Men in the city of locusts

Postcolonial professors and social scientists were killed for infesting spaces but historians were the worst: they were never concerned about the history of migratory grasshoppers so they are forced to live. What about artists and poets? There are none in the city. Or perhaps there were some, in the beginning, but now they all resemble the natives and cannot be separated from the law-abiding citizens. Sometimes tourists are allowed, the harmless curious men, who eat Balochi rice and drink Kashmiri tea while discussing anthropology. As the sun sets in the city, in a world far away, a Frenchman kills an anonymous Arab because it’s a hot day and there’s no god today.

Locusts read about this and defend Camus. Historians plead in a language that no one speaks in the city, except the dead social scientists whose books larvae don’t like to bore through: papers with subaltern theories taste different from the papers with ancient texts. In this city of locusts, where the poet men seem to have mixed with the moths, an insect talks about breaking the monotony, flying over the houses constructed in a similar pattern, in the streets where your children play hide and seek.