was buried in mountains of frozen ice in the middle of winter. No
respite from the heat; no respite from the freezing cold. His only momentary
respite lay in consulting more and more marabouts, sorcerers and oracles that
divined the future and told him how to avoid his inevitable fate. 

While
Gyant DaMidget never inspired pity from many people in No Talk Republic, he
nevertheless presented a sorry spectacle as he shrunk physically and mentally,
as he sweat profusely and froze with cold at the same time, all the time. He
knew that the clock was ticking, that time was moving inexorably forward,
carrying him along. He was utterly frustrated that all his human, black cow,
black sheep, black dog and black cat sacrifices had not succeeded in making
time stand still so he could forever stay in power. He was frustrated that all
the lawless codes he imposed, all the arrests and imprisonments of innocent
people he committed, all the money he had stolen, all the voices he had silenced,
all the sorcerer’s, marabouts and oracles he had consulted, all the yinkering he
had done, all the insults he had hauled at local critics and western enemies –
all these had proved useless in the face of his uncontrollable stumbling and
bumbling towards eventual irrelevance and oblivion. They had all failed to stop
his strange loss of weight, his increasing darkness of face. They had all
failed to make him feel even a modicum of joy in his burning heart or any
semblance of security in spite of his angry gun-toting, fierce-looking and
trigger-happy military entourage and death squads. What was he to do? Gyant
DaMidget had no clue.

Well, he
continued pretending that he was the invincible superman; he continued importing
marabouts, sorcerers and oracles from far and wide. Every couple of weeks, his
marabout, sorcerer and oracle hunters flew in a new sorcerer, oracle or
marabout to do some consultations for the desperate tyrant. Following their
advice, Gyant DaMidget committed murders in the middle of the nights for his human
sacrifices; he fired and arrested individual ministers and other top civil
servants; he banned working on Fridays and speaking English in No Talk
Republic; he decreed that no one must think of human rights, the rule of law,
democracy, or foreign affairs in No Talk Republic. In his latest display of
erratic lawlessness, Gyant DaMidget decreed that no one must play soccer in the
rainy season or go to private classes during the summer holidays. Apparently,
his latest oracle had warned him to beware any significant gathering of young
people during the rainy season because some young people were planning to
protest against him. So anyone who dared play soccer or attend summer school
was to be arrested and charged with disobeying royal orders or giving false
information to a public official.

Still,
Gyant DaMidget could not find any peace of mind; he could not get rid of the
fire burning in his heart or the freezing cold sticking to his person like a
layer of invisible skin. He could not bring himself to feel big or powerful or
relevant. Instead, he felt increasingly small and insignificant, as if the
world was expanding all around him; as if his clothes were getting bigger every
day; as if he was falling into a deep bottomless pit; as if the skies were
slowly but surely threatening to press down and crush him unto the face of the
earth. Gyant DaMidget had thought that he could do whatever he liked with
innocent human lives; that he could arrest, jail or kill anyone he wanted; that
he could silence the whole wide world; that he could make nature do his bidding
even while he was violating the laws of nature with every thoughtless action he
took. Ultimately, Gyant DaMidget thought he could deny others their humanity
while maintaining his own. The realization that dehumanizing others inevitably equals
dehumanizing himself often crossed his mind; but like everything else that did
not match his own version of reality, this realization was promptly expelled
from his mind through a damaging process of clinging onto convenient truths. 

Things
got so bad that Gyant DaMidget dreaded looking at himself in the mirror. That
was when he decided to ban all mirrors at State House and at his personal
palace. He was seriously considering banning the use of mirrors in No Talk
Republic. In fact, there was always the mirror of life that every living person
was perpetually forced to look into. There was no way he could avoid looking
into that mirror of life and whenever he did, he shrank from the terrifyingly
image that stared back at him; the image he had created and that stuck to him
like a layer of skin, making him shiver with cold under 100 degree weather
conditions even with his giant boubous on. Eventually, Gyant DaMidget was going
to undo himself even as he tried to make himself the grand lord and master of
life itself. 

                                          

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