Waves ENGLISH

By Abdullah Ibrahim

Ibrahim recounts his past as the son of a family of farmers and landowners in Kirkuk: an idyllic place, where a mosaic of people from many different places and regions lived together and were neighbors in every sense of the word. But things changed with the start of the Iran-Iraq War when Ibrahim was conscripted into the Iraqi army to fight for Iraq. After the war, he left the country to escape the political tensions, ending up teaching Arabic Literature in Libya, then in Qatar. Passing through these countries accentuated Ibrahim’s memories of home, as did his sadness at each successive wave of violence that engulfed it and his memories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hamad Bin Khalifa University Press
• Release date: May 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9789927118685

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Hussein

The First Wave

An egg laid by the wind

1. To know what to want

My life, since childhood, has always been dictated by a torrent of events, ideas, and impulses. No one charted its path for me: No family, no school, no tribe. No society or government either. From early on, I set out to make my own path, my navigation guided by the collusion of my personal desires, cultural aspirations, and forms of public life. To myself and to others I often appeared a successful man. However, a profound conflict has always split my being as I strove to fit into the world; I belonged neither conclusively to my ambition- and chaos-ridden self, nor to the world inhabited by the community at large and its prevailing values, beliefs, and mores. I sought to shape a blend between the two, removing what I believed did not suit me, and taking pleasure in deviating from the general consensus, whenever I saw it as stemming from mere ignorance. When it comes to flattery and sycophancy, I am inept and outright hopeless. I felt constantly at fault, traversing a narrow path between two paved roads both of which I felt I had a right to take whenever I pleased, without leaving my own trajectory, and at times, this made me fancy myself different and exceptional. The reason had to do with the absence of a regular family upbringing. Because my father and then my mother disappeared early on from my life, I had to take on a role bigger than was customary for a child, yet smaller than what it took to satisfy his imagination.

A high degree of self-discipline grew in me. When I later became a father, I was stern to the point of being ham-fisted. With my children, I sought to compensate for the absence of the father figure in my own life, and pushed them to accept the values of the role while withholding the usual lenience and affection of fatherhood. They probably found it hard to swallow my role as a father who had dedicated his life for them. Like me, albeit in reverse, they became victims of the same kind of absence I had suffered. But while no one had guided my life’s path, they grew up between the guide rails I had laid down for their lives. This created the impression that I was free to do what I wanted, but I was rigid about what they wanted. It was as if I had two split personalities: one, an individual hidden in his thoughts and unquenched desires; and another, a public self, who had devoted everything in his life to his family, his students, and his readers.

In those years now pushed into the wide chasm of oblivion, rarely had I participated in the unruly world of children. Childhood remained an unchartered territory for me, its importance declining until it was extinguished, like a faded fantasy. In school, I wavered between a feeling of exceptionalism, and a desire to overcome my rural roots, which I believed were holding me back. I was seen as an epitome of prudence but also of aloofness. I suspect now that I may have deliberately set out to discover the faults of others, in the process preventing myself from seeing my own flaws, like a person blind to his own shadow.

A person needs to act his age; but I refrained from acting like a young man, or rather I was prevented, for reasons unknown to me. No one had ever drawn the blade of interdiction in my face, nor had my ear ever been pinched in punishment, yet I did not understand what it meant to be a child or a boy. I played a role that was odd for my age throughout my life, whose rhythm was inconsistent with that of others’ lives, and I have known no final harbor in which to come to rest.

True, I have been described as proud and even self-important, but I was never arrogant or impertinent, even though I had both qualities in some measure, because of the ideological vanity that had spread across Iraq throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The result of that in Iraq was the emergence of a nebulous violence that would later serve the undercurrent of war, of which I have witnessed three, not to mention civil wars.

Thus, whenever I recall the path of my life I find it to be an interrupted stream woven by the events of my life, following an upward curve that never reversed direction. To this path I attribute everything in my writing and professional careers, which can be thought of as two mirrors sitting opposite one another, reflecting off everything forming on their surfaces. All this has unfolded against a backdrop of willful isolation and dutiful work. It is safe to say that work that does not seek out perfection, in a spirit of perseverance and determination, is fruitless.

I took to feigning conformity from an early age. It was futile to explicitly oppose prevailing norms, but I was not convinced of their worth. They did not satisfy my desire to live a certain kind of life, which blossomed and opened up to the world year after year. Despite this, I did not overreach in either direction. I continued to draw the attention of my family, which accepted my role begrudgingly in the beginning, and continued to be suspicious of it for thirty years more thereafter. My work later started generating financial, moral, and social rewards for the family, whose suspicions were dispelled when I began sending them money from outside of Iraq in the beginning of the 1990s. Buying them properties and farms, I offered them security in a society fatally struck by poverty. With genuine volition, I gave my family whatever they needed and deserved, without asking favors or gratitude in return, driven by a sense of moral obligation and paternal responsibility. I was never forced, nor was I ever requested, to do so. I attribute the doubts regarding the value of my work to the strict way in which I have resisted any extraneous temptations that would have hindered me from continuing my cultural quest. But I realize that my traditional family ultimately perceived their own image through the mirror of life at large, not through the lens of the difficult wager I had imposed upon them and myself.

It was not any naïve sense of belonging to my family that drove me to offer it protection in one of the toughest periods in Iraq’s history—the 1990s and what came after, with the fallout from war, the embargo, the occupation, and civil war—it was my honest sense of ethical duty. However, being duty-bound did not mean I was a coldhearted creature. Many times, when their letters reached me in Libya, I was tormented by sorrow for my children. I worried, panicked, and lost all ability to sleep as they blundered through their adolescence. And when all news of them was cut off during the US-led invasion of Iraq, I wasted like eroded soil before a mudslide. I could not believe they had survived it until the noon of Friday, September 1, 2003, when I arrived at the family home, and found them alive and well, each and every one.

A crippling fear for my family returned to me during the fighting between Kurdish forces and the Islamic State group, starting in the summer of 2014. The blitz resulted in their displacement, when the Kurdish factions destroyed our farm and our homes, and extricated our deep roots from that land. Ultimately, my own success also depended on protecting them. Yet when I consider my obsessive fear for them against my weak direct paternal instinct, I feel no confusion. To me, no matter how many experiences I have undergone, no matter what ideas and relationships I have experienced and cultivated, my paternal role has always transcended overt sentimentality, and I have always maintained what I believe is necessary distance between the roles of children and parents.

I began discovering the boundaries of the world around me, putting together its scattered puzzle pieces, beginning with the aftershocks of the Kirkuk massacres in 1959. The Communists had mutilated and dragged the body of the man whose land my family farmed. A Turkmen named Qassim Beik al-Naftji, they had accused him of being a ‘feudal lord.’ We had played in the farms his children had inherited, and used to pinch beetroots from the women working that land. We would hide them under our clothes, and roast them at night in the tandoor oven, jumping around the barbecued juicy vegetables.

Fate ordained that I would later buy a plot of those lands in the second half of the 1990s, when it was put up for sale. I turned it into the large farm I had always dreamt of having. I made the purchase when I was still teaching in Libya.

In the 1980s, those who were murdered in Kirkuk were commemorated as martyrs, and statues of them were erected in public squares. Before that, the existence of Iraq’s monarchs had been hidden from my generation, because they had represented the ancien regime. I had learned one of them was named Ghazi from the packaging of the golden cigarettes that bore his name. They were rare and we found them only by accident, discarded on the side of the road that straddled our village. I later learned that the royal entourage in Baghdad had been massacred in the most brutal manner a year earlier, with some of its members and other senior government officials dragged dead across the streets, including the prince regent, Abd al-Ilah, and the prime minister, Nuri al-Sa‘id, while King Faisal II was murdered in his palace. Subsequent regimes in Iraq painted the monarchy period with an extremely negative brush.

A dark image of the monarchy period formed in my mind, thanks to the hatred-drenched words I read in textbooks when I was a student. I saw Abd al-Karim Qassim as a rash general—I had seen in old school books a photograph of him as a bareheaded officer with prominent, protruding features. He had the air of someone who was so strict that he appeared almost repulsive. I learned later that the man was a stoic, austere character who had been manipulated by Iraq’s rival forces and pulled in different directions to the point that he appeared erratic, like a drunk driving through a minefield. Sawt al-‘Arab Radio in Cairo, instructed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, hammered through Qassim’s image as dictator, calling him Qasim al-‘Iraq, ‘Divider of Iraq.’ Thirty years later, when I lived in North Africa and then the Gulf, it was this Nasserist-cultivated image of him that would come to my mind whenever he was mentioned.

Of the Arab defeat in the Six Day War with Israel in 1967, I can only remember the characterization made by my friend, Sa‘id. We were in a wheat field and a pack of grouse flew over, blocking part of the sun. He said that fleets of Israeli planes on sorties over Egypt had blocked the sun just like those birds had done, and that symbolic image stuck in my mind ever since. I did not know much about Palestine, except for bits of information I received about some random events. One of these was the arrival of the Feda’yeen, Palestinian freedom fighters, to our village. They were in camouflage, and wore kufiyah scarves around their necks. The men were collecting donations for the cause of liberating the Holy Land, and were met with magnanimity wherever they went, especially from the women, who even donated some of their jewelry. The Feda’yeen were bearded young men. I remember them standing timidly outside our home. We would gather around them, our curiosity and fear of missing out aroused by the brown camouflage patterns of their uniforms, their scarves, and their boots. I also remember the image of the Algerian freedom fighter Djamila Bouhired. Her palm-sized portrait hung from a wall in our house beside a larger portrait of the Imam ‘Ali bin Abi Taleb holding Zulfiqar, his split-bladed sword, with his bushy beard, dreamy eyes, and large turban.

Our village stood one to the west of Kirkuk. After it was razed, the site became a suburb of the city. The personal status record shows that my family’s roots there dated back to the Ottoman period. We were among the Arabs who were native to the city. Localities like Hawija and Al-Riad, and the villages that surround them, were centers of Arab presence in Kirkuk, while ethnic Turkmen were concentrated in Tuz Khurmatu, Taza Khurmatu and adjacent towns. Kurds tended to live in Chamchamal and Shawan in the east and the north, towards Sulaymaniyah and Erbil.

As the years went by, these communities mingled and intermarried, and formed bonds of shared kinship, language, and interests. The people of the city are thus a blend of the three ethnicities, as well as Assyrian-Chaldeans. The sizes of these communities varied in size over time according to levels of migration and displacement. Size was not important until the issue was deliberately brought to the fore in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Thereafter, with the intent of forcing an ethnic identity upon the city, data on demographics was deliberately suppressed. The matter became subject to manipulation and exaggeration because of the political rivalry over the right of each community to claim the city as its own, despite its long-standing diversity that dates back to the early days of ancient Iraqi civilizations.

The policy of forcibly Arabizing Kirkuk began in the 1970s. It brought fear to the Kurdish and Turkmen communities, and resentment among the native Arabs in the city. Large numbers of Arab folks were brought in from central and southern Iraq to settle in Kirkuk and its suburbs, and in some areas, they were even made to supplant the native communities.

When nationalist sentiment spread among the Kurdish factions, they considered Kirkuk to be theirs. Their bid to impose a Kurdish identity on the city attracted large numbers of Kurds into Kirkuk following the US-led invasion in 2003. The Turkmen community became frightened of the prospect of the effacement of the Turkmen identity of the city. After all, the Turkmen population had long formed the core component of the city. For their part, the Arab community rejected the attempt at Takrid, the ‘Kurdification’ of Kirkuk, while at the same time not claiming it to be an Arab city. People alien to Kirkuk were settled there, and natives were banished, creating a kind of social chaos that erased its diverse character. Both Arab and Kurdish authorities pressed ethnic policies, but the backdrop of the ostensibly nationalist rivalry over the city was a struggle for power and wealth, as well as Kirkuk’s identity. Revisionism and fabrication have been widely used to such ends.

Many perceive Kirkuk from the lens of frenzied ethnic aspirations, identitarian myths, and fabricated historical claims. They forget that cities change and evolve constantly. By the mid-1970s, Kirkuk was still celebrating its diversity, unaware that this would become an existential threat in the decades that would follow. The blending and re-formation of ethnicities and genealogies were common in the city. We had relatives who settled in Kirkuk after the Great War. Their grandchildren believed they had Turkmen origins. They neither knew nor cared to know whether or not they had Arab roots. Many Turkmen became de facto Kurds after settling in Kurdish-majority areas, and many Kurds became Arabs or Turkmen, learning Arabic or Turkish through coexistence, intermarriage, and blending. This is not surprising because religious, sectarian, ethnic, and linguistic shifts are heavily influenced by the cultural context of the individual, family, or clan, and in the span of a few generations, it is possible for one community to melt into another.

Kirkuk was a model of pluralism and harmony. The question of identity was not on anyone’s mind, and I personally had never been aware of the ethnic and religious backgrounds of many of my companions in my youth. However, I did not survive the aftermath unscathed when all of this changed after the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. When I set out to write this biography, which I wanted to be a confession rather than a rationalization, and as I recalled part of my life in Kirkuk, I found that I was actually aware of the ethnicities and perhaps even religious identities of my friends. While I have only mentioned these affiliations for the sake of elucidation, without any ideological undertone, I feared that omitting this information would be to obscure the rich diversity of Kirkuk and its special cultural character.

Indeed, I am narrating to an audience most of whom probably did not know that back in the 1970s, identifying a person by their ethnicity, religion, or sect was rather offensive. Furthermore, I have started to feel that the moral right to claim a stake of it requires me to highlight diversity in my cherished city, lest I become a false witness by skirting the facts, although they carry no preferential value in my thoughts and the thoughts of the people I knew in Kirkuk. There is a bigger truth that needs to be stated here. Decade after decade, a contradiction grew in me, the same contradiction that has sliced through my country’s identity. The Iraqis have failed to heal such cracks, and soon, I found Iraq to be too narrow and stifling for my dreams. As tyrants came to govern Iraq with the rule of mobs, inflicting incessant harm upon the country, a fantastical image of Iraq took form in my mind of Mesopotamia, a land as old as time itself, a land that has inherited the civilizations of Sumer, Babel, and Assyria.

It would be a stroke of blind denial to not admit that this dissonance left its mark on my character, which followed no fixed standard. I wavered between an Iraq swept by waves of violence, intolerance, tyranny, division, and insularity, the result of the social, political, and sectarian unrest a part of which I have witnessed myself on the one hand. On the other hand was an Iraq with a golden lineage that can be traced back to the dawn of civilization which it helped found, incubate, and develop, before occupying a prominent position among the nations of the world. But there followed both pathological inflations, and then pathological deflations, of the substance of that identity. Its luster soon faded in my consciousness, replaced by bitterness and frustration over a dismal reality: in the end, Iraqis have failed to forge an identity for a nation respected among others. Yet Iraqis have never stopped claiming things were otherwise.

In my reckoning, the momentous events that transpired in Iraq were never absorbed into one shared and cohesive national identity. None of the historical and cultural discourses of Iraq became dominant enough to shape a unified national narrative that would capture the collective imagination of the nation. Rather, because of their sheer number and contradictions, the various ideologies undermined each other, scattered among the ethnicities and religious communities of Iraq. This is unlike the case, for example, in neighboring Turkey and Iran. In the former, the militaristic legacy had a big role in molding its identity. In the latter, its literary heritage shaped the broad features of its identity. Perhaps this is why fissures materialized in Iraq, in the absence of major moral deterrents that would have prevented ethnic and sectarian extremism from commandeering the country. And Kirkuk was not spared from this fate.

2. He died without ever embracing me, my exceptional father

My father died in the spring of 1965. Little about that event was imprinted in my memory, except for the crowd of men who walked in his funeral procession before interring him in a graveyard adjacent to our home. My father did not make me feel warm and safe, and I inherited his characteristics, reincarnating his role with my own children.

He died at the age of seventy. I was eight. His image in my memory is now a faded, distant mirage. He was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century in Kirkuk. A wide age gap separated us, and I did not become part of his world that was full of other things more important than me. He was frequently preoccupied with a wooden radio, often tuning in to London Radio. What remains with me of that memory is the church-like chimes of Big Ben, and a broadcaster on Iraqi Radio who had a coarse voice, proclaiming that America is the enemy of peoples. Little did I know then that America would occupy my country, some forty years later.

My father embodied our family’s mythology. His image, hidden in the dark corners of my reminiscence, holds that he was a self-made man, slender, tall, silent, and stoic. He had me with the last of his wives, whom he had ‘won’ by exchanging his eldest daughter for her. This type of ‘marriage,’ based on trading humans, is called ash-Shighar marriage. It is prohibited in Islam, denounced by the Prophet himself, but it is common in the region where I lived. Thus my mother was younger than some of my sisters, and wherever one looks in the history of different peoples, one consistently finds a strong desire for young women. I don’t have any idea about the kind of relationship my father and mother had, but after his death, his influence disappeared from our lives, and she replaced him.

His portrait, which used to hang from a wall in the landing, showed a pale man. It was a retouched copy of an image we had found in his passport to Mecca, issued in 1957, the year of my birth. It was burned along with my house in the spring of 2015. I imagine that the photographer had tried to reproduce the image to his liking, but the colors almost completely faded with time. In the image, a green brush-stroke had covered his left cheek, and a white stubble had grown from his chin. His head was covered with the Shemagh headdress above two mysterious, piercing eyes that carried a look of affection, though vague and mysterious to me. My father never touched my cheeks tenderly. He never hugged me, or showed me any affection. I may have become, nay, I am, a shadow of him.

I was told that my father had only one brother. This older brother had a weaker constitution. He received the lion’s share of their father’s inheritance, which consisted of forty Ottoman gold liras hidden in a camel’s neck. The older brother kept half of them secretly, and split the other half with my father. I was told that the man traded briefly in tobacco, and then in silver-handled daggers. He may have dealt in pre-WWI muskets as well, and he gathered a small fortune in the process. He bought land in a village somewhere, and his wealth grew steadily, allowing him to acquire more land and property. The man was both feared and fearless, but he was murdered by one of my brothers. My father took the family and fled to another region, running away from the ensuing tribal quest for vendetta that haunted us for nearly half a century after, before we were forced to accept the conditions of tribal justice.

A Kurdish youth named Al-Sha‘ali served my father and herded his cattle, and was the inspiration for a character in the stories I wrote and published in my book Rimal al-Layl (The Sands of the Night). The stories told by members of my family had portrayed my father as a combination of a patriarch and a tyrant, but he died a little-known stranger in a place far from where he had lived and built his family. The myths about my father, who became absent even before I had come to terms with his existence, became more elaborate as I grew up. His noble qualities and his endurance were inflated and exaggerated, and each time we wanted to avoid facing the moment of truth, we reminisced on fantasies, looking for a lost sense of balance. During my absence from my family outside Iraq, many other myths about my father were woven, and questioning them became an act of blasphemy, despite the fact that I had never heard them before. What I know is that my family had no written history, but only fragments of stories that do not hold up to scrutiny to form a coherent truth. The matter interested no one in the family before me, and I was not willing to fabricate a genealogy in order to act as a backdrop for my biography. I’m a stubborn man who is at peace with his principles at the end of the day. It is unwise for everyone to belong to immortal dynasties, and I never felt the need to belong to one.

My father did not seek to establish and highlight his lineage, and I emulated him in that respect. However, when I taught classical literature at Qatar University in the fall of 1999, I jokingly suggested otherwise to a student who had submitted a research paper comparing the poets Al-Mutanabbi and Abu Firas al-Hamdani. Her paper contained a preference for Abu Firas, considering him a victim of Al-Mutanabbi, to the extent that she enclosed with the paper a sketch of Abu Firas, bound and behind bars, soliloquizing with a dove beside him. I told her that I preferred Al-Mutanabbi, even though I was a ‘descendant’ of Abu Firas. The news spread like wildfire, and my students urged me to teach them about the poems of my supposed great-grandfather, whom they fancied a knight-poet. But I was not interested in Abu Firas’s literature, and I spoke about him as a man who had often plotted against Al-Mutanabbi, and who had fashioned an image of himself as a prisoner of war who had no one to talk to about his woes except his feathered companion. It was his status as a knight and emir that had made him famous.

In later decades, my family became obsessed with its tribal lineage. Perhaps my son Walid should have been named Firas so that his father could better identify with his great ancestors, delusional as that may have been. In one of my visits to Iraq after 2003, a genealogist came to see me after my long absence. He was wearing new robes, his face plump from the banquets he had attended. He had been travelling around Iraq, from Basra to Mosul, visiting the Hamdan tribes, and preparing a book on their ancestry. I decided to tease him, tribalism and sectarianism now the new adopted identity of the Iraqis. I asked him, How can you, through only orally transmitted tales, connect me to a person who lived more than a thousand years ago? Can an orally established genealogy be trustworthy, if genealogy itself can be trusted at all?

He looked extremely disappointed. He was a treasure trove of tribal lore after all, and the chronicler of the tribe’s identity. He nearly choked in our lounge that overlooked our tree-lined yard. I hastened to reassure him, telling him not to forget to add the names of my grandchildren to the family tree, with all its branches and leaves, for our men had grown in number in the new century. His tree did not include any of the women of the family, as if they were little more than ashes blown away by the storms of the eons.

In Libya, in the mid-1990s, a friend from university from the Shi‘a Muslim family of Al-Najjar in Najaf visited me. He was an expert on Ottoman history. While we chatted about the relationship between minorities and colonialism, he inquired about my tribe, and I replied that I was a Hamdani. That means you are a Shi‘a, he said immediately. The Hamdanid state was Shi‘a, he added, happy that the conversation was now steered into his expertise. When I fact-checked that claim later, I found it to be true, but I had not known it before. I did not know because I never read history with such a sectarian lens.

According to the sociologist Ali al-Wardi, the phenomenon of Sunni or Shi‘a conversion had specific social and historical contexts. For example, when a tribe migrated to the home of another tribe that professed a different sect, it usually converted within two or three generations to their sect, through what he called ‘blending.’ Here, some degree of sectarian caricature is necessary: Some in this overtly sectarian time and age may speculate, unlikely as their conclusion may be, that the collapse of the allegedly Shi‘a Hamdanid state in tenth-century Mosul, Aleppo, and environs, could have prompted its people to flee south to Shi‘a regions and retain their sectarian identity. There is no evidence any tribe migrated, however, and those who remained or settled in northern Iraq could have converted to Sunni Islam, assuming they were not already Sunni, as demanded by the communities around them. This may be why we see members of the same tribe having different denominations, as has been the case with most Iraqi tribes that have intermingled since ancient times. Historical evidence suggests that the Hamdanid state had a diverse tapestry of religious communities and ethnicities, where no sect or people prevailed over the other, to such a point that communities such as the Aramaeans and Syriacs were able to preserve their languages and religious beliefs under its reign. At any rate, it seems that the peoples of that state were better off than their descendants today.

I had not become aware of these wretched sectarian filters, which were once little more than social norms devoid of preferentialism in my opinion, until I enrolled at the University of Basra, when I was around twenty years old. Some of my dorm mates, after participating in a Shi‘a ‘Ashoura holiday event, noticed that I was sitting quietly. I was not taking part in the mourning rituals related to the medieval tragedy commemorated on that day. They distanced themselves from me, as though I was one of the murderers of Al-Hussein. They told me that I must be Sunni since I was not participating, and explained to me their argument very explicitly. Thus I was labelled a Sunni. I never accepted the label though, mocking it instead. In my mind, the only label that ever carried weight was citizenship. This firm conviction has stayed with me to this day.

My lack of awareness of sectarian identity also results from the fact that my family assigned no importance to sectarian and ethnic identities. In 2012, three and a half decades after the Ashoura incident, a PhD thesis titled "Dr. Abdullah Ibrahim’s Critical Discourse: A Study in Methodological Foundations" was discussed at the same institution, the University of Basra. Its author concluded that I had neglected in my critical studies the entirety of Shi‘a narrative heritage, as though there were other sectarian narratives I had concerned myself with in my Encyclopedia of Arab Narrative and in all my other books!

I have rarely felt that I belonged to a certain sect. Whenever I was drawn into a debate in which this issue was raised, I always spoke of an Islam without sects. I believe that my father and forebears had similar ideas, and did not buy into the delusions of tribal and sectarian affiliations. This position differs from what I have seen with the latter generations in our family. I believe in natural rather than ideological affiliations, and it is this belief that has led me to pursue the project of critiquing ‘centricities,’ be they religious, ethnic, or cultural. I have written on how centricities are created based on deceptive narratives. I proposed deconstructing such centricities because they tamper with the natural affiliations of individuals who are forced into an ethnic, religious, or cultural box as a result.

3. An infant without the chance to be weaned

My mother’s influence on me began when my father was still alive. But when she developed cancer after his death, a deep wound formed in my psyche that never healed. By the time she died years later, I had come to terms with that wound, to the extent that I had been waiting for her to pass on. She had turned into a pile of bones. Her face had withered away, and her once bright mouth had turned into a hollow cavity, full of holes and furrows. Her slow death was a torture we trained ourselves to endure and accept as the days went by. No one was able to slow the relentless growth of her disease, triggered by a traditional healer’s medical error, and it consumed her.

It all began with a cow. Our family had little interest in raising animals. We had kept only one cow for our breakfast milk. But it was a cow that played a tragic role in our family, causing the deaths of both my father and my mother. One spring afternoon, my father went to the barn to help our cow, who was known for having difficulties in labor. During the ordeal of her labor, my father fainted and died alone, without anyone noticing. To this day, I don’t know whether the cow had kicked him or not. He was found dead next to a newborn calf.

Three years later, a calf kicked my mother in her mouth with its hind legs, and her upper gums were subsequently swollen. It is possible this was the same calf that my father’s death had brought into life. In the evening, her face became swollen, and her lips turned a blue color. The next morning, she rushed to Kirkuk seeking treatment. There, she received a deadly remedy: an ointment from a barber who was known to work both as a dentist and as a nurse, working out of the Kurdish Souk, the traditional market. Later I saw that tall slender man frequently, whenever I roamed around the citadel in Kirkuk or went into that market. He wore a stained white robe, and I still believe him the cause of my mother’s death. His name was Shakkur Barbar. According to one urban legend, he had treated Abd al-Karim Qassim from chronic bleeding before Qassim led the coup of 1958 against the monarchy, establishing the republic.

My mother had made a mistake. But she was alone and helpless, with no one to support her. Instead of going to a doctor, she went to a quack, who she falsely believed could treat all ailments. In the evening, she returned with her face behind wraps. Her front teeth were removed, and her mouth was coated with a dark-brown antiseptic liquid; her smile would henceforth disappear forever. Almost overnight, my mother had become an old crone.

Shortly after father passed away, my mother extended her wings over us. She tried to organize our life, and we grew ever more attached to her. I remember how every other week, she would go to the city and return, like a fruit-bearing tree, struggling to carry a sack full of walnuts, raisins, dates stuffed with pistachios, and bags of salted nuts. She would place them in a wooden chest, and none of us dared to take even a single nut unless we were all gathered around her, in what became a family ritual. At night she would sit in the middle by the light of a lamp, as if we were a group of priests in a cave. She would mix the treats and snacks she had brought into handfuls and then hand them out. We spent chunks of our evenings in that happy gathering, enjoying the delicacies that were a rarity in our village. My mother was trying to raise us to be strong after my father’s death. She imparted on me the role I would thereafter seek to undertake to the bitter end, that of the man of the house; and she often would tell me: You are big, my little one.

Within a month, my mother’s cancer had swallowed a slice of her upper lip, exposing her gums. The enamel of her teeth rotted, and the necrosis spread around her mouth. Her mouth had bled profusely on the day she was injured. When the barber started tampering with her wounds, every time she returned for treatment, her face became even more swollen.

Eventually, I accompanied her to a real doctor at the Republican Hospital in Kirkuk. She was kept away from me for days on end, as I was prevented from visiting her. One day, I decided to try my luck. I waited from dawn outside the black, wrought iron gate of the hospital. When it opened in the early morning, I went inside with the villagers, and finally met my mother. She embraced me like she was bidding me farewell. She smelled my neck, my shoulders, and my hands, her tears flowing down my face. By noon, a nurse took me to the doctor’s office, where I was told my mother had cancer. The doctor told me: Take your mother, she cannot be cured! But I did not understand until after she died.

We left the hospital, darkness descending on my heart. She walked behind me carrying a sack containing her clothes, and I felt we were about to lose each other forever. Trips to the city with my mother would no longer be possible, and the warmth she had given me would soon fade away. I felt as if all the lights had been suddenly extinguished. At night, I drowned in my nightmares, seeing myself naked, alone, and lost, my only shield torn. I was about ten years old. That night, we deliberated about her condition, and decided to seek treatment for her in Baghdad. In the morning, I accompanied her to the capital in an old German-made coach that took a whole day to reach the capital.

We arrived in the city at sunset. I admitted her into an old Ottoman-era hospital, located on part of the lot where the Medical City was built in the district of Bab al-Moatham. It was called Al-Majidiyah, named after an Ottoman sultan. The building looked grim, and rain had swept all vestiges of its erstwhile luster. Its windows were blocked by creeping trees. The tiles in its wards were cracked and crooked. My mother remained a whole year in one of these wards, fighting back her intractable disease. With each journey from Kirkuk to the hospital in Baghdad, my hopes for my mother’s recovery faded more and more. After every visit, I felt hopeless, and it was difficult to convey my mother’s state to my sister and brother. As days went by, more portions of her face were lost to the disease, and all I could do was bear witness to her withering and the retreat of her smile. On one of my visits, a nurse took me to see her doctor. He said he had decided to discharge my mother from the hospital because there was no treatment for her condition. I took her home. By now, we had lost any hope of getting her cured through modern medicine. We pinned our hopes on superstition instead.

A few months later, we heard of a shrine in Mandali along the border of Iran. There a spring of murky water nearby would hopefully be able to cure what all the doctors of Baghdad were helpless to treat. I took her there, unsure of anything. We set off from Kirkuk in the morning, passing through Tuz Khurmatu, Al-Azim, and Al-Khalis, then took a turn east into Baqubah and a number of small towns surrounded by vast groves. Shortly before sunset, we arrived in Mandali, a hamlet set against rows and rows of tall palm trees. We alighted on the outskirts of the village. I stood confused next to my collapsing mother, looking for a car to take us to the shrine, which was located some distance into the east.

Finally, we found the shrine on a hill next to a dark swamp that was teeming with muddied bodies. As we looked for an empty spot, we saw women filling copper bowls with black mud, then proceeding to smear it on their grubby bodies. Others were leaning on the shrine’s wall, their legs, arms, and chests covered with black grease, while men submerged themselves to the neck in the foul-smelling pond. My mother found other women who faced a similar fate. We climbed down to the swamp day and night during our stay. She would smudge her mouth and face with the mud, as I stood observing, vacillating between hope and despair.

Our desperate travels between Kirkuk and Mandali lasted months, during which my mother’s condition worsened. She was transformed into a shadow of the woman she once was. She could no longer express her emotions and soon enough, she became so emaciated that she was unable to speak. My mother’s mouth had disappeared. Her tongue swelled enormously, and she spoke in hand gestures. Squeezing my hands was her only way to communicate her affection. Tears rarely left her confused eyes, which had a gaze of deep sorrow but also a resolve to depart this world forever. I brought home a skeleton wrapped in a black shroud, most of its face now gone, save for her big black eyes. My sister Aisha fed her mashed foods, as she had no teeth to chew. We would lay her on her back, and discharge the fluids from her body through an incision that rotted more every day. Relatives stopped visiting us. We were helpless and beaten. On those countless gray nights, we were mournful and despondent, having accepted her slow demise and gradual withdrawal from our life, waiting for her death as a foregone conclusion. And it came on the first day of 1970.

Her departure forced me to face my fate, which I had prepared myself to do during those times I spent by her side. Now I faced the moment of truth, but more profoundly, the moment of fear and melancholy. I understood that she was gone, leaving me like an infant without the chance to be weaned from his mother, like the medieval poet Abu al-Alaa al-Ma‘arri had described the parting with his mother. Only a small number of people inhabited my childhood and youth. My mother was the most important character, my father’s role secondary. As years went by, Mother’s share of my attention continued to grow at the expense of father’s. I was eight when my father died, but I never felt orphaned until I was thirteen, when Mother’s life slipped from between my hands.

Afterwards, I developed a reputation for someone who extolled his mother’s qualities excessively. I tried to find strength and wisdom in them, and I recognized that they were emotional in nature. She had given me a lot of affection when I was a child, in a family and village atmosphere that eschewed the display of emotions, and it was exactly what I needed. However, this need remained with me. I never felt emotionally satisfied by any woman other than my mother. My feelings still took me to that place that had marked my childhood. All women were passersby in my life, stopping a little in my barren landscape, then quickly departing, leaving behind ethereal, intangible traces in their wake.

I woke up every morning, come the rain, come the dew, come the fog, or come the sweltering summer heat, to gaze at the cemetery opposite our home. That graveyard had outlived, or rather, swallowed generations of my ancestors, their tombstones rising from the foggy dawn like ancient pyramids. The cemetery comprised long rows of sand mounds laid side by side, surrounding a fenced spiral shrine and one grave atop which stood a wooden pillar. On that column, green cloths were hung, and from these, shepherds, pregnant women, and sterile women would cut out pieces to make wristbands or amulets for their children. In the corner were laid traps for foxes and rabbits, but the animals caught in them were made sacrosanct and no one dared touch them. For twenty years, nothing was removed from the shrine except the green cloths used for those seeking blessing and intercession. Widows, elderly women, and women who had grown sick of waiting came here. They hung green strips, and prayed and pleaded at the shrine. The green cloths gradually became shredded scraps.

I often watched the women pleading with God to return their husbands or children safe from the ‘War of the North’, fought between the government and Kurdish separatists. It was in this cemetery that I heard for the first time the name Mullah Mustafa Barzani. Two of my uncles were dragged to that war. On their leave back home, they told me stories of the terrible mountain battles.

On religious holidays, the cemetery would swell with the families of the dead. Women, clad in black, crowded its premises, their funerary clothes bestowing a sense of dignity on their weeping, and in the light of dawn they often appeared like a flock of solemn crows. As the sun rose, children raided the cemetery in brightly-colored clothes, prancing and hopping, and carrying Eid sweets. As soon as the fog cleared, the shrine’s outline would emerge clearly, surrounded by the graveyard that crawled towards our house year after year, until it surrounded it, and their walls connected. The weeping would make way for greetings and kisses, because when the sun rose sadness fled. The dead were forgotten at that point, and a momentary joy rolled in.

We bade father farewell in that cemetery. After his death, I would take a copy of the Quran and go to his grave on the Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha holidays with my mother, filled with a sense of pride, as I was one of the few people able to decipher the difficult words between the Holy Book’s covers. I would boastfully read from the short suras, but I remember myself being greatly intimidated by the long chapters at the start of the Quran. I never felt weak, however, before the shrine. I did not seek blessing from the shrine or its tattered ribbons. Something hidden deep inside me always told me that bestowing sanctity on cloth was tradition, not religion, but I paid the price for that sort of intuition early on.

I often went to the shrine to play with the animal traps. I used my hands and feet to pry open their rusty jaws, holding them open with a stick and preparing them for my imaginary game. I would free the jaw with the tip of the stick, and the trap would shut briskly on itself, making a loud noise and jumping up in the air before landing on its face, upside down, free of any prey. Once, I got distracted while playing this dangerous game, and the upper jaw caught my fingers and nearly sliced them off. The pain stayed with me for weeks, and to my mother, this was punishment for ‘desecrating’ the shrine. I stopped playing in its yard. After my mother fell ill, I stopped reading the short suras of the Quran, and never again in that cemetery. I imagined, for a long time, that the cemetery was an extension of our house. From behind the wall, and across the yard, the cluster of graves circumventing the shrine appeared as though crawling towards us, and in the end, we buried our dead in the part adjacent to the house.

It was our well that attracted the graves. All the wells were on the other side of the village, and those who came to bury their dead had to split into two groups, one that drew the water from the well to wash the corpse, and another that dug the grave. I often found them to be in a hurry, swarming and scrambling to wash the dead, while shooing us children away like we were irksome bugs. Half an hour into that ritual, one would hear the sheikh briefing the dead on what awaited them in the grave. Once the angels came, the dead person had to acknowledge before them that the deity he worshipped was Allah, that Mohammad was his prophet, Islam his religion, the Quran his book, and the Kaaba in Mecca the direction he faced when he prayed in life. The funeral prayer ensued, and we would scramble to find a place to stand behind the men in their shifting rows, dust-covered and scruffy, afraid to be told off. The throngs then disbanded, and we stood witness to the fresh new grave in the soft, moist-smelling earth. The cycle repeated, and new graves appeared, one after the other.

Our house was soon surrounded by graves and by the dead in them. Decades later, our entire village was razed to the ground. In the early 1980s, its lands were confiscated in the name of Arabization. After the US invasion, the Kurds retook control of the village, and claimed it as part of Kurdistan.

As for me, the only thing connecting me to the village had been my mother.

4. A rabid dog mauls me, drenching me in blood

It was probably my mother who had persuaded my father to allow me to enroll in school. I was her eldest son, the boy who survived after four male newborns died of mysterious causes. I had survived thanks to her votive offerings, I was told when I was a child. The age difference between me and my older and only sister was significant. She was my mother’s first child, and all those who came after her had died, except me. This gave my life a special importance, the blessed son who preserved Father’s name through Mother.

One day in the early fall of 1963, I joined a handful of students at a ‘clay school’ in the village of Al-Murrah. On the following day, my mother sent me to a house at the edge of our village to an older student to tutor me. But as soon as I left his home, I was attacked by their dog. The animal cornered me, then charged, sinking its teeth into my abdomen. I was covered in blood. I was rushed back home to be looked after. My mother then decided to put an early end to my first school stint, which had lasted only a day.

The next year, I resumed studying in Kirkuk, having moved to the house of a half-brother I had from a different mother (hereafter referred to simply as ‘brother’). I do not know the circumstances that led my mother to take the risk and send me to school in the city. All I remember are the difficulties I had wearing trousers: I was turned into a semi-civilized boy when I was made to wear this long black sack of thick fabric that covered my legs from the toes to the abdomen, splitting at the top of my legs, like a burial shroud. I ridiculed myself, and felt ashamed by the unfortunate fate I had come to. My dishdasha had protected me and signaled my firm belonging to the village. But that fall, I felt as if it was defiled as I sought to reconcile myself with the dressing habits of the city folk. It was as if I had been laid bare or my virginity had been violated. The school was located in the Turkmen Al-Musalla district. There, my brother had rented a two-bedroom house with another family. My brother and I lived in one room, and the other family in the second room.

Our neighbor had a little blonde girl who was in my class. She kept a furry gazelle, which I liked to pet and cuddle, spending afternoons playing with the dovish creature and offering it water and treats. That is, until the neighbor asked me to stop ‘pestering’ her gazelle. I was sad, and felt my world was shattered for a few days for being barred from playing with my animal friend. I pined for it, but also felt afraid and helpless. The gazelle now looked at me with big confused eyes, a rope strapped to its gentle neck.

I struggled to overcome my isolation, being an Arab surrounded by kids whose language I did not speak. Most of the people of the city spoke Turkmen, so I stood out among my peers who did not allow me into their world. I was not given permission to fit in, so I retreated and secluded myself. The fair-skinned Turkmen pupils saw me as an alien from the far-off countryside. In the world of children, spite overlaps with exclusion and rejection.

My brother then moved to a house on the other side of the city, in the Qoriyat district. I was sad to part with the gazelle, but I was pleased to be free from my persecution at school. However, my brother kept me in the same school, in spite of the distance. I was young, and I had nothing in particular that made me feel confident. Then a problem emerged that stopped my second school stint short, once again.

On the walk to school, I had to cross the Khasa River that bisects the city of Kirkuk. Stray dogs prowled on both banks of the river, which flooded during the winter, but I kept going every day. As soon as I left home, I would encounter teams of horses in a square filled with black carriages, ready to be hired. I would pass through As-Siba', ‘Lions Square,’ which was straddled by white stone lion statues. I was fascinated by the redolent red roses in the square, and would dodge guards to pick them from behind the fence, carrying them and their scent with me. I would walk past the Workers Club building, and cross the thoroughfare that led to Baghdad, before reaching the ‘no man’s land’ by the riverside, an area littered with rubbish, ruins, and packs of dogs. I would discard my roses, hang my bag around my neck, and search for the road to the other bank between the piles of waste. By then, my excitement and boastfulness would have died down. I would cross the river avoiding the spotted dogs and their fat puppies that watched me with suspicion and vigilance, before snarling, then whining, then yawning, then stretching and barking. They reminded me of that dog that mauled me the year before, though its image in my memory was hazy by this time.

My mother brought me back to the village every weekend, stopping first at the home of an elderly relative in the Kurdish district of Shorja, east of Kirkuk. A long time ago, the elderly woman rented a small home adjoining a Kurdish family’s house. When the owner and his wife died, she took it upon herself to raise their children, and became their surrogate mother. One day I overheard them discussing something odd: I was not just in danger from the flooding and the stray dogs—the mere mention of which triggered the memory of my ordeal with the dog that mauled me a year earlier—but was also at risk of another kind of ‘assault’ from