The Somnambulistic and the Sun

She stands before you naked 
you can see it, you can taste it, 
and she comes to you light as the breeze. 
Now you can drink it or you can nurse it, 
it don't matter how you worship 
as long as you're 
down on your knees. 

He woke up that day feeling numb and while he was taking on his clothes he started regurgitating his dream as a phlegmatic breakfast. He went walking for work feeling dazed with a constant hiss in his ears. While he was walking he noticed that the sun is facing him so he decided to keep "staring at the sun" till somebody looking like Robin Williams appeared and said "hi". The somnambulistic didn't answer. "If you keep looking at the sun," said the Robin Williams-like man, "your eyes will hurt." The somnambulistic didn't even blink. Partly out of obstinacy. "Your eyes will turn red," said the Robin Williams-like man worried "and they will hurt." The somnambulistic, hearing that, didn't resist a fade of a smile to draw itself into his numbed face. "It is the sun that will turn red!" said the somnambulistic, partly out of grandiosity "and not my eyes." It was time for the Robin Williams-like man to go playing some few other roles in his virtual life of the cinema-like quality till the apple might get more ripe.      

So I knelt there at the delta, 
at the alpha and the omega, 
at the cradle of the river and the seas. 
And like a blessing come from heaven 
for something like a second 
I was healed and my heart 
was at ease. 

The second day the young man woke up anxious. His breakfast was bitter. He even smoke cigarettes. While at work he wondered why he did keep staring at the sun that other day. He remembered that Robin Williams-like man. The files were thick at work and he forgot himself till a woman named "Life" appeared and asked him for a loan. He refuses. She said: “Some Refuse the Loan of Life to Avoid

the Debt of Death”. 

O baby I waited 
so long for your kiss 
for something to happen, 
oh something like this. 

And you're weak and you're harmless 
and you're sleeping in your harness 
and the wind going wild 
in the trees, 
and it ain't exactly prison 
but you'll never be forgiven 
for whatever you've done 
with the keys. 

O baby I waited ... 

The somnambulistic woke up numb in the third day. He had many dreams. Phlegmatic dreams he likes to call them. Because they are as cold and real as life. Not bitter nor sweet. Tasteless. Numb as a paralyzed limb he held up his body and went walking to meet the sun. The sun is yellow and hot. The Robin Williams- like man came and tried to make fun of him by giggling. The somnambulistic spitted phlegm on the ground next to the Robin Williams-like man feet and walked away. The Robin Williams-like man chased him and told him how he played the role of a psychiatrist in a movie named "Good Will Hunting" since they had met that day and ".. your constant staring at the sun is a disorganized behavior that might hurt your sight." 

It's dark now and it's snowing 
O my love I must be going, 
The river has started to freeze. 
And I'm sick of pretending 
I'm broken from bending 
I've lived too long on my knees. 

In a gathering in the fourth day he was told that he is a child. They belittled his efforts. They left him thinking that they believe that he is selfish. That he caused their suffering. He started blaming himself. He couldn't feel love. He decided to chose loneliness as a way of life so that not to hurt, and not to be hurt. Snow started falling and he lied on the ground and slept. 

Then she dances so graceful 
and your heart's hard and hateful 
and she's naked 
but that's just a tease. 
And you turn in disgust 
from your hatred and from your love 
and comes to you 
light as the breeze. 

O baby I waited ... 

When at the fifth day that woman with that strange name "Life" was accompanying the Robin Williams-like man. The somnambulistic numbness gave to a warmness in the heart. The sun turned little orange when the lady said: "Be Yourself!" The somnambulistic realized that since days he didn't drink water so he asked her for a glass of water. "There is a well near your working place. Its water is cold and clean. You will be the first one to discover it and once you drink from it the water will keep rippling. Rippling so that others will remember and care for you."

There's blood on every bracelet 
you can see it, you can taste it, 
and it's Please baby 
please baby please. 
And she says, Drink deeply, pilgrim 
but don't forget there's still a woman 
beneath this 
resplendent chemise. 

The sixth day was an anxious day. There was many work yet the young man was feeling warm and energetic. The woman named "Life" came running and said in a hurry: "You are close to that well. The key will unlock with the password ETERNAL RECURRENCE!". She smiled as she said that and waved at him a kiss and went away.   

So I knelt there at the delta, 
at the alpha and the omega, 
I knelt there like one who believes. 
And the blessings come from heaven 
and for something like a second 
I'm cured and my heart 
is at ease

At the seventh day the somnambulistic woke up numb and took his phlegmatic breakfast of dreams' contemplation and went walking heading to work and again that fresh sun appeared as a one-eyed clever observant. When the Robin Williams-like man came back after he had finished some role playing during the last days with some extra pains in more knees and teeth the somanmbulstic knew that that actor is nothing but himself. He kept looking unblinkally at the sun that kept showing her yellowness stubbornly for a while till she started to turn orange. The somnambulistic actor wakes up into the young man and takes the orange and starts to peel the chemise while the sun, this time, starts to turn rosy.

What a rumbling!

The Falling Leaves of Arabic Communism

The papers of both novels started to come in my hands as I turn them and the two books ended like trees in autumn, devoid of their fallen yellow leaves. The first novel was bought from Algeria, the second form Iraq. Both about a life of a communist. Both written by a communist. An ex-communist?

Both main characters are ill. In the Algerian novel he had paranoid delusions and spending the time in a mental hospital, the Iraqi novel he had paraplegia, spending the time in a wheelchair.

Both are men who are taken care by a European woman. Selene, the French, takes care of the Algerian anonymous protagonist, and Maria, that nurse from Netherland, takes care of the Iraqi protagonist named Saeed The Iraqi.

Selene asks the Algerian, in Rachid Boudjedra’s novel “The Denial”, about the story of his mother. The protagonist starts to describe his mother’s life and its environment, mainly the house, which she does not go beyond. But he also describes his life, his father’s and his brother’s, his uncles’ and aunts’.

  Rachid Boudjedra

 By his way of talking about his mother he also describes the city. From his narration you can see the signs of his mental illness yet you may get sometimes bored or tired while the pages, the papers, the leaves of the book, keep coming in your hand as you turn the book, and sometimes fall from your hands to the ground. You will end in the middle of the novel of about 300 pages with a file of individual papers each of which trying to find a way to escape from the two covers of the badly printed novel.

The Iraqi communist in Jasim Al-Mutayer’s novel “The Sick Communist” is named Saeed The Iraqi and he had left Iraq in the 90s to Algeria, Yemen, and finally Syria in which he get ill and the doctors in the Syrian hospital told him: “You will die tomorrow.” 

 Jasim Al Mutayer

Since then he kept repeating each day that he would die tomorrow. He was accepted as a political refugee in Netherland. After a while in the hospital a nurse named Maria took him to her home by a wheelchair, in which she lives alone, and started to take care of him.

He is confused in Netherland since he cannot but love the country, yet the country is a capitalist one. Maria, in spite of her habit of bringing the Iraqi newspaper of the Iraqi Communist Party to him and of opening it in front of his eyes (his is paralyzed and cannot hold the paper) and turning the pages for him, is not a communist. He is visited by his Iraqi friends all of whom are communist refugees in capitalist Europe. His friends open philosophical conversations with Maria who answers them that she is not a philosopher and that the difficulties of life doesn’t need a philosophical doctrine to understand them. She adds: “It is the right of every human being to live a long life whether it was in a crying wind or a smiling breeze.”

While the Iraqi communist is still believing each day that he will die tomorrow, and while the Algerian anonymous communist is still fighting his paranoid delusions, the papers of the novels are falling one by one.

The Circle of Zero

On of the worst things of living in a country like mine, Iraq, is that there is no liberty of thinking. Since childhood and we were being trained about what is permitted to think about, about what is permitted to write and read. Liberty to read whatever you like was actually present since there is nothing available to read only after it passes through the filters of censorship: governmental, religious, and social.

Before 2003 I didn't know about Iraq history. And this is bad because you get hold of the continuity of what you are living in.

After 2003 every former Iraqi politician that was regarded by Saddam's regime as bad, was regarded as a hero.

With time I started to be able to differentiate between those politician from the past.

In "The Circle of Zero" which was written by Fadhil Al- Azzawi in the 70s there is a city in which lives the dead among the live. But the dead decided that they should get hold of the city. A war started. A live youth has been chased by dead militias and he finally reached a group of men with guns. He asked their help. They didn't do anything when the militias was approaching. The young lived yelled on the men with guns: "Are you with them?" and they answered: "Of course we are." One of the gunned men ordered that the youth be taken as a hostage for few hours till he become one of them, the dead.

The 70s of Iraq were not a piece of heaven as our parents told us. The communists, the ba'athis, and the nationalists were in conflict. They solve their conflicts with killing. They are all poor and they do not benefit nor from being a member of their party nor from killing the other party members.

Fadhil Al Azzawi writes in the book "The Vital Spirit: The 60th Generation in Iraq." that one day in the 60s there were writers discussing in a cafe in Baghdad and they were talking about Sartre, Beckett, and others. Security governmental men were listening and thought that these hot conversations are about political leaders like Lenin and Marx, the only two names they know. The writers were taken to a prison and spend two hours of interrogation about whether they are communists, ba'athists, or nationalists. They all answered that they are not members in any party. One of them answered that "it is better to regard them as absurdistans.

What a country? What a history!!!