by Sinan Antoon
“Who are the people denied the right to vote?” she asked.
“The people in Falluja, for example,” I replied.
After the article was published, a reader wrote a comment on the newspaper’s website agreeing with me. But the other ten or so comments condemned what I had said or described me as ungrateful. The funniest of them was from a retiree who described himself as a veteran: “It may be a sign of the moral degeneracy in our country that Mr. al-Baghdadi is allowed to teach in our universities, to systematically brainwash young people and to receive a salary nonetheless.”
“Melt all your sorrows and mold them into a spear and look for a strong arm to aim it at your heart.”
I missed Cambridge so I visited Ali Hadi for two days. We stayed up late drinking and chatting. Once again I was worried that we spent too much time lamenting the state of the world, while the victims had to go on living. The gods of sleep were not kind to me that night, and reading a novel by Sebald didn’t help either. Ali Hadi had a television in his guest bedroom. I turned it on in the hope that it would make my eyelids droop and save me from insomnia. Switching between channels was like rummaging through trash. I looked for the right mix of noise and light to bore me and send me to sleep. At two in the morning I settled on PBS. It was Antiques Roadshow, in which the presenter speaks to people who have brought antiques to be valued and sold. Old clocks. Pieces of furniture. Pictures. The camera came across an ordinary-looking woman in her late fifties standing proudly next to the object she was displaying.
“What do you have there, madam?”
“It’s a handmade Native American cradle. Real leather.”
“Wow, that’s really beautiful. And where did you get that from?”
“It belonged to my grandfather, who was a soldier. I inherited it from my father.”
“And how much is it worth?”
“I’ve been told it could fetch $46,000.”
“Wow, congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
It was the cradle I wanted to know more about, but the presenter moved away and the camera followed him. I turned the television off and let the darkness invade the room again … and the ghosts. In the darkness I tried to touch the cradle before the last child was removed from it and before the cradle was placed in the domain of “civilization,” where it would become a “cultural document.” Its former domain was now inhabited by ghosts. The ghost of Walter Benjamin hovered in the room, saying, “I told you, there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
You want to write a novel about me?
My heart leaped when I read this sentence in your letter, which I was very pleased to receive. I won’t hide from you the fact that I felt a certain pride, because I have long thought that my life—the parts that are past and those that are yet to come—would make an excellent novel, and even a stunning movie. But I also realize that millions of people in this world are convinced that their lives are epic tales waiting for someone to write them down. Then I had an attack of depression and that frightened off the pride, which flew away like a bird. Feeling proud apparently doesn’t suit me; it challenges the dominance that melancholia has established inside me. How could pride dare to build its nest alongside my melancholia? Of course I don’t mean that the idea in itself is the cause of my depression. Not at all. I believe, and this is neither an exaggeration nor a rhetorical conceit, that people are books (and vice versa). We are manuscripts and rough drafts of books. But in order to be completed and to be read, we have to die. Only then will we become known. Because things become known through being complete. It’s the same with people. You can only do a full autopsy on a body after death. Then you can examine all the tissues, layers, and cavities. The “archaeology of the human” can start only when the human is a corpse. So you might have to wait till the time is right, till I descend to the underworld to wander there like my ancestors, and with them too, but without coming back as I always come back. Then you can write your novel and you’ll have absolute freedom to use my real name. But there’s another problem, my friend. We are all books. Yes. But we also have different histories, different genres of writing, and different types of paper and ink, different covers, fonts, and font sizes. Now I’m writing like a scribe. Anyway, we are books, and I’m a book a part of which has been lost forever. This is what I imagine, but I also feel that it’s a tangible fact. Someone has torn up many of my pages or stolen them or hidden them or burned them. … If I knew what was written on those pieces of paper, it would be only a minor problem. But I don’t know. For years I’ve been looking for myself in myself , but I haven’t come across it yet. On the contrary, I’ve been stumbling around and falling apart. There are empty spaces and vast blanks in my head. I can’t get inside my hand and write down on it what there was, or what I think there was. Do you remember, my friend, those olden days when there were only two television channels and the transmission stopped an hour or so after midnight? It ended with the national anthem and after that what we called “the freckles” appeared—those flickering gray and white spots, all of them practicing how to pronounce the sound of the letter sheen. There are spaces in my memory and even in my life where the transmission cuts out. Sometimes even the gray and white spots disappear as well. And the shshshsh sound disappears and blackness takes over—no sounds and no colors.
An assistant professor in the political sciences department invited me to attend his class on American policy to talk about Iraq and the war. He told me that another Iraqi would also be present so that we could take part in a debate. It was a big hall with about seventy students spread around the tiered seating. In his email he told me he wanted me to speak for a quarter of an hour before answering students’ questions. I tried to speak objectively about the contradictions in the war rhetoric and the strategic objectives of the war, avoiding any delusional references to democracy. I went over the effects that economic sanctions had had on Iraqi society, and I referred to the escalating violence and the need to end the occupation as quickly as possible and hand Iraq over to the United Nations. He thanked me and said he was surprised to hear what I said about the United Nations, which he didn’t think inspired great confidence, and he asked us to go back to that point later. The other guest was Rahim, the Iraqi student who had won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Dartmouth. He had knocked on my office door one day and introduced himself. He said he had heard there was an Iraqi professor and he would like to meet me. We chatted a while and I asked him how he had won the scholarship. He said he had been working as a translator with the U.S. Army and the officer in charge had written him a letter of recommendation. When it was his turn he spoke about how his family had suffered under Saddam Hussein’s regime, which had executed one of his brothers. He said he had come from Iraq two months earlier and he was surprised by what I had said, but he understood it because I had been far away from Iraq. He said that Iraqis had been dreaming of freedom for thirty years, that America had helped them obtain it and that he appreciated the sacrifices of the American troops and thanked the American people. The students applauded him warmly. He looked at me and smiled, elated by his triumph.
Destruction also has a tablet preserved, somewhere in the netherworld. On it are written the names of everything that will be obliterated and everyone who will die. Every night I see myself flying and I read what’s written and I come back to write it down in my catalog.
I went into the classroom early as usual and put the cup of coffee I had bought on the table and my bag on the chair. I took out the textbook and the folder of corrected homework and put them on the table. I looked for the CD that came with the Arabic language book to put it in the CD player. It contained a dialogue designed to train the students to use the expressions in the lesson, in which Maha, an American of Egyptian origin, appears and speaks about her life using practical and useful sentences such as My name is …, My father works as …, My mother works as …, I’m of … origin, I live in … In came Cindy, one
of the students, who also comes early. Apparently she went to the gym straight after class because she always came in her gym clothes. She sat at the front as usual after wishing me a good morning. As always, I reminded her to use Arabic as much as possible, especially as we had learned to say sabah al-khayr. She apologized and greeted me in Arabic. I put the CD in the right place so that we could start practicing the conversation after a short dictation test I insisted on to reinforce their writing skills and consolidate the new vocabulary they had learned. The students started to drift in and I gave them their corrected assignments. Tim came up to me—a student with very short blond hair, a flat nose, and freckles on his cheeks. I was pleased to hear him say in Arabic that he had a question, an expression that was in the book with other useful expressions such as the Arabic equivalents of “How do you say X?” and “What does X mean?” which I had asked them to always use, though they could then ask the same questions in English because they were still in the first year and didn’t have the vocabulary.
He took me by surprise with a strange question: “Sir, when are we going to learn imperatives?”
“Not yet,” I replied in English. “We’re still at the early stages of the present tense and then we have the past and then the imperative. Why?”
“There are some imperatives I want to learn how to say in Arabic.”
“For example?”
“Kneel down. Stop. Put your hands up. Move back.”
I was amazed at his request, and Cindy raised her eyebrows.
“Why do you need them?” I asked.
“After I graduate this spring I’m going to join the army and go to Iraq or Afghanistan, and these phrases will be essential. I have a scholarship from the DOD.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“We’re not in the Pentagon here,” I finally said. “The book we use is for civilians and to introduce students to Arab culture.”
“Okay, sir. Could you write those phrases for me on a piece of paper?”
“No.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I was very angry. I left the class and went to wash my face in the bathroom and get my breath back. I had been growing bored with teaching Arabic even before he made this extraordinary request, but at that moment I decided I had to do whatever it took to find a job at another university, where I would teach only literature and could avoid these situations.
Did I tell you that I can hear things speaking? Yes, I can hear what they say. They know me and sometimes they call me by name and beg me to listen. Sometimes they talk like people, slowly and with a logic that’s easy to understand. But they can also groan and snarl and scream. I can hear their screams with painful clarity, and I don’t understand them. No, that’s not true. I understand them well because I know they’re suffering the same things that I’m suffering, and in many cases they can’t say what’s troubling them. They scream with all the strength, all the misery, anger, and despair they have. What do I do when I hear their constant screams? In the beginning I would block my ears with my hands, but that didn’t silence the screaming. It just made it sound a little distant. Then I felt pangs of guilt and I accused myself of narcissism. The least I could do is feel solidarity with things and scream them. Yes, scream them. That’s the right expression and you haven’t misread it. Maybe it’s me who coined it. I’ve certainly never read it anywhere before. So I decided not to ignore the screaming of the things. It’s not enough to open your heart wide. The heart isn’t enough. I opened my ears. And whenever anything, or any creature, shouted at me, I would try to calm it down. Sometimes I succeeded, and often I failed. I would add my screams to the screams of the thing. I would scream at it and it would scream at me until I collapsed from fatigue. I’ve grown used to this, and now it’s normal as far as I’m concerned . But human beings, the vast majority of whom are heartless or have deaf hearts that can’t hear what I hear, run far away from me when I take part in a screaming session. If any of them do come close to me, then they do so in order to force me to stop! They think it’s an illness and that the medical profession can cure it. But I know it’s a rare talent. Once I dreamed that everyone endowed with this talent gathered on the stage in a theater, as if they were in an orchestra. They wore smart black clothes and sat in chairs in regular rows. When I came in they all stood up, and the audience stood up and clapped warmly. I bowed to the audience, then I turned and clapped for the orchestra and motioned to them to sit down. They didn’t have any instruments or any scores in front of them. Their throats would do. All I had was the baton that I picked up to give them the signal to start. So they started. Their screams rose to the heights. They flew across the open dome of the theater to the sky, where the deaf ears of the gods are. What happens after that in the dream? Whenever one of the people screaming falls down, two men come and drag his body into the wings and a new screamer soon takes his place. Then I too collapse from exhaustion and wake up.
So which things talk to me, you might ask. All of them. A solitary piece of paper cut out of a book flying down the street. A loose pebble hurt by passersby when they tread on it. A frightened cloud escaping its fate. A head of lettuce trembling at the sight of a knife. A brick massacred by a builder with a sledgehammer. A sad statue drenched in the urine of passersby. A tree branch with its back broken. A word in a dictionary that no one uses any longer. A drop of water clinging to the mouth of the tap before it falls, and so on.
Animals also talk to me, of course. A hungry fly. A stray cat. An old donkey that’s tired of being enslaved. A goldfinch that sings to me from its cage.
Dead people, not the living. The dead call out to me. I once read a sentence Paul Klee wrote: “I live just as well with the dead as with the unborn.”
The library at Dartmouth closed its doors at 11 p.m., but there was another old building that was almost separate and that stayed open around the clock. I spent many hours there working on my dissertation. I didn’t work in my office because there I would waste time checking news websites again and again. The library was half-empty most of the time, except for a handful of students who stayed late working on papers or studying for an exam the next day. The heating in the building was an old-fashioned steam system that didn’t work very well. I often had to wear a coat indoors. On those snowy nights Abu Nuwas seemed very distant and alien. I felt tired and sleepy, of course, so I resorted to coffee. One night I went out to buy a cup of coffee from the gas station, a fifteen-minute walk away. I forgot to wear gloves and it was extremely cold. I couldn’t put my right hand in my coat pocket, as I had done with the left hand, because it was holding the coffee cup. On the way back I began to feel a tingling in the fingers that were exposed to the cold air. When I got back to the library I had lost all sensation in my fingertips and I was worried I might have frostbite. I put them as close to the radiator as I could and rubbed them for more than half an hour before they came back to life.
Six months after I finished checking the translation for the documentary, Roy invited me to the first official screening of the film in Boston. It was being shown as part of a festival for alternative documentaries. I asked him for an extra ticket for Ali Hadi. I assumed that I would be staying at his place to attend the event and that he would also want to see the film. The theater was full and the reaction of the audience was very positive. That was no surprise as the area was well known for being liberal and for opposing the war. Roy asked me whether I wanted to stand with him and Laura to answer questions from the audience after the film, but I thanked him and declined. I was pleased that he began his talk by thanking me. “The translator who accompanied us to Baghdad is present with us today,” he added. He asked me to stand up, and he led the audience in applause. Most of the questions and comments were about U.S. policy and the situation in Iraq, and not about the film itself. Many people criticized the mainstream media, their version of the war, and the failure to portray Iraqis as human beings. “What can we do now?” some of them asked. Ali Hadi praised the film and whispered i
n my ear that I had been very harsh in my criticism of its shortcomings and that it was much better than he had expected. He put up his hand to speak and praised the directors and the team for “bringing the voices of Iraqis to this continent and reminding us of their humanity.” I introduced him to Roy and Laura at the end of the evening.
“Memory does this: lets the things appear small, compresses them. Land of the sailor.”
Wednesday lunch was the most important social event for the college faculty. It was the day when the Hanover Inn offered its buffet lunch. The food wasn’t bad, especially the desserts. Sometimes I would go with a few of my colleagues from the department. The conversation would be boring, about bureaucratic issues in the department and the trials and tribulations of teaching. When I was late for the start of lunch, I would have to sit at one of the other tables and meet other professors. Some of them were pleasant and welcoming and tried to chat. Some of them were silent or would continue with their conversations even after someone new had joined their table. When friends asked about social life after I had been at the college for a few weeks, I would say, “The overwhelming majority of those who live here are either seventeen years younger than me or seventeen years older.”
I did meet one woman who was in my age range and wasn’t married (most of the faculty were settled, with children, beautiful houses, and dogs). She was a German woman who was an assistant professor in the film department. Tall, elegant, blond with green eyes. I was sitting alone at a table having a salad and reading the newspaper when she came up holding her tray and asked if she could sit down. I folded up the newspaper and we started talking. Like me she had been appointed that semester. She had taught in Florida for two years and before that had studied in London. We competed to find fault with the little village where we had to live: the cold, the paucity of social life, and our longing for big cities with their restaurants. “But let’s be fair. The cinema program is excellent, and it’s the only breathing space we have,” she said. I agreed and told her that I often went. “Yes, I’ve seen you there several times,” she said. “We should go together from now on.” We went to see the new Lars von Trier film Dogville and then to a nearby bar to talk about the film. She said it didn’t rise to the level of his previous works, but she admired my enthusiasm. We ended up in her apartment and we slept together that night. I felt that the sex was rather mechanical and lacked something. But maybe both of us decided not to waste this opportunity. I couldn’t sleep so I got dressed at 3 a.m. and walked back to my apartment. Two days later she sent me an email suggesting we have lunch, but I made the excuse that I was busy grading exams. She didn’t try again.