An Excerpt from ‘The Feathers,’ a Novel by Salim Barakat

Salim Barakat’s unique novel The Feathers has been translated into French, Spanish, Catalan, Swedish, Kurdish, Turkish and soon Persian, but not yet into English. Thus far in English, there has been a selection of Barakat’s poetry Come, Take a Gentle Stab, translated by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen, and published by Seagull in 2021, which Seagull will follow with Barakat’s memoir of childhood, The Iron Grasshopper. forthcoming in Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy’s translation in the fall of 2024. Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo writes in his introduction of to the Spanish translation of the novel, “The Feathers is an authentic feast for us, for that kind of reader on the edge of extinction, who is obsessed with reading and rereading every great piece of literature”.

Image from the Spanish translation by Carolina Frías y Almudena García, Las Plumas.

From ‘The Feathers’

By Salim Barakat

 Translated by Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy

First Part

 

Second Chapter

  

 

An indispensable narrative to complete the genesis of Mem Azad as jackal!

 

The female jackals’ howling calls transformed the darkness of the night into a garden lit by obscure crystals. Mem Azad was not yet asleep, tossing and turning in his bed spread out over the house’s roof, obsessed with his desire to go downstairs on this night. Laying on the mattress, his eyes fully open, he stared at the summer night sky that the people of the Northern Syria knew inch by inch. They were used to spending the night on their patios or their roofs, fully covered by the darkness, with no chance of recognizing the space around them unless they were smoking; only then could you locate the burning heads of their cigarettes. And when they put out their cigarettes, the little burning ashes scattered, like lightening bugs, in the improvised memory of night.

Starts all over the sky. Camouflaged distances between the stars that reach the other side of the universe, where the other cosmos is behind the throne of Allah that hangs over water. But Mem is worried that he might have a repeat of the last night, when he found himself in his bed, on the roof, listening to the female jackals’ howling calls coming from the northern fields of the city of Al-Qamishli. The jackals’ voices had a magic depth he never experienced before. He was used to the howling of these nocturnal animals causing only two emotions: gloom or familiarity, depending on the mood of the one who was staying up late. But to get out of the bed, as Mem did, and to walk to where the calls were coming from, that was something he’d never considered.

Leaving the roof, Mem went down the wooden stairs, heading directly to the house’s iron gate without turning to his father, who was staying up late with friends, sitting on carpets spread over dusty grit. He left the house and headed to the western quarter of the city, where the irrigated fields were side by side with wasteland, fighting over what little water remained, pumped out of machines that were getting harder to find in the markets a few years after the Arabs’ defeat in a war they entered in 1967 with no military secrets. It was the golden year for Hamady Azad, Mem’s father: “The Greater Kurdistan is no further than the head of my cigarette,” he said, pulling the smoke to the bottom of his lungs and bones. But day after the day, Hamdy’s Kurdistan kept moving away from his rough fingers. The defeated countries, from the North African desert to Khorasan, gathered to defeat Hamdy Azad, who got lost among his people in his attempts to prepare them to lead a Kurdish future.

In his striped pajamas and shaggy hair, Mem walked toward the western fields, crossing a few alleys between the small houses until he came face to face with the naked openness of the space that was bordered by the hill of Hilaleyah village, a little bush with no more than a few stripped tree trunks, and the furrow that was once a river, before the Turks came and diverted its course to negotiate with the drying-out Arab countries—with all their money, their armies, their luxuries deposited in western banks, their cloaks, their clouds, and their dialects—to sell them a spring or two from the waters of the Taurus mountains.

In penetrating the deserted bush, Mem leaned over, the bend of his body derived from a desire to walk on his hands and feet, to sniff the land hidden beneath a layer of dry tree leaves. He was feeling the place, which had been dark and enclosed before opening itself to his senses. He began to distinguish the live plants from the dead ones, and the dry coarse dirt from the soft wet soil. He was able to pass between the patches of wild mushroom around the stripped trunks, the ones hiding under the dry leaves, and the ones that were waiting for the chance to grow up, cracking the fragile layer of dust woven over them by coincidences arranged by the wind.

            On his hands and feet, Mem’s running was much more agile. The place that was immersed in its nighttime darkness began to have visible details for his keen eyes. He—in a way he’d never done before—was sniffing in every direction with a keen sensitivity that was able to separate a complicated mix of odors: harvested ears of wheat, a cucumber field, a little stream of water, humans who had just passed by on the dirt paths that connected the bush with the hill, wasteland, irrigated land, sandgrouse in their camouflaged nests between the wild malabar cinnamon, a far-away chicken coop, dogs.

It was not just smells to which he had this sensitivity to but also movements and their sounds, both near and far: the movement of tree leaves, the movement of a bird’s wings in the heart of the night, the movement of field rats, the growth of some plant, the wind passing through the dry branches of the little bushes in that naked openness of space, and even the moaning of dead bones in their faraway graves.

            The geometric space of Mem’s body seemed to walk in harmony with the air. There was a greater balance between himself and the directions around him; he just needed to crane his flexible neck to see better, or to sniff the spots more deeply with his wide nostrils, or to check all the movements around him with his articulated ears, which were turning like the eyes of a chameleon.

            All at once, he was close to the earth and in the heart of the open horizon. The little hedgehogs avoided him in their movements under the weak pale light of the night, and he avoided them as well. The lightning bugs avoided him, and he avoided them. He had a light fur that sensed the movements of the air. His claws, with which he held the ground tightly, were much clever than his human feet, which had disappeared once he’d begun to walk on all fours.

            Everything around Mem was light. His lungs were strong like his night. He was emptied of any human knowledge. He had only the knowledge of his senses. Cautiously, he made decisions about how to move in darkness; darkness was the only thing he knew, as if he had never witnessed daylight. Only currents of odors gave things their shapes, origins, desires, and violence. With his agile steps and a hardworking soul, Mem was trying to arrange his world, to slowly adapt to the absence of the certainty that humans are proud of, and to leave behind their claim to know how to plan for a future. Now, in the ongoing overwhelming transformation of Mem Azad into a nocturnal being, into a jackal, he could no longer be sure of any calculations. Even his heading toward the north now, after changing his direction from the west, was driven by his instinct to follow the swarms of female jackals.

            Mem was as light as a ghost in an arena that could afford nothing but ghosts. The quiet spread like a thin layer of mist over the place’s naked openness, preparing its sensors for anything that might create a whisper or a clamor. As for the place, it was like a taut string, stretched between Hamdy Azad’s house on the western side of the city and the village of Hilaleyah, like a fever with two modes of attack. During the cold attack, it was better not to talk about the dead. They were moving from the Kurdish province of Badlis in Turkish Kurdistan to somewhere nobody cared about. This was because the fifth law of May 1932 said that the Turkish ministry of interior had the right to change where people were living depending on the proximity of their relationship to Turkish culture. And because the Kurds were not a part of that culture, their dead had to move from their graves in the province of Badlis, to wander with no destination.

            As for the hot fever, the place had no tongue, because the Turkish Kurds in the Mardin, in Nusaybin, and in Cizre, from the middle of the century to today, in addition to the Syrian Kurds on the banks of the Jaghjagh River and the triangle of land bordered by the rivers of Euphrates, Tigirs, and Al Khabour, had to eat their Kurdish tongues while other tongues, such as the Assyrian, the Armenian, and the Syriac, were spoken in their high-ceiling schools with their brick roofs. The prohibition was a part of the eleventh clause of Turkish law in the year 1934, which says that anyone who does not consider the Turkish language to be his mother tongue cannot build new villages and cannot be a part of workers’ unions. Somehow, some of the minorities were exempted from that law, but not the Kurds. And in the year 1934, a deal was made between the Turkish government and the Iranian one to end the Kurdish issue. Thus, the borders between the two countries were closed to prevent “bandits” from hiding in Syria and Iraq. In later years, North African governments entered the fray, punching the soul of Hamdy Azad, who sat there with his sleepless guests. Everything had become very similar to what happened in 1930, when the Iranians allowed the Turks to enter their land to strike at the rebels. Surprisingly, everyone was allowed to enter each other’s lands from the east, west, north, and south, carrying his different mother tongue to chase “the stray Kurd” upon written and non-written treaties.

But Mem Hamdy Azad was free of all of that. Now, he was the king of the wind and the night. He was crossing the bush from the western side of the city, with his snout pointed toward the north, from which the strong odor of a group of his strange kind was coming. When he neared the barbed wire that drew its forced line between Syria and Turkey, he found himself amidst a group of female jackals in the middle of a cucumber field, fenced in by little aubergine shrubs.

            Everything was relaxed and joyful, like a cloud of laughter over a dark sky. The nocturnal beings caressed each other, biting, rubbing, and gently wailing. Mem surrendered to the joy that imbrued his soul. He was even more playful than the others, caressing them with his fangs along their legs, waists, and necks, jumping into the air to avoid their bites, chattering with his premolar teeth, as if he were devouring the night.

            The night was ready to be devoured. The night was generous in giving its nocturnal beings a childhood that was unlike any other childhood. Thus, like his mates, Mem raised his howling, reaching as far as his voice could reach, with no barrier or rebuke from anyone, shattering every other voice around him as if he were shaking the certainty of that silent land, that silent water, those silent plants; he was shaking the certainty of that silent air, and the certainty of Allah who was silent as well.

Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian writer who has published dozens of novels and poetry anthologies. Raised in northern Syria, he lived in Beirut and Cyprus before settling in Sweden, where he lives today.