#The Shackles of Deliverance: An Ode to the Deed of Release#
 

#The Shackles of Deliverance: An Ode to the Deed of Release#

Section I: The Discharge and the False Elation

I cast off the mantle of debt from the shoulder of my years,

Heavy with the mortgage loan,

And I folded the pledge of the lien, misery fled!

The sound of the final payment rang out like a victory knell

In the icy skeletons, the frightening structures of the Bank.

I believed myself master of my house at last,

Builder of my walls by the sole burn of my labour,

And that the knot of time had been untied.

But the Bank, that insatiable Marble Bull,

That hypertrophied temple of coldness,

Threw one supreme condition at me.

It spoke, with the voice of antique registers:

"There remains a thread! There remains a simulated bond!"

For Liberty is not whole...

Until I have received that Mute Document.

Section II: The Paradox of the Request and the Debt's Phantom

To prove your freedom?

To proclaim the debt's death in the books of silence?

You must pay the redemption of salvation!

You must chase after the spectre of pale documents.

"The Deed of Release" (L'Acte de Mainlevée)!

Behold its name, so bare...

It is the Crown of freedom they sold me a thousand times over!

Alas! It carries a second price, as if it were not a right,

But a favour drawn from the Clerk's pocket.

It would have been more fitting, O institution of vigilant accounting,

To send it to me like lightning, on the wing of a Dove,

Without effort on my part,

In thanks for a loyalty that did not bend.

But Bureaucracy is Sovereign here,

And the procedure is a Law that carries the affront within it:

"YOU MUST REQUEST IT!"

Strange irony! The freedman is required to send a plea to his slave,

And if you abstain, you remain indebted.

The Debt is not dead!

It has disguised itself as a cold phantom in the bank files,

Making that document the identity of the petitioner,

And the talisman of a humiliating deliverance.

Section III: The Deluge of Levies and the Multiplied Injustice

What a bitter taste! What a strange thing!

The price is debited twice for the very same document!

As if this "Discharge" had a Face and a Shadow,

And we must pay for the Shadow as much as the Face!

Where is the explanation in this obscure and forced arithmetic?

Is it theft under an official title,

Or an avarice that is renewed with every payment?

And the ordeal is not over, the thunderbolt is stronger:

The tax for the Bank's change of name!

What a farce!

I pay the price of their wedding, their internal mutations!

I am the contract's witness, the victim of the change, and the payer for the staging!

The homage to the notary bows down upon my purse!

As if the Debt were a drama that does not end with reimbursement,

But a play that tracks me in every act so I must buy the entrance ticket.

Section IV: The Call of the Taxed Free Man

O Bank, O Deaf Walls of the financial institutions,

Show a little humanity! Do not bargain over the breath of Salvation!

How many homes are stripped of the light of full ownership

For a sheet of paper under the shadow of a false debt?

When will the "Deed of Release" become

A certificate of honour, sent with pride,

And not a punishment invoice on the back of the exhausted man!

Let it emerge spontaneously,

Like a sigh of relief not followed by a cough of tax.

Let it be a free key for the house deserved,

And not a new lock added to the neck of the broken borrower.

The story is not in the number...

But in the stab of feeling you are still a captive...

Even after the ink of the repayment has dried!

#NOUR EDDINE BALIGH#