The Chronicles of Nefaria

by

William A. Cook

INTRODUCTION

Chris Cook

               A bitter winter welcomes the annual Sacred Season of Forgiveness and Retribution in William A. Cook's fictional Nefaria. Fading in and out of lucidity, suspended between life and oblivion, the once all-powerful leader lay in a coma, his bodily functions aided by the latest medical machinery. Too sick to rise, and  too  mean to  die, the  figure  under  the thin cerecloth reminds of Greene's Harry Lime, the character whose final interment was resisted, "as if nature were doing its best to reject him." In this case, the frozen leader's condition denies him life, while his odious nature and the sheer weight of his crimes seem too great a burden for even Hell's consideration. He is alone now, none knowing of his moments of motionless awareness, or caring about his fate. Ignored by former colleagues and written off as a lost cause by his celebrity doctors, only his nurse, a lowly member of the despised underclass, remains to minister to the Father of the Nation.

               Cook's narrative takes place within a disturbingly familiar world of injustice, brutality, and unbearable human misery. As in the 'real" world, most of the suffering is borne by a population living under the heel of a military occupation that dominates their daily lives. Similar too to our world, the dividing line between occupier and the occupied is determined by race and religion and reinforced by guns, concrete and razor wire. The colonialists of fictional Nefaria have created for the displaced indigenous people a walled ghetto, where every aspect of existence depends on the goodwill of their often capricious jailers. A fragmented remnant of what was once their home, the landscape serves  as metaphor  for the unnatural existence of the inhabitants on both sides of the ubiquitous barriers that dissect the territory.

               Nefaria is also a tale of parallel personal worlds: The stricken leader, doomed to lay comatose and forgotten in a hospital wrestling his demons, and the attendant "angel," whose service to the man singly most responsible for the disaster that has befallen her people is her way of fighting to maintain her humanity. Trapped, the man who engineered and administered the slow erasure of a population has only his life and its litany of transgressions against life to occupy his mind between the sweet ministrations of a nurse who refuses to surrender to hate.

               Fact and fiction flicker in this account of the miserable conditions created by a settler society that both demonizes and depends upon the natives it trammels under foot and crushes beneath the iron tread of tanks and bulldozers. We need only to tune in to the nightly news to witness the sorry reality Cook's fiction relates: War, rumours of war, and worst of all, the soul deadening daily cruelty a grinding occupation with no end in sight demands.

               Nefaria is an accounting as apt for the bitter betrayal of the planet's promise in our young century, a promise disappointed by war and the occupations, as it is for those trapped in the afflicted non-fictional territories where the worst of human nature routinely plays out. He details the relentless humiliation suffered under a generational occupation that daily murders individuals with impunity while collectively punishing the population, and notes the pursuit of an inexorable push toward the final extermination of an entire people. The victims of the intended genocide also fight; they resist with guns and bombs and rockets and stones, but the real battle is within each individual to preserve the "angels of our better nature." Refusing to descend to the unreasoned hatred that drives the endless cycle of hate, oppression and  destruction, the young nurse's devotion to her higher angels is the only roadmap out of the morass; she is exemplar and her resistance is the only hope for our and Nefaria's future.

               As the winter of George W. Bush's disastrous tenure approaches, new wars and killings vie for headline space with the older horrors we've become mainly inured to. Those “regular” daily outrages against humanity allowed to continue year after year, son after father after son cannot be  forgotten, but neither can they be reduced to the simplicity of diametrical opposed positions.

               This is not a Shakespeare tragedy, with actors familiarly enstaged: Villain and victim locked in a passion play that mutually defines and destroys them both. What William A. Cook has created is a reflection of a reality too searing  for  the  trivial  attentions  of  politicians  and  network newsreaders. It is more than merely another cri de coeur for the downtrodden of Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine, and the too many elsewheres people are systematically brutalized. It is an urgent appeal in defense of how we define humanity, and a prayer that, like the better angel embodied by the caring nurse, it is not too late to salvage our collective soul and move finally towards the long-elusive fulfillment of the human promise.

               And as for the dictators and their enablers, Cook suggests we: "Let their respective shadows fall over the wastelands they have created in their arrogance that we may learn and dream once again."

Chris Cook is a contributing editor to the news web site, Pacific Free Press. He’s also a ten year broadcast veteran whose program, Gorilla Radio, is broad/webcast from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and still clings to the notion human beings are inherently good.