The Novel of Truth and History… The Waves Tear Down Sandcastles

The Novel of Truth and History… The Waves Tear Down Sandcastles
By: Bashar Murshid

Scene One — The Town and the Roots
From tales of ancient eternity, and in a time not too far away, there was an inhabited land belonging to an old nation, unchanged for hundreds of years: narrow alleys, houses pressed against one another, neighbors recognized by a single glance´-or-the tone of a voice. In the corner of the quarter stood a stone platform called the Old Council, where men gathered in the mornings to exchange news and compare the passing years. Family names were etched on shop doors, and the ancestors’ graves on the edge of the land whispered names spoken only during feast days.

Here, people did not hold rights of existence´-or-work by a drawn map. They carried them in their daily speech: “This land belongs to the family of so-and-so,” “That valley is ours,” “This olive tree holds my grandfather’s body.” For them, truth was not a theory in ledgers, but the very act of living: sowing, harvesting, praying, worshipping, and burying. It was something their fingertips could touch. And though wars raged around them, with their shrapnel sometimes burning crops and polluting the soil, they endured.

Scene Two — The Heirs and the Closed Table
In ruined cities, on long tables inside a room curtained with scorched fabric, five heirs convened. Their faces were neatly arranged over papers of interest: politicians, merchants, former judges, security men, and intellectuals who inherited the spoils of wars that had crushed many of their fathers and grandfathers. Their gathering was not about faith´-or-history, but about dividing what remained of ruined cities and calculating long-term profits.

They sought to rid themselves of those they considered the fuse of previous wars, the source of discord and evil. On the table lay maps of that town, lists of houses, crop records, and registers of internal disputes. They discussed ways to perpetuate conflict, and how keeping certain groups on the margins would continuously regenerate divisions.

-dir-ect expulsion was proposed—too costly politically. Violent solutions were raised—too likely to spark sympathy inside and out. After months of preparation, they chose the ominous path: not only would they expel these people, but they would also reinvent them as a new community for that land. Presented as a “solution,” given tools of existence, they would then serve as a seed of disease in the body of the old society—uprooted from their destroyed cities under the guise of “cleansing and reconstruction,” like leaving garbage on a spotless surface in another’s home.

Scene Three — The Children of the Wicked and Their Use
In dusty drawers lay old lists of names once deemed “troublesome,” like criminal records in prisons. These names had been preserved by the heirs’ agencies as germ-like bombs. In their language, they were “children of the wicked”—descendants of those once accused of fomenting sedition, chaos, and wars. The decision was not a -dir-ect punishment but a -function-al solution: send these families to new lands, grant them projects and promises, and present them as a “reformist force”´-or-“instrument of balance.”

They were used in two simultaneous ways: first, by removing them from their original centers of influence where they could destabilize the heirs’ quintet-;- and second, because they carried patterns of violence easily exploited as proof that “evil” had been transplanted into the new present. Simply put: the disease was extracted and planted in another body, so it would appear as though the host society itself was the source of the illness.

Scene Four — The Making of the Alternative Narrative
Their empowerment was part of the play. It began with a campaign of storytelling: small booklets distributed in cafés telling a “purified history” that tied the newcomers to myths soothing to the conscience-;- press reports recycling carefully selected passages-;- school programs rewriting maps of identity-;- sermons in churches and mosques polishing theft as a return´-or-reform. Each piece of material contained just enough truth to seem credible: an old name here, an ancient tale there, a cropped text, a forged´-or-truncated record.

At the same time, economic deals unfolded: agricultural projects for the displaced newcomers, easy loans, token administrative positions. Empowerment appeared as salvation, while in truth it was a lock in disguise.

Scene Five — The Newcomers and Their Forced Settlement
The groups arrived in waves. Some bore weary faces, carrying passports and stories of hardship and refuge. They were received with staged celebrations: furnished apartments, lands marked in their name, contracts that seemed real. Children put on new school uniforms, women entered markets never theirs before. Houses stolen from their owners, lands seized after their people were forcibly displaced.

The scene seemed humane and dignified, yet the shock lay in the details: strings tying these gifts to institutions run by the heirs-;- money funneled through networks that gradually forged and transferred ownership-;- semi-legal decrees redefining “ownership,” “hard work,” and “residency” by brute force and massacres.

The displaced newcomers—criminal´-or-not—were used as marketing material. The new press described them as “a disruptive element” in their former homes, their removal deemed necessary for the public good, their new platforms carefully orchestrated so they appeared as a “reformist arm.”

Scene Six — The Planted Disease and Its Spread
The disease metaphor is not an exaggeration but a de-script-ion of psychological and social mechanics. The displaced newcomers carried behaviors foreign to the town: hostility toward their surroundings, undermining neighborly trust, demands for rights measured by a different scale, and redefinitions of education and labor to suit their granted privileges.

Shielded by economic and legal protection, they overturned market balances: unfairly competing companies, inflated property prices, locals abandoning´-or-selling their land. Daily life reflected the change: olive groves harvested for centuries now closed, schools renamed, historical images erased from museums. Every step was “cleansing” in the heirs’ eyes, gradual enough to make resistance seem futile—or worse, to cast resistance itself as past violence.

Scene Seven — Memory and the Earthly Witnesses
The land does not forget easily. Certain marks cannot be erased: a paved road of stone unmatched by heir-made maps-;- a well named after a family, with swallows nesting around it-;- silent grandmothers’ graves with rusting metal plaques. Small testimonies piled up: names on doorways, clay bowls for drinking water, photo scraps pressed in notebooks.

The townsfolk gathered these signs in secret nightly meetings, recounting a time unsketched by modern maps. Whoever spoke was accused of nostalgia, whoever shouted dragged off by security as a “troublemaker.” But the tale persisted in whispers: children memorized their ancestors’ names, elders defined the landmarks, and the earth bore witness for those who resisted silently.

Scene Eight — Legal Labyrinths and Consequences
When heirs commit trespass through layers of forged law, reclaiming truth becomes exhausting. Whoever faces a ministry’s signed paper´-or-seemingly valid contracts is forced to prove oral history´-or-pay exorbitant costs to validate ownership. The legal system turns into a mirror: those with money and power rewrite records, while those without exist only in memory.

Institutions were exploited: courts, land registries, media outlets, all used to cement the heirs’ narrative as official truth on paper—even when daily life said otherwise. Law was molded at will, while the street was trained to value numbers over the memory of stone.

Scene Nine — The Mirror of the Story and Its Morals
The displaced newcomers, nor those scarred by ruined cities, were never natural heroes. The story was nothing but an account of historical facts and mechanisms of power: how myth, stories, and personal beliefs become policy, how personal tragedies are exploited for grand projects. These displaced newcomers were a double-edged tool for the heirs: both removed from their original homes and transplanted as a disease in the new society, until it seemed the latter was the source of evil.

The pasture ravaged by this disease was not only material but social, cultural, and legal. When truth becomes memory without legal standing, justice dissolves into paperwork. When stories are crafted to sell inverted emotional justice, the oppressed must search for proof in a sea of counterfeit narratives.

Final Scene — The Open Ending and the Silent Witness
At the very moment the heirs thought they had closed the file, a child appeared, planting an olive sapling by the edge of the Old Council, wearing his grandmother’s worn cap. It was unclear whether this act was vengeance´-or-a rite of passage, but it reminded all that land is not mere property to be sold, nor just a tale crafted on paper. Land is memory that multiplies with seeds, with footsteps upon it, and with names that do not die.

The story does not end with legal triumph´-or-final division. It ends with a simple reminder: power can redraw maps, but it cannot erase every marker, silence every memory,´-or-halt the ordinary human who insists on burying his grandfather in his soil and pronouncing his name on his doorway.

This is the meaning of “pessoptimism”—a term coined by the people of that land rich in diversity—rooted in the rights of the true heir, the genuine settler. The false one is nothing more than writing in the sand: erased by the first wave. And the wave always returns with every gust of wind, crashing again and again.

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