Sleep deprivation was a central theme in the menu of torture methods used against me. They explicitly explained why, saying: ‘we want to annihilate you from within’. Well, I could not think of a more effective way to reach that monstrous end. Lack of sleep for several days can easily drag an average person to absolute insanity. I, therefore, had to dearly guard my alertness and vitality, so I had to eat the least possible amount of food, disobeying the advice of the great Turkish poet, Nazem Hikmat, who said that prisoners should eat anything available, and wash up whenever possible, to maintain their strength. In the process of digestion, the blood is concentrated around the stomach area, which reduces its flow to other parts, bringing about laziness of the brain and the nervous system. I could hardly afford extinguishing the fire inside, because interrogation is not just a battle of wills, but a battle of minds as well.

When I felt that their method was starting to adversely affect my mental strength, I was compelled to injure my finger, using the rough edges in the chains around my wrists. I also injured my heel, by continuously rubbing it against the corner of the “chair”. Whenever I felt insanity creeping to my brain, I rubbed my wounds, causing them to bleed. The ensuing pain quickly reinvigorated me, and prepared me for the next battle.

Once, I was forced into a tiny room, which the prisoners named, the “Lion’s Den”, for many straight hours. The hideous combination of locking me in this insulated cell with a very high temperature, the filthy sack covering my head for many hours every day, the violent shaking of the upper body and the head, sleep deprivation and position abuse succeeded in bringing me to a state very close to death, but not quite there yet. The interrogation officer, when noticing that, nervously freed my arms and legs from the tiny chair, that I was confined to in the cell, and rushed me out of this reminiscent “oven”. I became temporarily blind after this experience.

I realized then that although the decision to exterminate me had not yet been reached, this option was no longer unthinkable. Later on, some similar episodes confirmed that.

I was again subjected to heat and sacking, but this time, I was led blind-folded to a special cell, the floor of which was covered with multiple layers of human feces and urine. I tried to keep myself from vomiting, but when my foot touched the filthy mix, and after many previous rounds of interrogation, my whole gut was spurting out of my mouth. The oxygen level was dwindling pretty rapidly, so I glued my remains of a body to one of the walls, trying hard to maintain my posture, but my muscles were increasingly giving up, my knees failed to follow my orders to remain straight, I was physically shifting from a state of life to what seemed to be a state of death.

However, I had to stay alive, for Suha, for Haneen, for my mother, for all those whom I cherish, I could not die just like that; so I resorted to my last citadel, my brain, searching for any hope for life. I remembered the words of one of the commanders, ‘we should have killed you then, instead of arresting you’, and those of another, who boasted that he killed Ibrahim Al Ra’y, implicitly threatening me. Those thoughts were hardly a peaceful refuge; in fact, they accentuated my realization that I was slowly dying.

After a few minutes, it was no longer slow, I was dying, period. What were the sons of bitches waiting for, they always stop the episode right at this stage, or did they decide to go all the way this time. Maybe, I thought to myself, they are expecting me to knock on the door and ask for redemption. Well, I could, I was still able to collect the scattered pieces of energy left in me and kick the door, yes, the door was close enough. After moments of tormenting hesitation, I shouted inside me, hell no, I won’t. The great hero, Rojas, did not bend before the fascist Pinochet forces, when they mockingly fired in his direction, to terrorize him.

Suddenly, a turbulent wave of emotions struck me like lightning; I felt an uncontrollable desire to hug Haneen and Suha. The overwhelming emotion occupied my whole body, and long-suppressed tears penetrated my normally heavily-guarded fences, and gushed out of my eyes, with vengeance. Only then, I reoriented my thinking, and remembered my idol, Arnesto Che Guevara, and long behold, the tears just as suddenly dried out. Guevara, I recalled reading, held his head up high to the last second, thereby defining to the revolutionaries of the world the real meaning of dignity and pride.

At that time, the shift to death had covered a lot of ground, but I was far more ready for it. I was then at peace with myself, and entrenched in tranquillity, so I said to myself, I shall die like an olive tree, standing up.

I later woke up with a violent unyielding shiver throughout my body. I was saved at the last minute, it seems.

Following yet another close encounter with death, in which an interrogator just tightened the sack around my neck till I choked, I asked the officer in charge, point-blank;

AQ: Are you planning to kill me? Or was the interrogator only “kidding”?

INT: There is certainly no kidding here.

I had to logically conclude from these experiences, that the Shabak has just added another innovative device to their already rich reservoir of methods of torture: bringing the prisoner to the verge of death, whereby he can actually smell it, taste it and see it, and save him at the last second, only to resume the interrogation. I can only wonder, how can a former victim internalize so much savagery from his tormentor, and undergo a process of transformation to a refined version of him? I guess once they reduce us to non-humans, or dehumanize us, as professor Edward Said so eloquently argues, nothing can stop them from resorting to any tool of torture.