In Zuwarah the streets have no name. This is not a cliché, but a fact. It’s not that important, because nobody sends letters anymore, not there or here, and in Zuwarah they don’t receive bills.
Somebody told me that, in 2012, a group of inspectors was created whose mission was to visit house by house and collect money for electricity, gas and water. That didn’t last long: the people’s reactions ranged from “if my neighbor doesn’t pay, I won’t be the first to pay” with a slam of the door in their faces to a resounding shot in the head after a heated discussion. There are many weapons in Libya, approximately four per person, including children. During the war in 2011, everyone took them from military barracks, headquarters and other places that the soldiers abandoned in the stampedes. The first to arrive were mounted on Harley Davidsons, which you can still see circulating around Tripoli; then there were the weapons, followed by doors and windows that were tied to the roofs of the cars; they looked like they were going to take off and fly. The only thing left was usually the uniforms that the soldiers left behind before fleeing and the posters of Gadafi on the walls.
Netflix would not have been able to compete with that televised war; I’m still seeing a guy with pilot goggles from World War II and a Slayer t-shirt screaming “God is the greatest” from a black car with no doors and the roof ripped out. They said it was a way of lightening the weight of the vehicle so that it wouldn’t activate the anti-tank mines, but we all knew it was just to show off. Then there was the Mort & Phil villain… I remember seeing him on tv for the first time during a visit to the Suez Canal and thought he was sheathed in a scuba diver’s suit. It was the wild eighties.
It’s recently been seven years since his lynching at the hands of the sons of metal. The images were as harsh as they were grotesque, and the speech that portrayed the end of the war did not detract: the first measure that would be taken in the new government was to “revise the law regarding polygamy”. This also existed with Gadafi, but men needed signed permission from their first wife to marry the second. Mahmud Jibril, another character of Ibáñez, announced to the masculine population that they would no longer need the legal approval of their wife to add another to the gang. He did this from the balcony of the red castle of Tripoli, and before even speaking of the rebuilding of the country and its civil society. With no shame.
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