Compelled, but not defeated
I love old stories.
This situation reminds me of the tale of Brother Rabbit. You'll hardly hear that one, and that's sad. But I understand, there are problems attached to the telling, yet the story itself is still valid. We got it from an oppressed people who brought such tales from their old lands, tales they told for generations to their children and each other, to teach important lessons.
It's a simple story. Stripped of the storyteller's embellishments, it goes that the self-righteous Fox has caught the trickster Rabbit, and because of their enmity, the predator wants to see his prey suffer before killing and eating him.
Brother Rabbit sees a nearby thicket of thorny briars and brambles, and advises that he should not be tossed within. Fox sees only instruments of pain, and assumes Rabbit's expression of fear is genuine, so he falls for the reverse psychology and throws his victim into the center of the patch. Rabbit, of course, was born and raised there, able to slip between the vines and rely on the thorns to keep hunters like the Fox out.
As is usually the case in a trickster tale, Brother Rabbit wins.
You have won, it is true. I'll concede that. But look where you have cast me.
I know these vines. I've climbed these branches. I know how to use the tools here. I have allies here. We are at home here.
It is far easier to conquer than to hold. You soon see, Brother Fox, which way the thorns are pointing.
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Entry for LJ Idol: Season Ten, Week 17; Topic (2) “Surrender Under Protest,” which is also the title of a 2016 song by the Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers - I got the title of this entry from the chorus. (Listen here) The song turns the Confederate sentiments of today's South against themselves as an outcry against today's civil rights abuses and crimes. In this piece, I used one of Uncle Remus' tales - folklore we are culturally banishing due to its association with slavery, Jim Crow, Disney's “Song of the South,” et al, though the tales themselves still hold wisdom through their traditional African roots.
I had envisioned this monologue as part of a bigger story, as it obviously is, but I think now it is better to leave the context to the reader. I can see this fitting in various scenarios. It can be a sci-fi world where the aliens don't see the true talents of trickster humans; it can be a dystopian story in which the opressors' hubris is starting to show.
Or in in our time, you see the Resistance to certain political forces in the U.S.; the old men from Dixie, and their like-minded confederates from north of the line, don't see that they are the Fox now, just as they didn't back when brave storytellers whispered tales to aspiring Rabbits 200 years ago.