SONGS THAT I CAN NAME
Splices of the past enter the present. This is a historical process but it is also a personal one. It happens to my person. A flash of a place that I know. Or a person. An atmosphere. A bridge over a canyon in New Mexico. A certain stretch of road I walked along with my aunt Tara one summer in California. The boy who passed out sour Warheads in third grade after he won them in a raffle announced over the school on loudspeaker. A picnic on a hill, green, symmetrical. I am convinced it is because I’m dying. Though I am not dying.
It did happen once: not death but life, my own, in hyperspeed, in glimpses, on the screens of my eyes while I choked on a hot dog. In the summer, at the pool. I began to suffocate, processed meat wedged in the negative space of my esophagus. When it was dislodged, it flew out of my mouth. And landed on the wet cement. I was very young.
There was another time I thought that I might die, in the front seat of a taxi full of strangers crossing Iraqi Kurdistan in the dark. It had begun to snow, and the car, having climbed and then descended Koya Mountain on switchbacks, filled with palpable relief, and it was precisely then that the driver failed to see the truck turning onto the road. But I had a perfect view. I was also in collision. I was not in love with anyone. Nothing flashed before my eyes. Only an intense will not to die suffusing me. I braced my body against the dashboard with refusal. When we came to rest in some ditch, the car was silent. Everyone else had been knocked unconscious. The snow had stopped. Blood was coming from the driver’s ear. Suddenly the car was surrounded by passersby who pulled the men out of the backseat, where they were slowly coming to. I wouldn’t let anyone touch me. I had to step into deep icy water to exit the taxi. The trunk was so smashed that it couldn’t be opened. My bag was inside. My camera, inside the bag. Everyone was shouting at me to get into their car and like in a 60-second mystery I had to decide who here I should trust. I forgot how to speak in any language.
After I gave birth I spoke fluent German with the nurses. But when I left the hospital, I couldn’t anymore. Did I ever speak German? Did I ever give birth? Did you know that it snowed in Iraq?
The death rate, said the poet Ghayath Almadhoun at a reading in Berlin, is the same in Palestine and Sweden because everyone in Palestine and Sweden dies eventually.
We’d thought perhaps the prevalence of cancer in the family was environmental, something in the air or earth or water. What toxic gasses had been unleashed on Kurdistan the year before my birth. What chemicals had been absorbed. Nerve gas is called nerve gas because it attacks the nervous system. It disrupts the messages sent through the nerves to every organ. The first symptom of exposure is a runny nose. A tightness of the chest. Followed by difficulty breathing. Followed by involuntary release of all the fluids that the body can produce. Salivation, lacrimation, urination, defecation, emesis. The body begins to leak.
US troops sent to Iraq in 1990 were exposed to nerve gas too, and are dying now of brain cancer at a rate that is abnormal. Parts of their brains have shrunk. They call it the Gulf War Syndrome. The gasses that the troops had been exposed to were produced by chemicals the US sold to Saddam when Iraq was at war with Iran. When the US invaded Iraq they called it the Gulf War. Now they call it the First Gulf War because there was another. I become more Kurdish each time the country I was born in sends troops to Iraq. It has happened every decade I have lived.
We learned in the summer the cancer is caused by a gene. It must have come down through Abdul-Karim, who died of lung cancer, just like his brother. First Abdul-Karim, then Ihsan, Yusria, Srood, Saadia, Lana, then Sonya. Sonya sent us each a letter from her doctor that we were to show our doctors. I finally found a doctor in Berlin who could do genetic testing. They emailed me a seven page spreadsheet that I was to fill out before I could make an appointment. It listed every member of my family for four generations. The years of their birth. The years of their death. Their age upon diagnosis. I began to fill it out, but it took me months to finish.
Every plant I planted on the balcony that summer died in the summer sun except for the arugula. Or it died too but then, in the fall, it grew back. It grew yellow flowers on long stalks. I never knew arugula flowered. But of course it flowers. The leaves are bitter but the flowers smell like flowers. When the flowers died they left behind slim seed pods, like tiny green beans. I ate one. It tasted like arugula.
Each time I took the baby that I’d birthed to the compulsory check ups, the doctor asked where I was from. Ich bin aus, I said, each time, den USA. Your name, he asked each time, is it a common name there? Doctors always ask about my name. I never tell them what it means. If you miss a mandatory check up for your child, the doctor will inform the government and the government will send a yellow envelope, and then a red one. We never miss a visit. In Arabic, my name means heart. But not the organ heart. The other kind of heart.
The couple two floors up give music lessons, mostly opera, but on Tuesdays comes a man who plays guitar and sings familiar ballads. The ballads are familiar but they are not songs I can name.
I am not good at naming. I consult a dictionary daily, hourly. I am always searching for a word just out of grasp. Sometimes I am unable, despite efforts, to retrieve the word I want.
Once, when asked who my favorite poet was, I couldn’t think of any name. I tried to think of any poet, of any poet I could name, but only saw an image of a woman with her head in the oven, nameless. We took three days to name the baby.
They never put a bracelet on the baby in the hospital. But on the bassinet, there was a tiny whiteboard and on it someone had written BABY FUAD. In the fog that came after three days of labor I wondered if I would be able to identify the baby if the sign denoting him as mine fell off. But it never fell off. Eventually, we took him home and he became a person.
Sonya’s chemo happens weekly. It began in May and goes until December. Ariana’s daughter told me not to tell her mother about the news of the mutation. So I will not tell her. Her mother’s mother died of cancer.
The neighbors one floor up have broken up but seem to still be on good terms. Though when I hear moaning from above I no longer know who is having sex or with whom. One afternoon they played a song so loud that I could hear the lyrics from my balcony. I wrote them down and typed them into a search engine. Then I played the song on repeat, too, but not so loud that they would hear. Now I play it every day.
Maybe my brain, I think, is feeding me my memories slowly, one by one, proof of having lived. A flashing slowed down to the pace of the heart.
When I moved here three years ago, I lived next to Gisela and Manfred and Herr Genth (whose first name I never learned). By the time the baby came, they all had died. They had lived since before the Berlin Wall came down. You could see it from the balconies. Now you only see a row of bricks that traces where the wall once stood, a flat memorial. Manfred and Gisela had no children. When Manfred fainted in the bathtub, it was our door that Gisela knocked on. In the summer, workers came to finally empty out their old apartments, and the belongings of Manfred and Gisela were hauled out to the street and into a dumpster or truck for resale. I took an old framed painting and painted over it. It was the baby’s due date. Five days later, I gave birth.
Eventually, their empty apartments were gut-renovated. Then rented out to single men who worked in tech. That is what the landlord specified when he told me that my friend Elijah couldn’t move into the building: that he had decided to only rent to singles who worked in tech. Gut renovation means that the walls come down and the pipes are redone. The pipes are the guts of a home. I see the new neighbors so rarely that I sometimes wonder if they even really live there. They are, however, very friendly.
The row of bricks laid in the street which mark the path the wall took disappear down the street into a large new complex. I call it Panopticon. Its glassy apartments look into one another across the neatly landscaped courtyards. There are many diagonal lines. The apartments have rhyming layouts, rhyming families gathered around rhyming furniture and high-gloss kitchens and all of the apartments have shiny silver curtains hanging in their floor-to-ceiling windows. I imagine that the management passed them out to manage heat loss when the cost of heat increased twofold last winter. Heat must be pouring out at every hour through all that glass.
The building stands in what was once a border strip, a no-man’s land between the East and West, guarded by armed soldiers. The watchtowers that once stood there have been torn down, but throughout the city, some watchtowers still stand.
It took me a long time to keep it straight, whether I lived in the former East or former West, because I live West of the wall, but in the former East. The wall followed the canal, then cut Southeast, then back Northeast, forming a peninsula of East protruding into West. I live in what was once this peninsula of East.
The word Kurdistan only appears twice in my second book and only in negation. When it is no longer where my grandfather lives. As a word the doctor doesn’t recognize. In negation. In not.
At a reading in Berlin, the moderator asked if my first book, which deals with Kurdistan, was just a “one-off.” At a reading in Berlin, the moderator noted that she disagreed with my use of the word “genocide” to describe what is happening in Palestine. To describe the displacement of more than one million people. To describe the use of a bomb with no incendiary component, just knives it releases in a spray upon impact. A bomb designed to maim. At a reading in Berlin Ghayath Almadhoun names the number of family members killed in Gaza. It is either 28 or 38. Or 38, and 28 of them were children.
While the baby sleeps, I read about premature babies on tenuous life support. About the generators running on diminishing reserves of fuel. While the baby sleeps, I gather poems by Palestinian poets. While I ignore the baby, I watch a video of an injured toddler in Gaza trembling in shock. I cradle my screen in my palms. While I ignore the baby, I sign an open letter. While I ignore the baby, I post a screenshot of the email sent to the artist to cancel the show. We hope this finds you well, the email begins. While I write, the e and r keys fall off my keyboard. When it rains in Gaza, the children run into the open with buckets to collect the water. At a reading in Berlin, Ariana Reines says that she didn’t imagine we would be living in the era of murdered children. But we are. When it rains in Gaza, sometimes it rains leaflets. The leaflets are commands to flee.
The ceasefire comes and goes and when it goes my screen fills anew with the bodies of children. Some are already limp or stiffened with death. Sometimes it’s just one piece of a child on my screen. Some of the children are bloodied but living, comforting even smaller bloodied children. One child walks with a white flag as large as his small body and says that he is not afraid. One is missing the lower half of his body. He writhes. He is still alive, but not for very much longer. We are bearing witness. Bearing. Bearing down. Bearing child. Bare, bore, bore, born.
This began as one thing, and then became another.
Sometimes, passing too close behind another person on the street, I enter them, or they me. I don’t know how else I can explain it. Very briefly, I feel a sliver of their subjectivity. It is slippery and overwhelming. I become them. This does not require eye contact. It happens at unpredictable angles. A certain corner of a face. It produces a near-nausea. It happens rarely. But I pay attention when it happens. Maybe it happens when I pass someone whose self has a leak. And I walk into the leak. Bloodied is a horror of a word.
The first photos I saw of the country my father grew up in were photos of children who lay dead in the streets in the arms of their parents in a village called Halabja. Many years later I’d visit. In the museum, there are life-sized plaster casts of people lying in the same positions that they lay in in the photos that I saw as a child, scrolling on an Angelfire website on the old computer that my parents let me have in my bedroom. I was in my childhood bedroom when I saw those photos. In the photo that is most reproduced, a baby rests in the arms of her father, who lies face down, his head on the edge of a doorstep. The baby’s mouth is open, a little o; she looks almost peaceful. She wears a pink sweater with orange polka dots. Kurdistan isn’t a country.
The plaster replicas of the Halabja dead are on the floor of the museum, so that when you look at them, you look down at them. You feel complicit, looking down at recreated death.
You have to understand that even when I am not writing about Kurdistan, I am still writing about Kurdistan. And Artsakh. And Gaza. And every roaming ghost of empire.
Yesterday my mother called. My father’s test had come back positive for the gene mutation. I have a fifty-fifty chance of also having it. I led a poetry workshop that night and hardly thought of it until I lay in bed, and then I wondered what parts of my body I would choose to excise, if I too have the gene. Soon I’d need to have my blood drawn. Its programmatic matter extracted and sequenced. The results uploaded to an online portal.
In another photo from Halabja, a child lays in green grass in a pointy hat. My child also wears a pointy hat, a pointed teal balaclava which makes him look like a magician. Behind the young magician is a pile of other bodies. I think I have never seen this particular image before, but most likely, I have. I have seen, it feels, all of the dead of Halabja. The baby in her father’s arms was photographed from almost every angle. I think that’s why my brain has reconstructed her in three dimensions.
Sometimes I catch again the way I saw this city when I first arrived here, or even earlier, before I came here with the thought that I might stay. The giant silent buses which kneel creaturely to let me on and off once woke my interest. Now they don’t.
I began as one thing, and then became another.
I am also punctured. I am full of holes. Everything that I see enters me, and doesn’t leave. It just accrues like some hard cold stone dipped over and over and over in wax. Once, as a child, at a renaissance fair, I made a wax cast of my own hand. It was magic to me, then. A hollow space in the exact shape of my hand. It has since disappeared. My little hand. Sometimes there is very little that I want to say. How many images have I already seen? How many more? They are a part of me now. Who could name such a thing?
(Tracy Fuad)