When I write, I see everything as if for the first time, I try to empathize, to understand anew. I am both the student and the teacher. I teach myself and learn from myself. One day I came up with the mad idea of writing my story. I locked myself in my room, blocked out the external world and plunged deep within to bring, each time, another concealed part of myself to the surface. I discovered myself and the world anew and committed this insight to paper. Is what I write real life? I can’t say.
Despite writing like a maniac from such an early age, I didn’t for a long time actually put down that story of mine, with its countless people, towns, wars, uprisings, dead people, women and disasters. It wasn’t because I preferred poetry to prose. No. Prose, too, I write with a passion. The reason was — my terrible memory.
I can quickly forget many things. An ability I consider a blessing. It is thanks to this that I’m still around. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had total recall. I think I’d have ended my life long ago. Fortunately, then, I have a memory full of holes. The most terrible events fall out of it and never return. I have another ability, another blessing — if something terrible does manage to stick to the edge of my memory, I can embellish it completely and utterly. And, in next to no time, the dirt dissolves and only beautiful — or beautified—images remain.
But the price I pay for this blessing is very high. If I want to write about real events, I have difficulty not only in depicting towns or people’s appearances. My stories also lack what make stories stories — time, place and action. For it’s not just names and people’s appearances I forget. In my memory, different points in time get mixed up until, in the end, I can only roughly guess at which year it was. Unity of action and its chronology cease to exist too. Sometimes only disorderly, vague scraps of narrative are all that remain of true stories.
And that’s still not all. My notes — meant, actually, to underpin my memories — represent a danger. I’ve been afraid to confide important things to my diaries since I became aware of the danger of losing them. I wrote — and write — in them only rarely, which is why I call them my ‘monthlies’. An entry once a month. Twice, at most. Not because I didn’t feel like writing. But because it wasn’t easy to write a new entry.
In Baghdad, where I was born and grew up, I had to hide everything. During Saddam’s rule, a single word was enough to cost you your life. That’s why I used symbols to write down all kinds of things. I made up my own alphabet with Roman and Arabic letters, patterns and numbers that no one but I could decode.
Later, during my escape through the Arab countries, I used the same technique to survive the police checks, when they searched everything — literally, everything. For those emergencies I’d modified my alphabet by adding colloquialisms from southern Iraq. That way, I could note the names of presidents, their atrocities, their slaughters — unknown acts of resistance, too — without anyone even beginning to suspect anything.
Nowadays, though, the problem is that I can barely decipher that alphabet. Even though it’s my invention. The keys to the symbols have fallen through the holes in my memory and so the doors to my notes from those days remain permanently locked. To make matters worse, quite a few pages — through the years and in the course of my escape — have also become illegible, for I always write in pencil, even now.
I can suppress any thought of lost writings but my diaries exist and they keep reminding me of the loss that can be measured exactly by counting the many pages full of my hieroglyphics.
I’ve suffered another loss. My writings, I think sometimes, are like gypsy tribes and always disappear into some hole or other. One afternoon I came home to find the worst fate imaginable awaiting me — my father had become a Saddamist. The news made the tears pour from Heaven. Our family home wasn’t far from the bus stop. The part of town I was born and grew up in — Madinat al-Thawra, the town of the revolution — was calm. Only the patter of rain. Strange weather passed over the district. The square opposite our house — littered with empty oil and tomato-purée tins, broken schnapps bottles, punctured car tyres and twisted bicycle wheels, and where a donkey lived — filled more and more with water. A small lake had formed outside our house and into it flowed streams from our neighbours’ yards. As if by magic, shit, rubbish, rotten food was being pushed up from the seepage pit and pooling — stinking like hell — in front of all our homes. My mother usually greeted me with a tasty meal when I got home. This time, though, it was my manuscripts and books that greeted me, drowning in the dirty water outside the house. Like fallen soldiers, they looking up at me in terror. I was hysterical, as any Iraqi is when panic and disbelief blend.
I went in. ‘That was Father,’ my sister said.
My relationship with my father was never the same. We grew to hate each other. Were like two strangers. Since that day — I have to admit — I was very hard-hearted about him. The sight of him made me sick. But I’d often felt like that, lately, when I looked at myself or many of my fellow humans. We’ve all mutated into creatures of the imagination. How else can you explain a state declaring as criminal any act of reading and writing outside the schools and universities? Which is why my father thought it best to destroy my books and my writings. Fortunately, I’d hidden all the banned books beneath the pigeon cages on the roof. So my father ended up destroying only the permitted books he’d found in my room. How was he supposed to know the difference anyway? Illiterate, he was unable to write even his name.
Adding fuel to my father’s fears, the Iraqi secret service turned up at our house one day. And put me in prison for eighteen months and four days. Because, at some time, and at some place, with friends who worked for banned political parties, I’d spoken ill of the president and helped distribute flyers. In jail, there was neither pen nor paper. The guards considered such things dangerous. A pen could be used as a dagger, after all. Or to write subversive information.
And so, like all prisoners, I wrote on the walls. Our pens were little stones. I wrote a lot. If the walls had fit, I wouldn’t have hesitated to pocket them!
Writing on the prison walls involved a certain danger, though — the guards were constantly checking for banned slogans. The Central Prison, where I was, was full of members of Islamic parties who used the walls just as diligently — to write down holy verses from the Koran. And who’d have dared to erase even a single line of that to write something else? He’d have been labelled an infidel faster than he could blink.
The day came, finally, when I got to write on clean white paper. From one day to the next I’d fallen ill. Due to the damp in the jail, many prisoners suffered from skin diseases. I got a completely new one that made my skin look burnt. Fearing it might be contagious, the officers in the prison had me transferred to al-Rashid military hospital in Baghdad. There, in the ward for prisoners, I was able to persuade the warden to get me a pen and paper. I stayed in hospital for a whole week and wrote non-stop. Wrote, without thinking. The best stuff I’ve ever written, perhaps. When life confronts you with grief and great confusion, you always write something special.