Instructions Not Included

Squid Game is an unnerving commentary on our world, childhood games are turned into games of desperation, with winning no longer being one of the few rules that matter when it comes to survival. There is much symbolism in it, particularly when we paint its bleak parallels with the realities of our politics.

In the bloody colosseums of Squid Game, there are VIPs, powerful, masked, faceless men who entertain themselves playing with human lives. In our reality, they form the political elite, creating chaos, disunity and spectacle. They are staging the game, altering the rules and looking on as citizens, mere human beings, are made into pawns that struggle not just to win the game to bring pride or honour, but to live, to survive at all with the slightest possible chance.

In the second season, democracy is performed. They are promised they can “opt out” but beyond the arena is an even meaner world: poverty, desperation and violence all waiting just beyond the door. As is the case in our politics, we are informed that we have choices, that we have the vote, a voice, but the choices are more often than not, illusionary. It is a never-ending cycle with no real end to the game.

In the hellish dormitories of Squid Game, the players are equipped with knives and they are encouraged to ensure that they turn on one another. Our knives in this nation of ours are tribalism, political division and propaganda. We use vicious speeches amongst each other and distrust one another and turn against our fellow women and men, sisters and brothers, because we have been instilled with the notion that the only way we can survive is to conquer one another.

We are outraged by police brutality and rightly so, but sadly, police are also players; we are no different from them. We are all poor chess pieces in a rigged game, with the hope of surviving the round. The true enemy is invisible to us: the designers of the rules, the people who make money out of the spectacle. All of the participants in Squid Game are desperate in more than one way: they want money, but even more, they want what money promises, dignity and opportunity. So many people in Kenya are desperate to have a better life. This desperation is the food of the system, which makes us believe that there is nothing left to do but be ready to betray and be silent.

Anyone who challenges the rules of the game, activists, whistleblowers, is dealt with in an extreme way, as an object lesson to the others. “Do as thou art bid Or be flattened down.” The prize is enticing but it comes at the cost of complicity and betrayal to all that we know and love. It must be lonely at the top…or at the middle…truly, as a player, you will rarely make it to the top.

But even through this chaos, we have flashes of awe-inspiring humanity: self-sacrifice, strange alliances and rebellious acts of kindness. These scenes are powerful reminders of how, above the biggest engineered despair, the human spirit must burst forth. In our reality, we have this echoed in our communities through feeding one another, defending one another, raising voices and encouraging each other to be united. These are the flickers of hope and the architects of the game are more afraid of this than anything else.

Squid Game reminds us that the most violent thing is not the games, but in normalising oppression and injustice. It makes us complicit because of our desire to survive. The true purpose of the game is to make us believe there is no other option…that there is nothing we can do about the situation. Nevertheless, there are always other ways: in solidarity, in imagination, in not playing by cruel rules. When we see the game for what it is, when we look it squarely in the eye, we start taking our power back, even in frightful, hesitating, tiny ways. Fear is normal but it does not equate to weakness…It is okay to be scared.

I voice all these facts.

However, the truth be told... I am no more than one of the players.

I am afraid.

Perhaps it is I myself who is all the more willing to be a participant in the game than to speak against it.

I am one individual

I have dreams and aspirations

I would like to live long enough to see them.

And self-preservation has it that I will do anything in my power to see it

Even if it means remaining silent

And so I judge not my fellow players because I do not know what I would do if I were in their shoes.

As a person, I do not know where that places me, am I a traitor?

In a world constructed so as to involve us all in the game, the very dream of survival with dignity is a heroic act. And as we speak these truths, we perhaps start imagining the world outside the game.

idk..is there a world outside the game?

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