You Are the Great Ones, Not Them

Yemenat 

Ahmed Saif Hashed

(Conclusion of the first part of “A Space Too Confined to Cradle Even a Bird”)

I first wrote these words as an introduction to my memoirs, then turned them into the closing passage of their first part. Today, however, I am more inclined to see them as a kind of will.

Write your memoirs, your stories, your struggles, your great histories. Write about what you have lived and what you have witnessed. Among you are those most worthy and most honest to write history with fairness and closeness to the truth. Do not let the victors assassinate the truth, distort awareness, or corrupt history, life, and even the air you breathe.

You are the great ones, not them. You are the people who do not ignite savage wars or create vast tragedies, who do not oppress nations, plunder their wealth, or sell their homelands. You are often the victims of a grim reality, of ruthless injustice, and of violent oppression.

You are greater than those shaped by dirty money and supported by Propped up by deceitful media machinery. You are greater than those whose fame was built by propaganda and the cosmetics of lies. You are nobler than those born from the ugliness of wars and the treachery of betrayal. You are the true abundance of giving, beauty, and sacrifice. Through your work, your simplicity, and your beautiful dreams, you have built meaning and value. We are among those who try to be part of you, who stand with you and belong to you.

You are greater than their hollow fame, greater than their false glory and vast emptiness. Perhaps fate has abandoned you while fortune favored them. Perhaps destiny supported and conspired for them while betraying or neglecting you. Yet you remain the true great ones, deserving of every love, respect, and honor.

Your greatness lies in your lives, full of struggle, generosity, and conscience. You made them even greater with your deep humility and selflessness. Thus, you became the unknown or forgotten great ones of your time. Still, those who come after you have the right to know what must be known. Record what you have not yet recorded. Write about what surrounded you, the immense challenges, the heavy suffering, and the reality you have witnessed.

Write about your joys and your sorrows, your experiences and your histories. Write about what the wars did to you, about how those who conspired against you plotted and persisted until they sank into brutality and shameless savagery. Write about how they deliberately sought to destroy you with death and hunger. It is now your duty to make every effort to reshape the awareness of your society and of future generations. How much we all need this—both you and those who will come after.

Write your history before they falsify or corrupt it. It is a great history, worthy of reading, understanding, and reflection. Awaken within yourselves the greatness, nobility, and dignity that you possess, without belittling others except to the extent of their arrogance and emptiness. Be noble, for you will only be so through your loyalty to humanity, to conscience, and to the future.

Write what you have lived so that those who come after you may find guidance and wisdom. In your lives, they will find much that deserves to be read, that inspires, and that teaches. Perhaps your lives are more deserving of recording than those of the so-called great men whose fame was built on myths. In truth, many of them were butchers and criminals, corrupt and greedy, pirates and thieves, slave traders whose statues stand in public squares, tyrants and impostors, colonizers and despots.

You are the great ones, not them. They are the zeros, and you are the numbers that gave them value and position without knowing it. They turned you into followers, herds, and obedient servants. Meanwhile, many truly great people, deserving of every honor, have remained unknown because they were ignored or deliberately erased by those who denied them recognition, light, and dignity—and denied the same to their societies whenever they could.

Many great souls were denied the appreciation they deserved or the position they earned. They were surrounded by circumstances of rejection, trial, and hardship. Perhaps they swam against the violent current of a steep river. Perhaps their greatness was too pure to be seen by the light of fame. The truly great, filled with freedom, never fall. They reject servitude, submission, hypocrisy, and vulgarity.

There are noble heroes about whom we hear nothing, perhaps because they have no media machines to promote them or create their fame in this age of shallowness and the shallow-minded. Perhaps they lived in environments hostile to their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Life did not give them an equal chance beside others who claimed victory, though those others were in truth nothing but emptiness and deceit.

Be with the true great ones and the noble heroes, the lovers of glory who defied their circumstances and faced challenges, who crossed the long, dark tunnel into the light of the world. Be with those great ones who dwell within you, who live in your hearts without arrogance or vanity.

Honor the makers of glory who have withdrawn from the stage out of modesty, humility, or self-denial. Honor those whom fate betrayed and misfortune burdened, those who were never given an equal chance in life. Stand with the future and with humanity wherever it may be found, and you shall be truly great—whether fame comes to you or not.

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