Packaged Lives, page 2
We are Sinbads, the four of us, in our different ways. Wanderlust is our middle name. And none of use lives in our birthplace. Haifa is of Kurdish origin but lived in Baghdad before she moved to London through Damascus and Beirut. Mundher grew up in Baghdad, studied in Moscow, and moved to London, like Haifa, after brief stays in Damascus and Beirut. They now divide their time between London and Tunis. Lun-Yun was born in Dongyin, one of the Matsu islands off the coast of Taiwan, and moved to Taipei when he was fifteen. He went on to study in New York at Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard. He lived in Taipei but taught at a university in Tainan, the old capital of Taiwan. Concerts took him everywhere around the world. And he went on packaged tours with his family, friends, and colleagues. I was born in Taiwan but raised in Libya, where I lived for eighteen years. I did my graduate studies in New York at Columbia University and taught at the University of Virginia, altogether for fifteen years, before I moved to London. I traveled around Europe with my parents, the United States with friends, and Asia and Europe with Lun-Yun. Needless to say, conferences took me to even more places around the world. We divided our time between London and Taipei.
But we always come home no matter how far we wandered, not to a place, but to our family and friends. We more particularly carry our family with us everywhere we go. Haifa in London and Lun-Yun in Taipei still live among their siblings. Haifa sees her brothers frequently and is in touch with them every day, and Lun-Yun and I live in a family complex in Taipei. Mundher and I have more of a virtual relationship with our families, but we are similarly very close to them. Relationships are hard work, and closeness makes them even more complex. We often find ourselves torn between staying and running away from a love that can feel like prison. Packaged Lives, inspired by the title of the novella I chose for the collection, is homage to all of us who struggle to commit to relationships and the type of life they impose on us, and at the same time find personal freedoms so we can recharge and return to try again. Life comes in a package, but occasional journeys away from home can provide personal respite. The stories in this volume have in common the theme of the simultaneous need for relationships that anchor who we are and the impulse to run away from them toward what we imagine to be freedom. But the act of running away never takes one to freedom; rather, it reveals even more of the prison houses we live in. There is always that imaginary homeland originating from either our memories of the past or our dreams for the future.
All the protagonists in Haifa’s stories, here and elsewhere, are politically engaged Iraqis in exile. They have all found an alternative life, successful or not, outside Iraq, in this case in Britain. But Iraq resides in them, as if they have never left. Their bodies are in London but their hearts and minds stayed behind in Baghdad. The raving mad protagonists of “Evensong,” “Chatter,” and “Delirium” remained chained to Iraq and her political problems, unable to move on even in their new, comfortable life. The commitment to an imaginary homeland grounded in the past comes to a head with the fantasy for an alternative future in “Duck.” Both the past and the future are prisons. How can we escape and be free when even our very bodies are also prisons, as we see in “Refuge” and “Turnstile”? All is not lost, for transcendence is possible. Haifa is at her best when she writes about the fleeting moments of epiphany, in “Cave,” “Pilgrimage,” “Painting,” and “Packaged Life.” Poetry, art, history, nature, and occasionally a few stiff drinks can get us there. More often than not these come in one package. Intoxication is a way to describe the loosening of inhibitions, emotional, intellectual, and social, to describe total immersion in contemplation, and of reaching a state when and where borders dissolve. The body becomes one with nature in “Cave,” daughter and father, audience and performer, and reality and fantasy merge in “Pilgrimage,” mother and son, past and present, reality and imagination fuse in “Painting,” and history and dreams for a better future, and Christianity and Islam, come together to provide personal relief and glimpses of nirvana in “Packaged Life.”
This is Lun-Yun’s private world. He was not religious but he believed in music, art, literature, lessons of the past, and the unity of human experience of what may be called divine regardless of religious denomination. Like Hassoun the goldfinch in “Packaged Life,” he played music to lift the spirits. He collected paintings of nature and music that offered contemplations on what is beyond reach of our senses. He read books about the past. History was always on his mind. He loved parables. He sat quietly in churches and temples for long hours. He had a particular fondness for Buddhist temples we discovered in the mountains. We inevitably went to a Zen temple when we were in Japan. We walked to the Tibetan temple almost every day when he taught at the InterHarmony Summer Music Festival in Arcidosso, Tuscany. He visited the Dharma Drum Mountain Monastery often and signed up for a three-day Chan retreat once in Taiwan. He would have loved Haifa’s mountains as well as her stories.
Mountains, whether in “Cave” or “Packaged Life,” are sites of epiphany. The climb taxes the body and exercises patience but the reward is priceless. Sitting alone with the clouds up there on a mountaintop, looking quietly at heavens above one’s head, or beholding the earth reaching the far end of the horizon below one’s feet, soothes the mind, calms the heart, and revives the body. The ruins of human civilization and relics of the past in the background deliver a stark contrast for contemplation. There is nothing more cleansing of the soul than the stories of human triumph over the darkness of their history and the violence of their nature, whether by simply surviving atrocities and overcoming their worst impulses or, against the odds, by reaching out to others, to help them survive and thrive. The pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Grave would be, I am sure, Lun-Yun’s favorite.
The stories Haifa tells seem like parables. Her simple language is deceptive. Keen, subtle, humorous, her translucent narrative observes, questions, and moves characters and events but never judges, instructs, or preaches. She leaves you alone to experience the world and characters she lovingly creates, at your own pace and without interference. As a friend, she is like that. So are Mundher and Lun-Yun. They have given me homes but have never made demands. I am always free to come and go. The stories have been sitting in a drawer in our Taipei home for almost ten years now. I began working on them in January, four months after Lun-Yun passed away. Translation, like Haifa and Mundher’s friendship, kept me grounded and focused. Above all, the stories took me to new parts of the world, places I had never been, and at the same time brought me back to a familiar home, to the world Lun-Yun and I shared. For this, and for their friendship, I am most grateful.
Packaged Lives
From The House of Ants (1996)
1
Evensong
One
He felt it was extremely necessary to write a short introduction to explain the story he had begun to write four months ago. He has not finished yet. He had decided against it a few days ago, but this morning as he woke to the sound of loud raindrops on the skylight of his room the idea came back to him in full force. The introduction would be absolutely essential, he thought, for he would want to explain the recurrence of two elements in his stories and for that matter all his writings: diary and dream. He had been writing diaries since childhood, and dreams haunt his body at an average of two per night. He would have cared more in his youth to explain these, but he has changed. Change did not happen to him suddenly. On the contrary, it came to him slowly, sauntering in his footsteps with the passage of time, accompanying him every step of the way as he grew older and consumed more Arak, whiskey, a shot and a beer day and night.
From The House of Ants (1996), 67–73.
The straw that broke the back of his self-confidence and of his ability to formulate ideas and sentences was the title a young critic chose for her article on his stories. It had come as a slap on his face in the morning. He usually opened his letters and the magazines he received regularly in proportion to his contributions. The title was “Hackneyed Stories by a Writer Innovation Left Behind.” What was she trying to prove in her article? Why was innovation demanded only of him and no one else? Everything new he contributed was not enough? Was his name not always linked to the leadership of innovation? What was innovation in a world that recycled its fashions every twenty years? A world that reprocessed ideas for feature articles and regular columns in newspapers and magazines. Ideas, the so-called new ideas, that came from the distant Middle Ages, a time when kings clung desperately to their thrones until their subjects breathed their last.
What did she want from him? Why would she censure him for turning to his diaries? Did they not represent his genuine voice, and a full record of what was happening around him, not just the ups and downs? What was wrong with his dreams? Were they not his only moments of epiphany, when he stepped out of his masquerade, took off his masks, stopped hiding behind other people’s voices, faces, gestures, and all kinds of languages not his own?
Two
He took a sip from his fourth whiskey and lifted the glass up toward the ceiling lamp, twirling the remaining cube of ice at the bottom, before he drained the last drops. He wanted to push all the papers piled up on his desk away from him, to scatter them page by page onto the floor of his room, to kick at his books, and to tear up his diaries into bits so small he would never be able to put them back again, even if he had wanted, as he habitually did, to reread them every morning as soon as he woke up. He wanted to stand on his desk and scream at all the criticism and the whole wide world, these are my stories, this is who I am, stressing every word, as if he did not want to spit it out of his body on its own but accompanied by his soul and the validity of his dreams, in all their plenitude, dreams he had embraced and believed in his youth but had not affected him in any way or mattered to him very much recently. He did not move an inch though. He sat there on his chair, staring at his notebook, papers, his glass of whiskey, and the first line of the introduction to his stories. He muttered between his tightly pursed lips, almost violently, this is who I am.
Three
The only important decision he had to make was whether he should get up and refill his glass with more whiskey or stop drinking. He hesitated for a brief moment and decided in favor of whiskey. He definitely needed another drink before he could write the introduction to the story, before the words would flow under his pen as effortlessly as they used to. He lifted his whiskey glass again and looked at the bright light of the lamp coming through two layers of thick glass. How quiet is my home, he thought, so quiet he could only hear his watch ticking. It is nine o’clock in the evening, no, it is eight-thirty. He set it this way so he could fast-forward the slow evening hours, so he could start drinking earlier and go to bed earlier. Maybe if he could climb up the tall ladder of drink faster to reach inebriation and epiphany he would be able to get his momentous task over with right away. He would finish both the introduction and the story, and at the same time stifle the voice agitating inside for him to write. How he wished he could drag that voice out of his body, fasten his hands around its throat and throttle it to eternal silence. Do they not realize how fatigued he is? Do they not know what homelessness does to one physically and mentally? The taste of the salt of sweat pouring out of bodies no longer able to grasp anything would send anyone into isolation.
Couldn’t they picture what happens to a homeless man at night? Dreams attack him when he is at his weakest, not quite awake but not asleep either, tossing and turning, craving moments of oblivion. Hallucinations concocted by a brain sick with fatigue drown him in a viscous universe out of which he would emerge swamped in liquids discharged by his fearful cells. Innovation? What are they talking about? What kind of innovation do they expect from a man who cannot even see clearly, his mind under the protective shield of alcohol and his vision distracted by the colorful talismans of intoxication. These talismans parade before his eyes, night after night, like supermodels on a catwalk, dizzyingly changing from one designer dress to another. They reclaim him from those who want to take him away and restore him to his mindless daily routines, long hours spent on waiting for the evening to arrive. The evening hours are stretched out in a pool of alcohol, surrounded by a few snacks and some ideas. Heavy, violent, and fermenting ideas stared him in the face, like the first sentence of his introduction to his new story: “He felt it was extremely necessary to write a short introduction to explain his story.”
Why does he want to explain his story? Is it not enough that he wrote it? Why did the article pain him to such an extent? How did he let the words of the young critic crawl under his skin? He took pride in his thick skin, did he not, in his ability to push under the rug the havoc real emotions wreaked? He said, laughing aloud, “Let’s be realistic, it is either that my skin is tattered or her words have touched a raw wound. I refuse to talk about it.”
Four
He was in his late fifties. He could see himself weave a web of isolation around himself. He was afraid to walk down streets unfamiliar to him. He avoided going alone to restaurants, town halls, galleries, and museums. All eyes were on him, he felt, and no one else. He was afraid of meeting people he did not know. Having to answer questions without prior preparation horrified him. At the end of his first English class—and it lasted an eternity—he decided to miss the second lesson, the third, and what might have followed. He would not be able to learn a new language at fifty. He saw no point in repeating demonstrative nouns and pronouns after the teacher, like an idiot, or putting them in useful sentences. He could use some real exchange of ideas, not English phrases for buying a pound of tomatoes or a bus ticket. How many years would he spend learning a language, of which he knew only a few words, before he would be able to fluently exchange ideas with its speakers?
He searched in vain for the spirit who protected human beings from boredom and guarded their lifelong desires, passions, and fascinations, which drove them to seek for the unknown beyond the familiar horizon. He pressed his lips together tightly. Suddenly he felt the magic of the words he was uttering very slowly and carefully, the words that were sliding down the edges of his lips: where is surprise? I will tell her, he said, that I too am bored stiff with writing diaries and recording dreams. They are close, too close even for me, and I, too, want to write about distant topics, topics that do not have their arrows directed at my heart, about other people, about far-reaching ideas. Three words fell into his glass, hitting the bottom with varying force: events . . . about . . . distant . . . He lifted his glass toward the lamp, this time, to see the words gathering at its base. If only he could rescue the sentence, he thought, he would surely be able to write the introduction to his story and the story, well, at least, his short story.
In total mental and physical excitement, he lost the permanent frown on his forehead and began to watch the words glide from one side of his whiskey glass to another. One drop, one word, another drop, one more word . . . He began to rock himself with a tenderness he showed no one but himself, and only in moments of ecstasy, and to swing himself high in an imaginary seesaw. A drop, a word, another drop, one more word . . . One more glass of whiskey and the words would fill the page. “One more glass of whiskey and I will fill the pages with a new kind of writing, with an innovative text that will excite even my old joy.” Another glass.
Very carefully he reached out for the notebook of his dreams. He wanted to write his next dream. He now believed he could invent his dreams, influence them, even create dreams from his thoughts. His dreams were his very life, while he was only one of the elements, all of which have a life of their own in his dreams. Fantastic hallucinations. Could there be anything more fantastic than fabricating dreams? His whole body heavy with drunkenness, he lifted his glass high up toward the lamp in great excitement to drink to the health of his dreams, his whiskey, and the young critic who disturbed a deep wound.
Only alcohol could stop the bleeding inside him. He wanted to have both the here and now and the there and then. If only he could see through the crystal of his glass the mirage of ecstasy, the paradise of souls, and the full-blown sails on a beautiful day. He wanted to break free from the moment, to lose his profound fear, and feel again the flames of the burning spirit of his youth.
The more he looked the less he perceived until he saw nothing.
February 1994
2
Chatter
Place: South of London. A small flat on the ground floor. A big room divided into two. The first half for living and sleeping. A couch is the centerpiece. It is sparsely furnished. A small, low table. A television and a video player with a few videocassettes scattered around them. A wooden floor covered by a Persian carpet. A telephone on the couch next to a notepad and a pen. The second half is a library. Books piled up on shelves reaching up to the ceiling covering two facing walls. More piles of books, newspapers, and newspaper cuttings on the floor. A large wooden desk. A computer, a printer, and books of all kinds—science, philosophy, politics, literature, the visual arts, and exhibition and museum catalogues—occupy the surface. Two doors. One to the kitchen and the other to the narrow hallway leading up to the bathroom and the front door.
