The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  O ye! These are the qualities of a stranger who has left behind a home built out of water and clay and moved away from close friends, whether they be rough or smooth in nature, with whom he may have shared a drink among the brooks and the meadows, and who has observed with his eye the charms of sleepy eyes. If all that then results in disappearance and extinction, then where do you stand with respect to someone nearby who has long felt like a stranger in his own country and who has had little luck and gained little from his beloved and his residence? And where do you stand with respect to a stranger who has no way to find a home and no means to settle down? He looked pale when he was in a hut and he was so overcome with sadness that he was like a waterskin. If he spoke, he spoke sadly and intermittently, and if he remained silent, he remained silent in confusion and under constraint.

  It has been said that a stranger is someone shunned by his beloved, but I say, “No, a stranger is someone with whom the beloved is in contact. No, a stranger is someone that the observer ignores. No, a stranger is someone toward whom the drunkard shows goodwill. No, a stranger is someone who is called from nearby. No, a stranger is someone who is strange in his strangeness. No, a stranger is someone who has no in-laws. No, a stranger is someone who enjoys no rights.” And if that is true, come let us weep over the state of affairs that has made the stranger an outcast and has engendered this ill treatment.

  O ye! The stranger is someone whose beauty has faded like the setting sun, who is estranged from a loved one and from those who reproach him, someone who has spoken and acted strangely, someone who has traveled far, coming and going, and who dresses weirdly in tattered clothes.

  O ye! A stranger is someone whose appearance speaks of ordeal after ordeal, who shows signs of trial after ordeal, and whose real nature is apparent from time to time. A stranger is someone who is absent even when present, who is present when he is absent. A stranger is someone you wouldn’t know if you saw him, and who you wouldn’t recognize if you didn’t see him. Have you not heard the one who said: “What excuse can be made? No family, no home, no companion, nothing to drink, and nowhere to live”?

  This man is a stranger who has never budged from his place of birth or shifted from where he first drew breath. The strangest of strangers are those who have become strangers in their own country, and the most distant of those who are distant are those who feel distant close to home, because the aim of the exercise is to stop thinking about the world, turn a blind eye to what is visible, keep one’s distance from what is familiar, so that one can find someone who can save one from all this by offering a gift, support, a solid pillar to lean on.

  O ye! A stranger is someone who is shunned when he mentions the truth and who is driven away when he calls for justice. A stranger is someone who is called a liar when he offers proof and who is tormented when he makes unsubstantiated claims. A stranger is someone who receives nothing in return when he gives and who is not visited when he settles down. O let us take pity on the stranger! He has traveled far without arriving and has suffered long through no fault of his own. He has endured great harm without falling short and suffered greatly to no purpose.

  A stranger is someone they don’t listen to when he speaks, and if they see him, they don’t gather around him. A stranger is someone who, when he breathes, is afflicted by grief and sorrow, and when he holds his breath, is stricken with sadness and regret. A stranger is someone whose voice is not heard when he approaches and is not asked after when he turns aside. A stranger is someone who is not answered when he calls.

  O ye! To be a stranger as a whole is agony. He is full of grief, his night is regret, and his daytime is sorrow. His lunch is sad and his dinner is anguish. His opinions are distrustful, all of him is strife, he is made up of ordeals, his secret is public knowledge and fear is where he lives.

  Poor man! You are the stranger in every sense.

  Although I had left home, I made sure I spoke with Naseer once a month to see how he was. I hung up if my father or his girlfriend answered. At first I was worried that my father’s girlfriend, who had become his wife, would mistreat Naseer. But she remained pleasant with him, even after she had two children with my father. Naseer would laugh when I asked, “How are the Indian bastards?” He didn’t seem to be as upset as I was about what his father had done. Maybe he was more forgiving than me. In his last year of high school he won a sports scholarship from the University of Virginia after being scouted in the Northern Virginia basketball league. He left home to live in the dorms in Charlottesville, which was two and a half hours south, and he was happy with his independence, his celebrity status at the university, and the travel across the country with the team. I greatly annoyed him when I insisted that he concentrate on his studies to make sure he had a stable profession after he graduated and didn’t depend solely on basketball, because the competition was fierce and the chances of playing professionally with a team in the NBA were slight. I was pleased when he succeeded in finding a balance between basketball and his studies, where he majored in business administration. He got very good grades and after graduation found a job in Charlottesville with State Farm, a big insurance company. He shared an apartment there with a friend but later moved to live with his girlfriend. He continued to play basketball on the weekend. I visited him there twice, and he and his girlfriend visited me in New York after I had settled down there.

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE CATALOG

  In the beginning was the explosion.

  Isn’t that what the prevalent, accepted theory says? But maybe that massive explosion was the universe screaming and weeping as it emerged from the womb of nothingness into the pain of existence. This universe that expanded at the speed of light. Instead of crawling, it began to fly in every direction with a million wings and stars.

  In the beginning was the explosion.

  The whole universe is a jungle of fragments flying apart in the cosmic darkness. Some of those fragments have become a star that has settled into a sad orbit. Others are just cosmic dust that floats around. I’m trying to put together the fragments of a little explosion—dust particles from which I can make a necklace I can hang. Yes, hang it, but where? Where can I hang it? Around the neck of the void.

  My task is exactly the opposite of the task of the midwife or the obstetrician who cuts the umbilical cord after the birth. I reattach the umbilical cords between things and their mothers. I restring burned ouds. I put the tear back in the eye. It’s tiring work that never ends. And I have many enemies. Sometimes I think I’m a failed spider that’s hunting the void.

  I went to the small Xerox room to copy an article about Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and the beginnings of the Arabic novel to hand out to my students. But a man with gray hair wearing a gray suit was standing in front of the copier, which was churning out collated and stapled copies on the left-hand side. When he noticed I was there he turned and said, “I’m just about to finish. It won’t take long.” Then he put out his hand to shake mine, saying, “You’re the guy who was hired last year, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s me,” I said.

  I remembered his face because I had seen his picture on the department website when I was trying to find out about the place, who worked there and what their interests and leanings were. I remembered that he taught European history.

  “Jim Cleary. I’m sorry. I was on sabbatical in France last year and I didn’t have a chance to meet you. But I’ve read the application file and the articles. You’re Iraqi. Al-Baghdadi, right?”

  “Yes. I’m Nameer.”

  “Welcome aboard. Have you settled down and got used to the place?”

  “Yes, pretty much.”

  “Oh, by the way, tell me, are you Shiite or Sunni?”

  I was surprised at how quickly he blurted out this personal question. Other people might ask the question over a cup of coffee or wait until we’ve been friends for a while. I had been through this before and instead of giving the traditional straightforward answer, I found it was prefer
able, and more enjoyable for me, to answer with a question: “Why? What does that matter?”

  “Because the New York Times says that’s the cause of the whole problem in your country. Wasn’t Saddam a Sunni?”

  “And what about you? Are you Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist?”

  He was taken aback by my question, of course.

  “Well, Christian, but I’m not religious.”

  “And are you Protestant, Catholic, or what?”

  “Protestant. You haven’t answered my question.”

  “My father’s Shiite and my mother’s Sunni.”

  “And do you follow your father’s religion or your mother’s?”

  “Neither one nor the other. I’m not religious and I don’t believe in anything. I’m an atheist, an ‘independent’ like those of you who don’t belong to the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.”

  “Oh, wow, and are there people like you in Iraq, or did that happen after you came here and studied?”

  “I didn’t lose my faith at the airport. I lost it in Baghdad, thank God.”

  “That’s really interesting.”

  “Great!”

  He laughed, but rather nervously. I later thought he might avenge my rudeness by voting against me in six years when it was time to decide whether to give me tenure. We’ll see.

  “What are we going to talk about today?”

  “Anything you’d like to talk about. We can carry on with what we were talking about in the last session, or we could talk about what’s troubling you.”

  I was surprised by her answer.

  “What’s troubling me is the novel I want to write.”

  “Yes, you mentioned it several times in previous sessions. Why not say more about it?”

  “It’s about a secondhand book dealer in Baghdad who has a strange project. I met him in Baghdad and we exchange letters from time to time.”

  “What’s strange about the project?”

  I told her about Wadood and the sections he had sent me. But I focused on his letters and his garbled ramblings.

  “What you say about your friend and his behavior matches the symptoms we notice among people suffering from the effects of extreme psychological shock after a traumatic incident or severe psychological pain or a physical attack. The torture he underwent in prison is no doubt the reason. Has he had any therapy?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “And because he hasn’t been able to absorb the shock or deal with it or accept that it has happened, or because the shock can’t be explained in any logical way, he’s still trapped in a vicious circle. He won’t completely escape it until he manages to renarrate the details of the shock repeatedly, until they’re put in a context or a form that enables him to go on living normally or less painfully. Your friend has to find closure, as we say, and put the incident that caused all this pain on the shelf in its right place so that he can go on living normally.”

  “He’s collecting piles of stories, incidents, and news reports on the shelves in his room. He wants to write an open-ended book. But then no one in Baghdad lives a normal life. Their days are full of violence and destruction.”

  “I’m sorry. Writing can be therapy! This has been an important development in recent years—but supervised by a specialist, of course. Many of the soldiers coming back from Iraq write as part of their psychological therapy.”

  I laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Because my friend is still in the throes of war. The troops come back here, while he can’t ‘come back.’ And that’s what he’s actually writing.”

  “Yes, but the soldiers are victims too at the end of the day.”

  “I don’t want to get into an argument with you now. The troops here volunteer to join the army. Iraqi civilians don’t volunteer. They don’t have a choice.”

  “Let’s talk about your novel. Are you making any progress with the writing?”

  “No. I can’t write.”

  “What do you think the reason is?”

  “I don’t know. I feel my ideas are stupid. I have ideas and images, but whenever I pick up my pen, I feel paralyzed. I find excuses to put off writing. I can’t start.”

  “I mean, are you worried that what you write, and what you might publish, won’t have any value?”

  “Aren’t such fears normal for writers?”

  “Yes, but. Why don’t you try to write about things unrelated to the subject of the novel? About your daily life, for example?”

  “I don’t like memoirs and diaries.”

  “Writing about day-to-day things might help solve the problem and move things along.”

  Carnations scattered in the garden my leaves and roses also circles so you arrive glass and brick hills chasm he picks me he circles around nothing who wiped him out ah I’m not not you I didn’t pick jasmine and cactus faucet convulsion the wood piled up we slept on the roof they drowned in the hole softened how no the rest isn’t in your life the seal of sorrows the pomegranate tree under the roof underground they’re late and at every moment little leaves a lost butterfly how the jasmine thirsty a crow on my shoulder another crow flies off and lands on my shoulder on my heart in my mouth feathers

  In my last session with her I told her that reading the news every morning depressed me. “That’s simple,” she said. “Stop reading the newspapers!” This response struck me as silly and foolish, and unworthy of a psychiatrist, especially after everything I had told her in our sessions about my background. “How so, I mean, just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t help but read the newspapers or listen to the radio. I’ve been doing that every day since I was a child.”

  “You can take control of your life.”

  We argued about the concept of control and free will in life, and I couldn’t control myself and at the end of the session I told her what I was feeling, which was that I honestly didn’t see any point in our sessions and nothing was changing in my psychological state.

  “These things take a lot of time. It has a lot to do with your problematic relationship with your father and his relationship with your mother that we haven’t talked enough about. You’re evading confronting many emotions and memories.”

  “How much time?”

  “I don’t know. Every patient is a unique case. Sometimes therapy takes ten years or more before we can access what is buried deep and have a breakthrough.”

  “Ten years!?”

  “Yes.”

  I laughed sarcastically. “Life is too short for that.”

  “Yes, life is too short, but it’s best to live a healthy life and try to deal with our problems.”

  “I don’t know if I can talk and wait ten years to find a solution.”

  “It might not take ten years, but it certainly won’t be solved in ten sessions. Therapy requires commitment.”

  After that session I canceled two appointments with her, and a week later she sent me an email saying her clinic was moving to another building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, closer to where she lived. When I found the new clinic on the map I realized the trip would take me about forty minutes each way on the subway, so I decided to look for another psychiatrist.

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE MUNADDAB, THE DEPLETED

  nadaba al-shay’: the thing flowed

  naddaba is used if it goes into the ground

  nadaba fulan: so-and-so died

  nadaba al-ma’, imperfect yandubu, verbal noun nuduban: the water sank into the ground and went down

  nadaba al-qawm too: the people moved away; hence naadib, remote

  Do we breathe to live?

  Or do we breathe to die?

  No creature is born in this world without fertility, or enrichment as we say in Arabic.

  But birth, the birth of anything, looks like a wound. A temporary wound that heals. There is no birth without the mother bleeding, or without placenta. The placenta that the body ejects after it has serv
ed its purpose.

  Nothing is born in this world without fertility/enrichment.

  Even things have wombs and placentas, and they might bleed when they’re born. When enriched uranium is produced in nuclear reactors and does its job generating electricity , it leaves its placenta—munaddab or depleted uranium, which no longer has enough radioactive uranium. It’s like a butterfly abandoning its cocoon. But this munaddab is no longer content to hide in containers or in landfill sites, because humans have found a use for it that prolongs its life, because it has almost twice the density of lead.

  DU

  One munitions round made of depleted uranium, a round designed to penetrate steel, strayed off course as it fell from the AC 130 so it didn’t penetrate any armor: it just lay in the sands of Iraq like a soldier lost in enemy territory. But a soldier that won’t die or be captured. It’ll keep breathing. What it exhales will settle in a lung or a womb. A kidney or a bone in some body. And it will live in the water and the air for four million years. It will poison bodies with its stigma and go on living.

  Do we breathe in order to live?

  Or do we breathe to die?

  One day Mariah heard me singing:

  Ghareeba min baad aynich ya yumma,

  Mihtara bzamani, yahu il-yirham bhali law dahri rimani?

  “What’s that?” she asked me, and I said, “An Iraqi blues song.” She asked me to translate the lyrics and I started thinking about how to translate it, and then I said, “You know, there are sorrows that can’t be translated.” She waved her hand and went back to what she was reading.

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE SCAVENGER

  Rassoul woke up at five o’clock in the morning. His mother and his little sister Fatma were snoring fast asleep. He tried to get back to sleep but he couldn’t. He got up from the mattress, which wasn’t thick enough to stop the damp seeping into his mother’s bones and hurting her. As if work wasn’t enough of an ordeal. But Rassoul’s bones were soft, as his mother said to reassure him when he asked whether he too would feel pain from the damp. The night before she had told him that they wouldn’t go out this morning because of the war. But he couldn’t sleep and he felt trapped. There was nothing for him to do in this tiny place. It had been a horrific night. The drone of planes and the sound of explosions. They weren’t nearby but they frightened them. They couldn’t sleep for hours. Their mother kept listening to the news on the radio and praying. Whenever he or his sister asked her what was happening, she repeated the same expression: “The war’s started. The Americans are bombing.” But he couldn’t hear anything now. Maybe the war was over. They said it would be short. He went to the big tin container in the corner and scooped up a little cold water in the palm of his hand and drank it. He scooped once again and wet his face. He put on his work pants, on top of the sweatpants that he slept in. Then he put on his woolen sweater with the turtleneck and his jacket with a hood. He picked up his shoes from near the door and put them on. Then he opened the door, and closed it slowly and quietly behind him so as not to wake up his mother and sister. The morning cold slapped him in the face, as well as the smell of trash, which sometimes made him want to vomit. But he remembered what his mother said. We have to put up with it and work hard so that we can leave this mud hut and live in a room in a real house with a bathroom and find other work. This was his prayer and her prayer. He pulled the collar of his sweater up so that it covered his nose. He walked to the hole behind the house and stopped in front of it. He unzipped his pants and started to piss in the puddle as he looked up at the sky, which was also changing its clothes to start work. There were no planes or missiles on the horizon. He felt relieved after shaking the last drops off his little penis. One of them landed on his index finger. He did up his flies and wiped his hand on his pants. He turned and walked toward the trash dump that was twenty minutes away.