What else should I betray, mama?

For a while, I could not bear to see you. Anything about you had the stench of fascism, decay and death. I still have trouble seeing you. I love you, of course. That's what annoys me the most about you, that you can't understand how someone can love you and try to exist outside of the image your first-born children have made for you. Of course, "home is where I hated the most". I hate, hate, what you think of yourself. You are not what you think you are, and you will never be what you want to become. It was so liberating to leave you, to get to a place where people didn't bother thinking what they are and didn't bother wanting to become something else, where people just ...are. At least that's what I thought. They are broken, too, but in different ways than you, and you are the one I love the most and hate the most. With you everything fucking matters, everything is important, the crescendo of 4000 fucking years. Stupid, stupid. Everything you say you love, you turn into shit. And you blame everyone else. You are amazing, really. The more you become hollow and dead, the more you proclaim how you are the navel of the world. Stupid. You think everyone is out there to get you. Stupid. You are so entangled in your own mess that you can't see beyond your nose. You obsess about names, about blood, about symbols, about languages, about pride, about the colour of land, when at the same time the world is burning. You cannot save anything, you are locked in a box with yourself, the box is sinking and you obsess about what they think about you.

The only way to love you and to save you is to betray you. Proudly. I betrayed your purity of blood. My son is my proudest betrayal. I betray your language. FUCK your language, the thing you are most proud of. Do you hear me cursing you in what you call gibberish? I betray your holy ideals, your machismo, your patriarchy, your army. I will not let one of your khaki-wearing sergeants "make me a man". I don't want to be one of your "men", even if I would lay my life down for you. I betray your religion, your god. You did that betrayal first, but I will not play your game any more. Keep your priests, your superstitions, your ridiculous blessings of your army's guns. I betray your unity, your cultural, linguistic, ethnic monoculture. What else can I betray, mama? Tell me and I will.

But I am not going to give you the pleasure of writing me off as one more of your imaginary enemies. Oh don't you think for a second that I am disowning you. I am yours and you are mine. This land belongs to me and my son as much as it belongs to your first-borns. I figured it out, you yourself told me. No matter that they lie on top of you and you let them. They claim you for themselves and you like it, you believe them. But you're not just theirs. Their stories, their putrid, macabre nightmares are not all that can be said about you. You have other children, ones that you have cast aside, that you have abused and mistreated for centuries. And I chose to stand with them, to betray you in loving you because I really, really, really love you. My love for you is my ultimate betrayal of you.