Introduction by Robin Moger

I first encountered Golan Haji in 2021, when the Egyptian magazine Al-Manassa published a short piece by him, an extract from a book-in-progress about the life of Kheir Eddin al-Assadi, a twentieth-century Aleppan scholar, bibliomaniac, antiquarian and surrealist poet, the author of something called The Comparative Encyclopedia of Aleppo (seven volumes with entries on 20,000 words, divided into the city’s “55 arts of speech”).

“Each city is cities,” Haji wrote. “And, occasionally, the writer is a battalion. What is better able than language to incorporate every possible human thing? Life, like words, is governed by the rules of grammar and composition. The word is a journey that does not end, a myth lived daily; in everything one sees a symbol and a truth. By reading the world as a text written with breath, al-Assadi was Sufi. He built his city in a book, breathed its spirit into the pages and, gathering from speech the scattered fragments of the living and the dead, of men both neglected and famed, he encompassed the world’s chaos in the chaos of the alphabet.”

The more I read of Haji’s work, the more this piece returns to me. Al-Assadi’s “vast library”, which “occupied a whole floor”, finds its counterpart in the encyclopaedic clutter of Haji’s mind. And like al-Assadi, he too is a traveler, though with a broader compass: he crosses the borders of both country and language. “I live in a moving, linguistic in-between, as if in no language,” he has said.

Haji is a Syrian Kurd who writes in Arabic – “a second language” – and translates into it from French and English. He was born in 1977 in Amuda in north-eastern Syria and now lives in Saint-Denis in France. He has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Word Rejected (2023), and is even more prolific in prose. In any case, his essays are impossible to extricate from his poetry. Both share a density of reference to sources across the vast sweep of the Arabic tradition and through to contemporary literature in English, French and Farsi; both tease out the ramifying meanings of words with repeated passes of etymology’s comb. As one of Haji’s champions, the poet Fady Joudah, has observed: “He writes his essays as if a poet is writing a memoir, but ends up with a journey through the soul of the world/the word.” Though many of his poems and essays can be found in translation, most notably by Marilyn Hacker, his only English book is A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know (2017), a selection of 61 poems translated in collaboration with Stephen Watts.

The text below is a lightly edited extract from a chapter of The Wandering Kurd, a volume that is itself a compilation of unfinished books on a breathtaking range of subjects. Haji’s memoirs of a Kurdish childhood branch into etymology and language games, nature writing and political history; his extensive recent art criticism, with its attention to imagery and process, finds echoes in his travelogues, which run through Damascus and Beirut, Berlin and Nantes, en route to Saint-Denis; essays on Syria’s present horrors decry the external censorship that has been imposed on local cultural production, and are studded with the most generous and enlightening references. A piece that begins with Andalusian flower poetry passes through the tenth-century Levant and William Carlos Williams.

The Wandering Kurd, which is seeking an English publisher, opens with two telling epigraphs. The first is an Aleppan proverb recorded by al-Assadi: “Four were created for corruption: the rat, the locust, the Bedouin, and the Kurd.” The second is an extract from the 331st of The Thousand And One Nights (Haji reminds us that in this great work, Kurds feature principally as “a mendacious rabble”). When a judge accuses a Kurd of stealing a man’s knapsack, he responds: “Your Honour, all know this sack of mine and know what it contains – its castles and forts, cranes and lions, the men who play chess and their boards; its mare and two foals, its stallion and two steeds, and its two long lances; there is a lion and two rabbits, a town and two hamlets, a whore and a pair of sly pimps, a sissy and two bottoms, one sightless man and two most perspicacious, a lame man and two limping, a priest and two deacons, a bishop and a brace of monks, a judge and two witnesses – and all will bear witness that the sack, this knapsack, is mine.”

All Haji’s writing comes out of that knapsack.

On 13 November 1960, the Shahrazad burned down, claiming the lives of 283 children. The mud-brick cinema in Amuda was showing an Egyptian film at the time (dark crimes and romance: The Midnight Ghost) chosen by management over a biopic about Djamila Bouhired – the profits would have been sent to support the revolution of a million martyrs in Algeria. The ancient projector, which had been playing films all Sunday long, now overheated. A spark leapt from the magic box and brushed a sackcloth drape, igniting it. Running through the straw and planks of the flooring, the fire caught on the bamboo chairs and mud-brick benches.

The auditorium was packed with students from two primary schools, Al-Ghazali and Al-Mutanabbi. Those who jumped through the only window to escape the flames tumbled down the well immediately outside; others, piling through the narrow exit, sealed it tight; the rest suffocated and were scorched.

The smell drifted through the late afternoon air to the surrounding villages, whose residents, seeing the black smoke climbing up, readied carts and wagons and rushed down to the town’s southern district. They knew the firemen would only get there once it was too late. Between the cinema and the hospital, surrounded by mosques, they lost their way.

They were cursing Gamal Abdel Nasser. These were the days of the union between “the sisters”, Egypt and Syria, and they were convinced that the man who had forbidden Kurds from rearing their goats had now given orders to smother their progeny in the cradle. It was said that the fire was the God of their ancestors, immolating children for their fathers’ sins. “Ibrahim, father of the Kurds,” a crowd of women from Malali and Mashayekh cried out. “Why won’t your Lord make His fire cool and harmless for my son, too?” And maybe that, too, was why some of the wounded, mummified in their bandages, later passed away. Even in their prayers, the villagers clung to their polytheism, invoking others alongside Him – so God had withheld autumn’s blessing, kept it trapped in heaven.

It rained that day, but only once death’s business was done, the black water flowing past the houses like a clown’s tears. People started calling Amuda Cinema Town.

The screening room was as black as the base of the wheat-boiling pots at autumn’s end. A calligrapher (also a bodybuilder) slipped into the room to scrape the sticky soot off the walls, collecting it like powdered charcoal in a big bowl. He would use the residue to paint kaabas on the whitewashed rectangles by people’s front doors, beside the words that greet pilgrims returned from Mecca: “A blessed hajj / and a praiseworthy effort: / Who visits my tomb must pray for my soul”. The same soot was sometimes mixed with mother’s milk and pricked into tattoos of wings on newborns’ ankles, to help them escape the dangers that lay ahead.

Even though it happened many years before I was born, consigned to police files marked “no perpetrator”, we all knew of the fire. It was the reason why I was always frightened by the white flecks that spat and danced on the edge of the screen as the reel ran on. To this day, the first thing I do in any cinema auditorium, before the show begins, is make sure I know where the emergency exits are.

My friend Nuh used to borrow copies of Cinema Life from his teacher. He’d page through issue after issue, sitting up for hours each night, hunched over a copy in the mudafa, the guest annex that had become his study after his father’s death, sipping cold tea. He savoured imagined scenes from the films he read about, whose stills he’d see reproduced, but which he had never seen in motion. And the more his imagination worked, the more he fell into them, loved them like he was part of the cast. He started to wonder – half-fearful, half-thrilled – that he might leaf a page one day to find himself on screen; to discover that, unbeknown to him, he’d played a bit-part in some film.

Nuh considered keeping the dead company, projecting not Cinema Paradiso but Oblomov onto that sacred screen, the wailing wall within our little town’s cemetery. His thoughts were of the corpses interred in the Tombs of the Black Angels, our name for the mass graves in which those burned children were buried when it proved impossible to identify them.

Aboul Nanaat would join us for the sessions where we discussed films we’d never seen. His passion was for book titles, and he knew a vast number of them off by heart. He would finger through catalogue cards in school libraries and the cultural centre’s archives, pore over the Babtain Encyclopaedia of Modern Poetry, skim the listings of new releases in the Lebanese press and issues of The Arab – but I can’t recall him having ever read a book. To him, titles mattered more than content: they were the distillate, the key. What need was there to run flailing into a novel’s ocean of blather, to force down a dense textbook or work of criticism that only pretended to gravity and depth? Why batter through a mountain of paper only to find yourself back where you began, unable to remember a word past its title? To Aboul Nanaat, the only true book – or the only perfect book – was the Quran, because it was memorised word by word.

Poets from neighbouring villages would seek him out to suggest a title for their self-published collections, something unique, but as far as I know he never gave them what they asked for. Instead, he offered those poetry-loving Bedouin long and tangled phrases, or single-letter interrogatives and imperatives – Ma, Qi, Ra, ‘Aa (What? Protect! See! Be aware!), or letter games: for instance, raa‘i, meaning shepherd, was the ‘ayn el-‘aql (the “eye of the mind”, or the summit of reason) because its root letters Ra and Ayn might separately stand for ru’ya and wa‘iy, meaning vision and awareness, which is to say, basr and basira, or sight and perception.

Whenever our conversations grew heated, Aboul Nanaat liked to respond with titles of these books he’d never read, answers that were epigrammatic, obscure, shorn of explanation. If we were roaring with laughter, he’d mutter, “there is no strength or power save in God,” then announce, “Laughter and Disaster”, the name of a collection by Bandar Abdel Hamid. Unpicking the riddles wasn’t always easy. Who was ever going to know, or remember, the author of The Sorrows of the Green Moon, or Love and Theology, or Behind the Mirage? We had no chance of matching his obsessively acquired knowledge.

He had his own system of classification. For instance, he would describe Syrian poetry as two parties struggling for power: the Ministry of Prose and the Union of Meter. The first was headed by Antun Maqdisi at the Ministry of Culture, which published many Syrian and Arab prose poets; the leader of the second was Ali Uqla Arsan, who ran the Pan-Arabist Arab Writers’ Union, a stronghold of metrical poetry. Arsan’s comrades – or fellow warriors, if we consider the word to be a weapon (and Ba‘athists, like communists, most certainly believed that it was) – had embellished his past. As a boy, they would claim, he had learned to scale the minaret of his village mosque in the countryside around Deraa, and this was why he was such a deft opportunist: climbing ladders was no problem.

From time to time we would be joined in Nuh’s annex by another young man we called Sculptor. He was good with his hands, and had written, in Kurdish – a banned language that he’d had to teach himself – a lengthy elegy with a title to match: “My share of the misfortune: the imagined fates of the children who died”. He lived right next to the cinema, which over the years had transformed from a site of holocaust to a little garden with a statue, the “memorial” that was now the focus of Sculptor’s attention and his scathing commentary: “That’s not how you memorialise something! Where’s Bavé Behmed, who saved the kids? Why did that government artist Mahmoud Jelal only sculpt three children? Why have they got the Algerian flag up and not the Amazigh flag, when it’s the Amazigh who are persecuted like us Kurds? If it was up to me, I’d have a statue of Joan of Arc standing calmly amid the flames, or of the dragon being slain.”

Sometimes we’d meet there, hopping the garden fence as the gate was usually locked and gathering around the backfilled mouth of the well that had swallowed the children who leapt from the window. We would recite elegies we’d written, or observe long and silent vigils that were only broken when one of us posed a question in the form a single word, to which someone else would muster a curt and cryptic response:

“Cigarette?”

“White regret burned down by the unemployed boy.”

“Sisyphus?”

“Beetle hoists a dung ball in its antlers and scales a hill filled with graves.”

We loved to sit in the shade of the pines and listen to the wind. The straight trunks whitewashed from their roots up reminded us of the white boots worn by Turkish soldiers. In the branches we had hung dozens of tiny cradles, woven from the orangey pine bark. Each bore the name of a child who’d perished here, written out in sunlight and burned black beneath a magnifying glass.

The Sculptor would argue with everyone about the garden. “Knowledge is relative,” he’d always say; in answer to Aboul Nanaat’s questions: “There’s no need to treat everything like a competition… ” He would ask if we knew the name of Maradona’s barber, or of the midwife who delivered Isaac Newton, or the number of mules around whose necks Mela Mustafa Barzani hung lanterns then sent on ahead to trigger ambushes in the Qandil mountains. Or how many matches it took Mazlum Doğan to set himself alight in Diyarbakır Prison.

He’d made a little scale model of the Colosseum, its smooth stones collected from brooks that ran down the foothills of the Taurus mountains and the springs of Serê Kaniyê. There were coloured pebbles you could chew on, soft as erasers. He also went collecting in the bodies of his forefathers and uncles, which were veritable quarries; the unspoken agonies held in men’s innards petrifying with the passing years like the pearls that oysters shape impossibly slowly in the sea’s dark depths. He explained: “The smaller the pebble, the sharper the suffering and the louder the cry, the same as the troubles that find us in reality. The petty things take you out of yourself; you blaspheme and swear for the smallest reason. As when a swallow shits overhead and the good omen runs down your glasses, or you stain your shirt just as you’re getting ready to go out, or you loosen a screw with the tip of a knife. Disaster, on the other hand, freezes you, strikes you dumb; you might even act as though nothing’s going on.”

He liked to mock the word “project” and the reality show The Million’s Poet, in which people competed to be crowned the best poet in the Arab world: “They must have stolen the idea from Amuda”. Nevertheless, he began a project of his own, in honour of his mother: “The Million Pebbles”. It was to a be a “vast” work of art, incorporating parts of her body: he had already embedded her gallstones into the base of the model. She had insisted on seeing the wound after they’d removed her stone and the stitches; the great scar beneath her right breast, reflected in the mirror at home, had startled her: “Who cut this big black grin over my liver? Did they think they were giving me a smile for life?”

In the model Colosseum, the Roman arena of death became a little dish for treasures, like her ashtrays decorated with shells. She would drop the family teeth into it – the grandchildren’s milk teeth, the grandfathers’ false sets, wisdom teeth – along with her own gallstones and kidney stones and urinary sand, then put it back behind a white curtain embroidered with flowers, from which hung a kohl pot, a little mirror, and pockets to hold scissors and a needle.

We walked together on the endless plains, reciting the old poets. We trod the boundary lines between fields and waded through wheat until our trousers turned patchwork, blotched with green. The lucky one got to hold a china box we called “the plumb line of innocence”. It held milk teeth. When you shook it on those still spring afternoons, amid poppies in bright sunshine, its rattle was the music that accompanied the recital of a young poet seated on the ground beneath the sky.

But the Kurds’ spring is bloody; their March is a month of joys and disaster. On the night of 24 March 1993, another great fire at the Hasakah Central Prison consumed (among others) 25 Kurdish inmates. The following morning, still unaware of the event, I had propped my motorbike by the bakery on the west side of the town, and was securing it when I heard a scream. At first, I thought nothing of it; I imagined one of Sculptor’s relatives clutching at his side, mouth gaping, caught short by renal colic. You would sometimes catch sight of them in the distance, flipping in agony down a hillside, the cylinders of their bodies rolling like gas bottles, maybe accompanied by their donkeys: tipped on their back, hooves lifted to the heavens.

I stopped to listen, and heard something like a cry for help or a complaint. I followed the sound. It was the metal-turner Felemez, surrounded by neighbours. His dark blue overalls were spattered with engine oil. He was out of control, shaking his blackened fists at the sky and raving, having heard the news that his brother had burned to death in Hasakah: “A smoker! A hash smoker! Kerosene! Insect powder! Blankets!”

We walked up in the fields later that day. There was no poetry spoken. As we were getting ready to leave, Sculptor said: “Blood becomes dust and water. Just like our neighbour, Youssef the tailor, who stitched blue overalls with green thread, Napoleon was colourblind, too. He carried his massacres on into spring because to him the blood flowed green, indistinguishable from the fresh green grass. The French are poets by nature; a nation of envious, jealous poets. This is why they bombed our town in 1936 after the massacre of the Christians, the year my mother was born. They burned the livestock and they burned the wheat fields before the harvest could be brought in, but they never went near the brothel and the slaughterhouse, which were built by a Frenchman.”

Six high school students together; we hadn’t discussed it beforehand. We loosened the ears of the Ba‘ath flag – untied those four flapping corners – and let it flutter down into a puddle of rainwater. Then we hurried from the scene of our petty desecration. The key was to get away quickly, away from the crowds of potential witnesses who lined both sides of the main road outside party headquarters. I didn’t even look back to watch the Ba‘ath colours being smeared with mud, trampled under the feet of people leaving the Evacuation Day celebrations, its polyester sheen being pricked with embers from roadside torches. The next morning, after we saluted the flag and chanted party slogans on the basketball court, the school principal thrashed his cane to splinters over my bloodied, outstretched palms. He had selected it from a pile of dry branches that came from the pine trees towering over the east end of the courtyard.

I was suspended from Al-Ma’arri High for a week, but my family didn’t realise it. Every morning, I would get ready for school as though nothing was out of the ordinary and then, dressed in my paramilitary-style uniform, head off to the plains. There was always the nagging thought that a Turkish soldier might mistake this little figure for a conscript, wandering alone through the open expanse, holding a book, a crust of bread and a lump of salty white cheese sprinkled with poppy seeds, and with a Russian-made telescope tucked beneath his jacket – to spy on the Taurus mountains. A goods train might pass through, the cattle’s tearful eyes visible though slots in the sides of the carriages. A herd of sullen mules might be descending the lower slopes towards fields sown with watermelon. I had with me a selection of poems by Mani the Mad, which had caught my eye at the Hurriya Bookshop, where it was clipped to a clothes’ line with a pair of pegs.

The locals were offended by the ugliness of the muezzins’ voices. In The Book of Songs, al-Isfahani tells how Mani the Mad once heard a call to prayer that upset him so much that, scrambling up to the top of his tower, he “took the muezzin by the beard and gave his bald spot such a slap it seemed his head must fly off”. The construction of a huge, multistorey religious school was underway in Amuda, each of its four minarets overlooking a different street. On the wall that ran down Malali Street, it read: “Mosque for sale”. Outside its gate, drunks lifted up little bags of cigarette butts and ashes, demanding Sheikh Abeed give his blessing. The sheikh was known to have a green hand: a touch would turn the ashes to pistachios.

Before me the plains run into the distance, where the National Water Company office stands: the only building in this direction, with its little courtyard of pines. Over the years, storm winds have clipped their heads off, lightning has split them. One or two sway in a soft breeze; the rest don’t move. A riddle that perplexes me: a double gate held shut by a rusted assemblage of lock and chain.

I jump down from the fence, shielded by the trees from the possibility of a carelessly aimed warning shot. White feathers: soft, caught like little sails on the grass in the shade. A slender leaf twirls propeller-like in its fall. I pick it up and clamp it between nose and lip to give myself a thin pimp’s moustache. In a patch of sun, a Sharq beer bottle glitters greenly on a bed of dry pine needles, wrapped in a faint steam that rises from the rough dirt. Teenagers run wild in this courtyard after evening falls, their drunkenness taken to its pitch when the April breeze comes through and the moon is full. They down little bottles of lightly scented gin and lemon that they keep tucked at their waist; the Yazidis sneak hits of the lettuce proscribed by their faith. I don’t partake.

And I jump back out. I lean against the south-facing wall, where someone’s scrawled “fareeq saher al-kora”: the football wizard’s team. The hollow of the “a” at the end of kora has been painted in to look like an Adidas ball. The sun hides, a light wind springs up, and shadows speckle my body; light dresses me in a dead leopard’s still-warm hide. Overhead, bronzed and heavy with cones, dead branches hang next to living boughs on the same tree. The needles are dusty green. I love how they feel, like when I leave the barber’s and sweep my palm over the clipped brush at the base of my skull. Above the stacked twigs and branches are layers of cloud, each sliding in a different direction. “It’s because the wind runs down invisible lanes,” I tell myself: “It twists and turns, runs into itself.”

The clouds move faster in the morning. They drift away and their sumptuous white turns grey. The heavier clouds, plump as naked monarchs or stickers of putti on the cover of a school book bound in blue card, drift west to Serê Kaniyê. They are brighter, lower, slower. On their white shelves, I stack a library of the mind: the books I haven’t read, or haven’t had the time to read, or to read again. The points of my elbows and my shoulders rest against the wall, and I raise my head. The boughs branch like the blood vessels over my grandmother’s brain, which I saw in a VHS recording of the catheterisation. They are the veins of the air, as seen in the ground’s snapshot of the tree with the sky behind, or maybe a white cloud, like the backdrop in an ID photo.

I think to myself that I’ll stay here until these peeling trunks are blushing in the evening light. Sheltering from the April sun, I cover my head with Mani’s poems. The children of Hazdeh will be passing soon, filing on foot from the Salim al-Sayyid High School to their village. I had just heard one shouting – “On high!” – and the cockerels had crowed a pious reply: “qul qul qul qul qul qul… ” Say say say say say… Say, in the name of your Lord. A phrase never completed. As though the echo is a vast boulder rolling across the fields, I track it with my eyes. And do not see it.

In the distance, amid the fields’ green, is a Nissan pickup. Orange, tiny, the cargo bed shivers like a tit’s tail. This is an Electricity and Communications Company vehicle. It usually lives in the garage beneath the post office known as the Eiffel Tower, but now it’s heading to Umm al-Rabie, the village of the al-Ghamr Bedouin. Whenever called out for repairs, the pickup is driven by Bashir Hazouke, the communist engineer whose quick-tempered outbursts cause his blood sugar to spike. Having to drive out here means he’s probably feeling that way.

This is bee-eater season. Are they ever eaten? Like when the girl feeds her lover grilled bee-eater in that song by Gulistan Perwer? They move and stop in small flocks, and their green feathers blend with the grass of Tell Mozan, whose knoll lies still as Sinbad’s sleeping whale, deaf to the Nowruz fireworks, a campfire kindled on its back. The flocking bee-eaters wheel slowly. Tiny wings. Breasts iridescent in sunlight. A beauty the beekeepers loathe. No sooner as their soft call is heard and the birds are spied on the phone lines strung over the barley, there is the echo of gunshots. It’s the hunter. Instead of the bee-eaters, he hits the lines on which they perch.

The phones of Umm al-Rabie go cold.