Enchanting Glimpses of a Childhood Revived by War

Mamoun Al-Jack

In the early days of displacement, Khartoum didnt cross my mind, and this is a quirk I know from Aakhzam, an old habit every time I leave a place or a person.

I clung to my books, so I reread Borges stories on the island once again, but without the clarity of previous experiences, and I read explanations of Al-Maarri for Al-Mutanabbi, and I dont know what devil drove me to carry Samuel Becketts plays with me from Khartoum. If I had left them there, without a reader, it would have been better.

I wandered a little in the village, and I tried as much as possible to walk on the same paths of my childhood, hoping to retrieve something from it, sometimes he was lucky and he could hear and see, and indeed, once or twice, childhood was waiting for me at some turning point.

I have always been delighted by the sight of open doors of houses. I am not a voyeur, but just the presence of an open door revealing marble in the courtyard and an iron bed on top of it used to please me.

Gradually, I named the stars and healed an old deficiency. I learned about Suhail as the cheek of love and the heart as the lovers heart from Al-Maarris analogy. As usual, a blind man leads me to see. And I knew the Pleiades, and the clouds from the high windows, and old rains brought to my heart old fears and desires.

The wave of readings subsided, then I went to a city, to Madani, and the skies of cities are usually distant, but its sky was close. It had something of the order of cities and their narrow rationalized spaces, designed for specific uses and purposes, and the expansiveness of villages and their horizons extended towards the myth. This is what I hoped for, but my hope was soon dashed.

I spent a night drinking, a day recovering from it, and then I returned to my village. I passed through Hosh Issa on my way back, as I did on the way there, and I had visited it in passing in my childhood on the way to another village. I felt a sense of familiarity and unwarranted intimacy with the place, and any unjustified emotion disturbs me.

In the village, the house was crowded with guests of mourners and visitors of a sick person, so I was busy with the duties of hospitality and its exhaustion, and I couldnt find a place for myself to read or contemplate for weeks. I had to listen to stories of merchants whose goods were looted, and others who saved some of it, all of this accompanied by political nonsense and hopes amplified by ignorance.

Afterwards, little by little, Omdurman overwhelmed me, not the one I left, but an old one, as if the separation from it revived a memory that continuous presence there had concealed, or perhaps it was the fear of complete loss. I remembered old pictures of our house and walls of mud, trees uprooted by the construction lust, and the sight of a sunflower whose contemplation emptied my youth, and Pepsi bottle caps floating in water irrigating a sesame plant, and the borrowed shadows of a lemon tree, and pomegranate flowers, and a water skin hanging in the arbor of a blind neighbor, which I used to lower for him whenever I visited, I remembered a square where the shadows of passers-by gradually shrank, and a black door that still stands, but those who were behind it left a long time ago, I remembered old furniture, steel and wood closets, and sheets with their annoying patterns and colors, and plastic flowers, and nonfunctional wall clocks even in their memory, and plastic-seated chairs, and the dismal hiss of a brass water tap.

I didnt remember people or moments connecting me with others or stories, just a museum of banalities brought by the contagion of time and its habits. Now, as I write these things, I remember - in fleeting flashes - others, but what concerns me is what I remembered before writing, that sudden and spontaneous revival and the slow and dizzying wandering in the emptiness of memory, not what can be remembered intentionally, or what is a desire for the world to become written.

Phrases for Sharpening and Seduction

It must have rained in the Ethiopian highlands

This phrase fascinated me for a long time, and the source of the fascination in a literary phrase is either due to its composition or its position in the context of the text. For the second reason, this phrase, said by the narrator of (Season of Migration to the North), captivated me in the first chapter of the work, after a moment of total contemplative absorption about existence, an existence he tries to regain in this chapter by awakening the ghosts sleeping in his soul. The first chapter is mainly a story of a return metaphorically invoked, starting from listening to the cooing of pigeons, which the narrator was certain of his return upon hearing, then a palm tree in the courtyard that mirrors the narrators existence, and then in the passage where this phrase appeared: the river with its width and extension.

The narrator returns to the memory of his childhood, when he threw countless stones into the river, and here he is at this moment, leaning on the childhood trees and gazing at the Nile. Following these glances, he immerses himself in contemplation, and then this phrase comes as another alert to the narrators position in the place when he notices the rise of the rivers water: it must have rained in the Ethiopian highlands. The narrators existence then expands and extends to accompany the course of the Nile.

The livelihood of sugarcane owners on the seashore has ceased

This phrase is from (The Epistle of Forgiveness) by Abu Al-Ala Al-Maarri, and it resembles the first phrase in that it comes as a turn, a diversion from narrating the bliss of paradise by referring to the mundane life. The epistle is not enclosed in the afterlife world, but rather fluctuates between this life and the afterlife: by comparison, or by returning to the moment of writing it: through addressing Ibn Al-Qarih and informing him that this imaginative scenario is linked to Gods will and power, or as in this phrase, which follows a passage in which Al-Maarri describes the pleasant taste of the drink of the people of paradise, and then he turns with this enchanting and sarcastic phrase to a commercial activity that may stagnate if a little of the honey of paradise mixes with what is known for its bitter taste from the trees and plants of this life.

If Damascus were

This was said by Al-Mutanabbi in his poem describing the Shuab stream in Persia, and it is one of his last poems, composed in praise of Adhud al-Dawla. We notice Al-Mutanabbis anxiety about the beautiful, as after his verses glorifying the stream and its beauty and goodness, memory diverts him to his time in Damascus, as if he is saying: Ah, if this were Damascus, or like Qaiss saying when a woman was adorned for him to forget Layla, he said: She resembles Layla, but no, she is not, and this is not Damascus.

Something in the body of Ibn Rushd, whose ancestors came from the Arabian deserts, was pleased with the flow of water

This, like its predecessors, is a phrase that appears in a narrative context. It is said by the narrator of the story (The Search of Ibn Rushd) by Borges, and its charm lies in the sudden shift in the narrative from immersion - similar to the narrators (Season of Migration) immersion in contemplation - in thinking and writing, i.e. from mental activities, to a delightful awareness of the body and its position in time and space. Ibn Rushd, as Borges tells, was immersed in refuting Al-Ghazalis opinions and delighted by the coherence of his responses to them and their rigor. In the midst of that preoccupation, the cooing of pigeons and the sound of water flowing from a fountain return him to his present moment, and he is pleased with those sounds, and his mind turns to his position in the place: his house located in the sprawling Cordoba, and the desert and its delights haunt him, just as Damascus haunts Al-Mutanabbi, who, when reminded, desires to turn his horses rein, to rest in the shade of beauty, not for more but for less.

Is it really, O servants of God, that I am not hearing,
The singing of the shepherds, the lonely wanderers?

This verse is by the pre-Islamic poet Abd Yaghuth, he says it after he becomes certain of his death, and among all the memories of his life, he turns to a poignant sound: the singing of the shepherds for their camels to drive them. It is a turn to a sound that he will not hear again, and although I have never heard the singing of camels before, this verse enchanted me with its imploring and desperate question: Really? Again, sound, not shape or image, is what is missed from life and longed for by the returnee to his home, as in (Season of Migration), or the one immersed in writing and mental activities, as in (The Search of Ibn Rushd), or the one certain of his imminent death and ready to be killed, as in Abd Yaghuths poem.