A graphic autobio of a bright light boy – by Elia Field
For sale as paperback and e-book on Brave New Books.
In Aleppo in the 1960s a bright, light boy was born, in a country scarred by years of upheaval and injustice. Why did his father try to kill him from the day he was born? Was he switched at birth? Or was he the product of a one-night stand with his mother? How could this boy be such a threat to him? Why did his mother have to rescue him over and over from certain death? Why was this bright, light boy meant to live?
Imagine this child, endowed with beauty and grace, with innocence and ignorance, roaming the Christian and Muslim neighborhoods of Aleppo. A child with a special gift. A gift so powerful, it made him love people and existence, no matter what cruelty or abuse they threw at him. A gift that he had to learn to master in the most hard way.
Imagine him constantly being hunted by a bloodthirsty father, being deprived of school, and forced into child labor. Being kidnapped from the street time and again and abused by out of control deadly violent men. Imagine him not understanding any of this, but learning to listen to his inner voice, to his inner seeing, knowing there’s more to life, trying to talk sense into people, seeing their person, not just their behavior.
Imagine him finding out and celebrating his identity and for that falling into the hands of institutionalized deadly violence: the secret service, the army, and army prisons. His demonic father being a picnic compared to all that. Why? For what? For being who he was. Picture him entering a system wholly designed to physically and mentally break people on an industrial scale. Him starting even to feel sorry for the exhaustion of his jailors, who had to torture so many people for a living. Teaching him to understand pain. Pain that unlocked the deepest powers inside of him. Even making him see love in the middle of hell. Powers that helped him to survive the worst moments of imminent death by giving him superhuman strength to escape, or out-of-body experience. Powers that gave him a deep understanding of his life and being. Powers that heal. Powers inside everybody that he wants to make people aware of.
Imagine him escaping further annihilation by unexpectedly leaving Syria, helped on his way by human angels, ending up in Europe, in the civilized Netherlands. Only to experience that civilizedness was a very relative term. Nonetheless, this was the country and the freedom he always had dreamt of since he was a little boy. See him starting to travel Europe and the world. Journeys strewed with miracles, and him working his magic along the way. Imagine him discovering that the universe is talking to us all the time. Discovering that people cut themselves off from this loving power by separating each other into boxes. Boxes for religions, ideologies, and sexual orientations. You name it, there’s a box for it that cripples and shames the natural power in people.
Imagine, twenty-five years after his own escape from Syria, him running into an old sun-burnt acquaintance who just had come walking all the way from Syria to the Netherlands, reuniting him with his old friends whom he had had to leave behind, finding out how life in Syria had gotten so much worse for them that many had had to make an irrevocable choice. All the more reason for him to spread his deeply felt message of universal love.
Now stop imagining and start realizing that all this actually happened and is happening still.
Elia Field is a gifted clairvoyant and a savant sauvage, who suffered decades of unimaginable brutalities, for being different, for being gay in an Arab society, and for challenging the inhumane system in Syria. Finally, he escaped to Europe and started traveling the world, opening minds with his strong humanistic messages and healing people as he goes.