So it was, to give an example, that the Qur’an opened to the first page of the sura entitled The Night Journey when my father was born. The finger fell and indicated the verse: The descendants of those whom we carried with Noah; verily, he was a grateful servant. When my mother bore twin girls, Sundus and Istabraq, his finger fell on verse 31 of The Cave: Those people have the gardens of Eden, under which the rivers flow. Golden bracelets are bound upon them, and they wear green garments of refined silk (sundus) and brocade (istabraq), reclining there on couches. How excellent is their reward, and how lovely the resting place! My cousin Aliya’s name came from The Ultimate Reality, in verses 22–23: In a lofty (aliya) garden whose grapes hang low. As for me, the Qur’an opened to The Poets, and his finger fell on the following verse: A day when neither wealth nor sons will be of any use, except for those who come to God with a sound (saleem) heart.
I don’t know whether “The Poets” had a role in my relationship to poetry. I would read poetry frequently and desperately try to write it, despite my fading hope that I would become a well-known and important poet, as I used to dream when I was young. Or perhaps Aliya was my most important influence, in that I wrote it for her sake? I sent her my first poems with Istabraq, and she became frightened of me.
Grandfather was part of the reason too, for he used to tell us stories of knights who were lovers and poets, and he would recite some of their poems, which were filled with horses, the night, the desert, swords, and the flying heads of enemies. And maybe I was also attracted to poetry because of my father, who had memorized Goethe’s Poems of the East and the West in German, even if he didn’t understand all the words. His German friend Kristof, head of the division of workers in one of the Kirkuk oil companies, had given it to him, saying, “Read this. He was one of us, but he loved your prophet.” So my father memorized it one weekend, going back and forth on the banks of the Tigris River, waving his arms, imagining an audience in the waves, the pebbles, and the willow trees.
At that time I was a little boy, spying on him from the cliff over the river. I imagined that he was preparing for an exam since my eldest brother, Hakeem, would do the same thing during the days of his exams. One of the times that my father turned to face his audience, he caught sight of me and called me over. I hurried down to him. He sat on a rock and hung his feet in the water, setting me on his knees. He spoke admiringly about Goethe and translated some passages from his book for me. I didn’t understand anything because I was focused on my wish to be big like him so that my feet would reach the water. Just like how I would put off trying to understand things in general until I was older.
My father was repeating, “The Germans are an amazing people. Imagine: Kristof is my boss at work, but he is also my friend! He says to me, ‘Your people invented the phoenix with your imagination, and mine personified it in the world.’ His wife, Sabina, is blond and beautiful. She writes poetry and joins us in the oil work. The Germans are an amazing people, Saleem, an amazing people.”
Because of how frequently my father spoke to me about the Germans, I used to imagine that they were like the people of Paradise, whom Grandfather would describe for us: “In Paradise, which we will enter in the afterlife, everyone is young. Everyone is one hundred feet tall. No one becomes sick, grows old, or dies. They eat what they want, when they want it. They point a finger at any bird, and it falls from the branches of the trees of Paradise; it is placed on a plate in front of them to eat, grilled and delicious; they eat as much as they want; then the bird’s bones reassemble, and in an instant it regains its form and lives again, returning to its branch. We will not defecate there. On the contrary, we will sweat perfume. We will have magnificent forms, and we will have beautiful women from among the nymphs of Paradise: if one of them peeked out from the sky right now, the light of her face would illuminate the earth. We will lie with them, but they will regain their virginity. To drink, we will dip our hand into rivers of wine, honey, milk, and whatever the soul desires.”
I imagined them in this way because my father never tired of saying, “The Germans are an amazing people.” He learned German and English from the foreigners at the oil companies. He memorized passages of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as well. Of course, he had also memorized the entire Qur’an because Grandfather was intent on making all of us memorize it. He said that it would be our closest friend in the desolation of the grave, and an advocate to defend us before the court of the two angels, Munkar and Nakeer: “When a person dies, he is buried and abandoned all alone. Then the two angels come and examine him. Therefore, if they ask you who is your lord, say, ‘God’; about your prophet, say, ‘Muhammad’; about your religion, say, ‘Islam’; and about your book, say, ‘The Qur’an.’”
Among all the members of our family, my father was the only one who kept the complete Qur’an preserved in his memory. Therefore, Grandfather would ask his help as he advanced in years and his memory began to fail him. As for us, the children of the next generation, we memorized some sections and forgot them, with the exception of the shorter suras and the verses associated with our names because Grandfather was intent on each of us knowing at least the verse from which our name had sprung.
He would say, “God was the one who chose your names, and their source is here in his book. Look!” Then he would point out for each of us the verse with his finger, as though he were reenacting for us the scene of our own naming, which we had not seen.
Many of the people of our village followed this naming method of his. For some of them, fate brought a rare and beautiful name, while for others, the name entailed problems and psychological suffering. An example of that was Aunt Huda’s son, whose father’s finger fell upon the word sirat (“path”). When we were small and quarreled with Sirat as we played, we would call him dirat (“fart”). In school, whenever he left the room and we could get hold of his notebooks, we would change his name by adding a dot over the letter saad to make it a daad. As a result, he grew up to be the opposite of his peaceful nature and his family’s reserved disposition. He became a fierce boy who would get into many fights, tortured by bearing this name that didn’t give him any rest until his corpse came back with those of my brother Hakeem and three of my cousins among the seventeen decomposing bodies.
We used to pick on Sirat and provoke him, then run away. When he realized that we had escaped his grasp, or when the stones he threw didn’t reach us, he would yell in a loud, agonized voice, “Are you making fun of the name that God gave me? Don’t you fear going to hell? Are you laughing at the painter or the painting?”
That would make us truly ashamed, and we did become afraid of God and pray for forgiveness because we were reminded of a story Grandfather had told us about a man whose name was Malik bin Dinar (“King, son of Gold Coin”). At the time, we had laughed at the name Dinar, only to be scolded by Grandfather before he continued his story. Malik was going along the road one day when he happened upon a donkey (or a dog — I don’t remember exactly now). The donkey was colored in a strange way: white with black spots on its eyes, ears, stomach, and tail. Malik burst out laughing, but then the donkey turned to him and spoke in a human voice, saying, “Are you laughing at the painter or the painting?” Malik immediately understood the reference to the Creator and the donkey. He fell to his knees and prostrated himself in repentance. He kept crying for forty years and asking God’s forgiveness for the mockery and scorn that he had shown one of his creatures. In the end, after he spent forty years weeping and showing special attention to every donkey he saw, God forgave him.