Such a long moment and the river has not vanished from the sight as yet. I look around and talk to your spirit. Not that I don’t see life around but it helps to speak with what is intangible. Little Berry is what I call you after the protagonist of Peach and Mulberry, however you remind me of Mahmoud Darwesh, Fairuz, Golsheftah and Ghadah Al-Samman as well. I am amazed how things metamorphose in one’s life. Before meeting you, whenever I thought about Iraq, I thought about Imperial invasion, war over oil, resistance, bombshells, Saddam Hussain and the false glorification of Islam. But realities change like the weather changes.
Lava Omer Darwesh, I met you in 2017 and I am writing this after the dawn of 2019. Time has passed, however and wherever. The other night I asked you that what was it that we did while we were together and both of us could not find an answer to that. Because, we did not speak about literature, nor did we party as we would have wanted to, nor we went out as much as we would have liked to, so what we exactly did?
Here, here, I have something to tell you!
Do you remember riverside which has witnessed tears, screams and laughter? Do you remember the streets in the Spice Market when we walked and walked and my Millennial Baby won’t stop photographing the city? Do you remember the room where I would just spread myself over the couch and wait for you to pour me the Arabic tea Chuck had kindly brought for us? Knowing that I was a loser when it came to groceries, you’d still knock the wood out of my door. And, well, the crazy way you and your badass aunt spoilt my prospective potential date, I will never ever forgive you both for that (Note it somewhere). Do you remember the days when we did politics and you freaked out? The entire Kurdish and Iraqi politics somehow, somehow became our cheesecake in Ghada’s room. And, above all, how the five of us would go around the neighbourhood screaming the good Arabic and waving people our courtesies.
Time moves on but memories don’t. The last night when Santiago was leaving and you slept in my bed while I kept speaking about Ranjit and Waqas, it amazed me how you could just tolerate every stupid thing I had in my bucket and you would just hush yourself to sleep.
Writers are weird beings. They introduce you to a world which you have been living in for decades, and centuries, but you are not aware of. I really wanted a pretty decent, literary profile to go the picture I took of you but, trust me, there is so much which literally non-literary that I have postponed it for some time.
Escritura 