I think my problem was that I hadn’t travelled voluntarily. I wasn’t a tourist. Only a refugee. A fleeing pigeon that was completely blind. It was able to fly but it didn’t know where to go. I was forced to leave my homeland for ever, that much was certain. But I still didn’t know what I would do elsewhere! I had to survive and that was all. My ‘access to exile’ path was a long path through the emptiness that I had to fight all my life. The longing for your homeland grows fainter with time. The more you penetrate the emptiness of exile in your new life, the more the touched-up past fades. Emptiness, though, is the one thing that remains, your constant companion.
‘God, save me from emptiness!’
In Amman, in a bid to battle the emptiness, I tried to make contact with members of the Iraqi opposition. A group of Iraqi politicians and writers in exile met in a cafe in Amman every afternoon. When I came to know them better, I couldn’t believe it — more than half had been generals, poets and writers who’d supported the Iraqi dictatorship in the eighties. I’d even seen some of them on TV, reading poems or making speeches in praise of the dictator. On one occasion, a poet who saw himself as an important representative of contemporary Iraqi literature, proudly read a poem he’d published for the king of Jordan in a Jordanian newspaper. He’d previously published several volumes of poetry dedicated exclusively to the Iraqi ‘leader’ and his wars. I immediately recalled the old Arabic poet: ‘And yet I saw no one.’ These people had sold out, completely. But what were they up to, in exile? A poet called Akram — with sad black eyes and a loud, deep, broken voice — explained: ‘Following the war of 1991, Saddam and his government have grown weak. The Iraqi dinar hasn’t been worth a damn since the embargo. That’s why, suddenly, many high-ranking military men and intellectuals have gone abroad and joined the opposition. The writers now write for other dictators in other Arab countries and earn a lot of money. They also write for Iraqi opposition parties and earn a second lot of money. The generals receive money from the Americans and other countries that have a problem with Saddam — to ensure that they support the countries in question in their own way, especially against their own opposition, and so on and so forth. .’
‘I don’t believe that!’
‘Just look at Syria. The dictatorship in Damascus is murdering the communists in its own country but is supporting the communists in Iraq. It’s all one big game!’
It’s easy to understand that, in such circumstances, I felt no great desire to remain with these people, to be part of this big game. Akram said it was best to go away — to where there were no lies.
‘Where?’
‘No man’s land. .’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Perhaps in the Bermuda Triangle!’
Akram stayed for a while with his high-ranking ‘friends’, then he fled, not to the Bermuda Triangle, of course, but to Lebanon. A few years later, I heard that he’d killed himself. He probably couldn’t free himself from emptiness, nor fight it. And so he chose the oldest and easiest way out.
I quickly forgot those people and tried to find new paths for myself in Amman. But there weren’t many. Working, reading and writing managed to soothe my longing and the need to meet other Iraqis died down. Thus, to some extent, I was able to avoid news from Iraq. For the same reason, I called my family just once a month. In the end, it also helped me to wander, alone, out into the Jordanian desert and to scream. Screaming is the best cure for emptiness but, sadly, an all-too-fleeting one. The emptiness on earth and in heaven weighed on you in Jordan too. Staying was not the best option. The next possibility for me was Libya. There you could at least feel free in the desert as it was so big. And so I bought a ticket and set out on my way without thinking about what I’d actually do there.
‘God, save me from empt-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ness!’
In Libya, I decided to flee to the West again. Life in the Arabian Desert under another dictatorship — this time, African — was unbearable. I saw and experienced for myself just how terrible things were. The country consisted of a single man, or a single family, who held all the power and determined the fates of its people. It was a land so filled with the sand of brutality that even a camel would lose its bearings. It would take more than the patience of a camel to be able to bear all that. The patience I had, even — though that clearly wasn’t enough.
I no longer wished to stay there. Actually, I no longer wished to stay in any place where pictures of some president or other hung in the streets. The countries in which I was to land up in future I’d divided into two groups — where there were posters of their leaders, like in Libya, and where there weren’t. That’s the kind of place I wanted to go to. I’d always heard about how that kind of thing existed only in the West. So I began the first stage of my long journey to the western hemisphere.
We were three men who’d met in Benghazi — a Sudanese, a Libyan and an Iraqi. Izhaq, the Sudanese, wanted to get married, start a family and live in peace. Abu-Agela, the Libyan, wanted to know the mountains and snow and ‘a blonde wife, a house in the forest and as much money as possible’. I didn’t know what I wanted. Nothing more, perhaps, than to overcome my emptiness and to take myself as far away as possible from any danger.
Izhaq was our people-smuggler. He wasn’t a proper smuggler, of course, but a French teacher and a fisherman. ‘If I’d known my studies would only be worth the piece of paper my result was printed on,’ he’d once said, ‘I’d have become a fisherman far sooner.’ Because in Libya the level of interest in French was extremely low, he’d been working, since his arrival in Benghazi, as a fisherman on the boat of a Libyan businessman. ‘I don’t want to stay. This place is killing me,’ he said every time I met him.
Abu-Agela, who’d fled from his tribe, no longer wanted to be a grain of sand in the Sahara and laughed at by his tribe. One day, he’d gone with the other boys to the holy stone in the desert — where they met once a week at the campfire to sing and dance. ‘It’s a wonderful stone! It’s said that it was the very first stone and fell from the sky with Adam. It is big, white and shines in the night. Just imagine that — a white stone and the black skin of the boys in the yellow desert! And then dancing and shouting round the campfire to the wild beats of the drum beneath the black sky!’
That day, he didn’t go to the stone with the others. ‘I saw Ouarde. She lived up to her Arabic name — she was a real flower. She looked at me as if I were the most handsome boy in the world. I didn’t know Ouarde well but I knew she didn’t have a good reputation in the tribe. But she was pretty — very pretty. Everyone said she was doing it with the head of the tribe though he had two wives and eleven children. I was only thinking of having fun with her. But she seduced me. I followed her to a valley far from our village. We hid there and it happened. My first time! A month later, the head of the tribe came to me and said that Ouarde was pregnant. Was claiming that I was the father. I didn’t know what to say. When a woman speaks such nonsense, there’s nothing to say. All the men had rifles in their hands and were talking about honour. But I knew it was a trick and that the head of the tribe himself was behind it. I couldn’t possibly be the father. I’m not stupid. How was she supposed to have got pregnant? I’d only fucked her up the arse! But I had to marry her. There was no other option. Marry her or be shot. Two days after the wedding, I ran.’