Return of the Angry Lilliputs – Part One

By Baba Galleh Jallow

The Lilliputs were back, and they were angry. More angry than ever before,
and determined to wreck havoc on those who so stirred their unforgiving ire. No, it was not that anyone needed their forgiveness, or that anyone knew exactly why the Lilliputs were angry. But angry they were, and they made their madness known in no uncertain terms. If anyone wondered why the Lilliputs behaved like retarded monkeys, baring their teeth and trying to
viciously scratch at innocent bystanders, they should wonder no more. The
Lilliputs were in a constant state of anger, their hearts feeling like a
glowing furnace of red hot coals, their faces tortured by the grins of those
who would kill the world itself if they could. But the Lilliputs did not
want to eat the world. They were just very angry, so angry that they felt
like moving about with their eyes closed, so they would not think of some of
the stupidities of this stupid world.

The Lilliputs were all giants of the intellectual realm, or so they thought
themselves to be. They all had read so much that the hair was falling off
their learned heads, and their eyes had taken on that famous distant gaze of the ancient sage or, some would say, the uncommon fool of the world. For it was said that too much learning made dotards of men although this statement had to be taken with a generous pinch of salt. The Lilliputs were no dotards; they were, in their own minds, angels of the recurrent apocalypse, the nightmare of all who would dare to be what they are not.

The seemingly desperate stares in their seemingly sheepish eyes were not stares of foolery; they were stares of those whose anger was beyond the comprehension of all the little minds of this world. And so the Lilliputs walked around and lived as if in a dream, awake, yet supremely scornful of all that did not fit their own elevated notions of beauty and decorum.

The Lilliputs lived all in their own elevated world, high above the clouds,
the sun, the moon, and the stars; high above the very heavens themselves.
For who could say it was not right to live above the world, above the very
limits of the limitless skies/ Who could say that it was not possible to
rise higher that space itself and live way above the very universe itself,
above all the planetary bodies, over and above the very limits of
imagination itself? Those who doubted the possibility of such seemingly
impossible feats only need to meet the Lilliputs, and they would be
convinced that indeed, man was capable of climbing higher that high itself.
The Lilliputs were a living, pooping testimony of this.

Some people wondered why our high and mighty Lilliputs were so extremely
angry that they constantly drooled hot, slimy grime from their generous
mouths. Very few people knew for sure. For what could make men so angry at the world that they go around with their eyes closed so they could not feel the blowing of the wind across the world? What could make men so angry that they constantly raved against the rising of the sun? That they uttered hostile diatribes against the falling of the rain, or the sailing of the
clouds across the distant skies? What could make men so angry that they
denied the very content of their own minds and struggle against the
flowering of good thoughts in their own minds: all thoughts that did not fit
their own ideas of the good and beautiful? What could make men so angry that they refuse to accept that birds should freely sing in the trees, that waves must rise and crash against the distant shores of this big wide world?

What could make men so angry that they refuse to accept the very fact of their humanity, the humanity of their common humans, and seek instead to blame they know not what on people who simply did not fit something in the confused schemes of their little minds?

Well, ask the Lilliputs and you probably will get much more than an ordinary
answer to each of those extraordinary questions. Or maybe the Lilliputs
themselves can’t say and don’t care. All they knew was that they were very
angry and they were going to make their anger felt in no uncertain times,
even if it means the world will think them fools and mental midgets
incapable of contemplating anything other than their own deluded notions of personal grandeur, or the littleness of all who seem little in their own
little minds. People said this was especially true of the most visible
Lilliput, the pious Bopagi Botiharr Munafen of Greensnake fame to whose
incredible exploits we shall now turn.