There is a Malay word that has changed along with history: daulat.

A stranger arrives on horseback at a homesteading community in a Wyoming valley in 1889. His appearance is unusual. He had a 'haunting' look, a child who was watching him says, "chilling in his dark solitude."

Revolution always rages before curfews. With fervor. Once the revolution is over, the raging stops. The fight, even the violence, has borne fruit; it is over, and now an order and sovereignty is established: a cold construction with straight lines.

There in that former internment camp, I stepped into the yard of the old prison that the colonial government built for political prisoners in the 1920s: it was narrow, barbed wire on the walls, and with underground cells where the most difficult prisoners used to be locked up. Under the hot sun and in the stifling heat of Boven Digul, which in no way resembled a 'pretty village', how did those prisoners manage to survive?

The sun can be bright, but distant and indifferent to human suffering. Les Misrables, which was first published on April 1, 1862, wanted to be closer to the earth, and sensitive to French weeping. As its famous phrase says: "Those who do not weep, do not see."

That brutal, hopeless and never-ending history probably started in a small Palestinian town 15 kilometers southeast of Tel Aviv. Arabs call it al-Ludd (). The Jews now call it by its Biblical name Lod. It used to be known as Lydda.