In Europe, my appearance again attracted trouble. It started in Athens. In the beginning, fortunately, I had no big problems and I didn’t have to worry about being arrested. There were so many refugees in the country that they’d have needed millions of prisons to lock them all up. From time to time, nonetheless, the police arrested a few — probably to make it look like they were doing something about the refugee problem. Once, they caught me too. I spent a few days in a cell while they tried to arrange a refugee ID card for me.
On the final day, something tragic happened. I needed to go to the toilet. A policeman accompanied me. On the way back he blocked my path and, in a fit of rage, began to beat me. I didn’t understand what was happening and began to shout as loudly as I could. Some of the other policemen came running and saved me from the blows of my escort who seemed to have gone mad. They began to grumble and argue with him. Such a commotion! I didn’t understand a word but guessed that they were angry with him for attacking me. Suddenly, the raging policeman was cowering on the floor, hitting himself in the face and howling. How absurd! I couldn’t make any sense of it! A blond policeman brought me back to my cell. I sat there, fed up with the world, hugely disappointed and sad. I couldn’t believe that in Europe too the police kicked and beat people for no reason. I could never have imagined it. A horrible surprise! In the evening, the door opened and an officer in a smart uniform entered my cell. He had an array of stars and other insignias all over his chest and shoulders. He explained in English that the policeman had lost his head because he thought I was a Pakistani drug dealer the Greek police had been after for a long time. He had, it seemed, lost his youngest brother to an overdose. And because he thought I was that drug dealer, his rage had boiled over and he had lost all self-control. The officer showed me a photo of the dealer. It was hard to believe — he really did look just like me! Two peas in a pod, we seemed to be. I was confused, myself.
Half an hour later, the no-longer-raging policeman returned and pointed his finger at me. ‘Are you from Iraq?’ he asked in English.
‘Yes!’
‘Sorry!’
He closed the door and left. Fifteen minutes later, a different policeman came, gave me an ID, accompanied me to the front door and said, again in English, ‘Go!’
I left Greece and its police and fled to Germany. In Germany, things were the same and yet they were different. The overzealousness of the German police brought my illegal journey to an abrupt end — in the middle of Bavaria. I wanted, actually, to continue to Sweden for I’d heard from lots of other refugees that you got support from the state to learn Swedish and study at university. Nothing like that existed in Germany, apparently. I was on the train from Munich to Hamburg and from there, via Denmark, to Sweden. When it stopped at the station of a small town called Ansbach, two Bavarian policemen came on board. They didn’t ask any of the many blond passengers for their ID but came straight to me. Was it my Indian looks?
‘Passport?’
‘No!’
They arrested me. At the police station, my appearance caused further excitement. The officers simply wouldn’t believe I was Iraqi — they thought I was an Indian or a Pakistani claiming to be Iraqi to get asylum. A fraud, in other words. Given the dictatorship in our country, Iraqis, at the time, were eligible for asylum in Germany, unlike the citizens of many other countries, Indians and Pakistanis, for example. It took a long time for an interpreter and a judge from Nuremberg to arrive in order to test me with a whole set of questions. They wanted to know, for example, how many cinemas there were at the centre of Baghdad. I named some. Child’s play, for me, of course. My Iraqi origins were soon confirmed. I had to give up, however, on the idea of reaching Sweden. The German police had taken my fingerprints and explained that these would now be forwarded to all other countries that offered asylum. I could no longer apply for asylum anywhere else. Only in Germany. Any attempt to leave would be a criminal offence. So I’ve been stuck here since.
If it were only things like this, and that were all, life would be bearable, really. But worse was to follow. Many here were simply afraid of me. Yes, afraid! Even though I haven’t beaten up anyone nor joined al-Qaeda nor even the CIA. It all began on 11 September 2001. From that day, Arabs in Europe lost their smile. The media spoke of nothing but ‘the Evil from Arabia’. At that tense time, I flew from Munich to Berlin for a few days. An old lady next to me, a Bavarian — no prizes for guessing with that accent! — smiled at me.
‘Indian?’
‘No,’ I replied with a smile, ‘Iraqi.’
The smile on her lips froze, turned into a grimace distorted by fear and she quickly averted her eyes. For the rest of the flight, she sat glued — pale and silent — to her seat. You’d have thought she’d seen the Devil! One more word from me and she’d have had a heart attack!
Thinking back to the names I was called, in the East or in the West, I realize that they’ve always had something to do with India. India — where I’ve never been, a country I don’t know at all. The Arabs called me the ‘Iraqi Indian’, the Europeans simply ‘Indian’. I can live, of course, with being a gypsy, an Iraqi, an Indian, an extraterrestrial, even — why not? What I can’t live with is that I don’t know who I really am. I know only that I was ‘burnt and salted by many suns of the earth’, as my Bavarian lover, Sara, always says. And I believe her.
I’ve realized, meanwhile, that there may be a concrete link between me and India, after all — my grandmother. That has a historical background. When the British came to Iraq at the beginning of the twentieth century, they were then also the occupying force in India. Accordingly, they brought a lot of Indian soldiers with them, who set up camp in the south of our country amid the vast palm forests. Who knows, perhaps my grandmother — originally from the south — met an Indian soldier in the forest once. And I am perhaps the product of the union of two British colonies.
TWO. Writing and Losing
There were no writers in my family. You couldn’t find a decent book, even — apart from the Koran and the government’s annual report. Despite which, at some point, I stumbled upon a room full of books — my brother-in-law Sadiq’s library. I was very young when he came to ask for the hand of my sister Karima. He married my sister and I married his books. Sadiq lectured on literature at the University of Baghdad; he was a literary critic and mad about books. The first book I read outside of my texts for school was the one he’d recommended and loaned to me. A translation from Russian—Selected Poems by Rasul Gamzatov. Once I’d read it, the bird immediately got hold of me, the books bird. I read as if possessed. Poetry, mainly. And then, one day, I thought of writing my own poems. I dedicated the first to my neighbour, Fatima. I was mad about her. She had no idea. She was very pretty and could have had any number of men. She paid no attention to me. And so my first poem was called ‘Sighing’. That’s how I began writing. At that time, I was composing poems by the dozen. Later, I began reading and writing stories. Poetry, though, touched me more deeply. Back then, I felt it was the ‘lung of life that allows me to inhale and exhale’.
Since then, I’ve been writing almost daily. I’ve become a writing machine. For a long time, though, I never thought about why I write. Writing was connected to my inner life — it was constantly compelling me to write. Three phases were to emerge, of which I wasn’t at all conscious. To begin with, I simply wrote, thinking that by writing I could capture my feelings in words. Writing was a kind of lightning conductor that would protect me from psychological defeats. If a stroke of fate struck, I wrote and, in doing so, felt such relief you’d have thought the lightning flashing through my soul now streaked across the paper. Then, I thought I could change the world by writing. Just like a revolutionary but with a pencil instead of a weapon. I believed that for a really long time. Finally, I became persuaded that I could even improve myself by writing.