Wake up you immigrant Canaanite, don’t drink the water, move your feet back and forth, move it until you lose all sensation but don’t stop moving.

My hands were swollen and bruised, it looked like water balloons penetrated the pores of my body and took refuge. I wanted to be tickled, to feel my fingers. Why was I not a fish, why was I a complete person, I wanted to become a half-person, I wanted an animal in my body, preferably an amphibious fin, crimson-coloured, I like the colour, I want a big fin, no, a wide tail.

Damn these limbs, what use are they to me now. What was that shadow on my face? It looked like a capsized boat. Was it speaking to me, transmitting voices I couldn’t understand? What was the matter with me, was I speaking the language of fish? I couldn’t understand the voices coming from the boat. Their screams were intensifying, but I couldn’t understand a single word.

That Ethiopian, yes, she sat on the side of the boat with two Afghan children on her lap. Her eyes lit up the Aegean Sea. The boat rocked, it was the children, damn them, they drowned her, why did they have to cling to her long legs. I used to enjoy looking at her legs, they eased the burden of the tough journey. How clear they were in the sun…undevoured by shadows, ineffaceable by the dust of the place. They were eternity and entity, the soul and prostration.

She had made oars out of her legs for each child to hold on to, who clung to her for fear of drowning. But her body betrayed her and the waves rose and the boat rocked, and her spine jumped towards the water. It wasn’t a chord backbone from the first beings…

I held on to her braids like a rope, yes, I pulled and pulled, but I was afraid of tearing her face off. I let go. I wonder if she became a fish. Where were her legs, I couldn’t see them around me, was I her first creation? Did a new creature pour out from between her legs?

The Iraqi woman, where was her big belly, where was her baby delivered? I couldn’t see the placenta in the water. She never did cut the umbilical cord. Look, you Canaanite immigrant! He was tied to his mother, the child’s pulse was the thing to become a fish. He liked the water’s oxygen; he didn’t know anything about the oxygen of the air. He was a miracle, bound to have grown fins by now, no, wings, and when the time was right he’d fly to heaven. This creature out of the corals and leaden sky will reorder the dust of the universe, and the darkness. The miracle child, the awaited saviour. Damn you, wake up, and let me feed with you, nourish me out of the umbilical cord. God must have looked out for you, he hid for you in your mother’s body enough food until it was time for you to get out of the water.

What’s this? It sounded like Turkish. Fish spoke Turkish now, hmmm. It was the Turkish coast guard, they were fishing me out of the water. I felt something sting my body, was it hot or cold? Tickles or a beating? They were killing me, taking me away from my sea and my fish, my transformation was not complete, I’ll lose my fins, my fins will go. Look you idiots, I wanted to say, I can be a fish that sleeps with its eyes open. 

‘Are you happy now, you fool? Keep the blanket on your body, you’re dying.’

When I heard those filthy words, I burst into a fit of hysterical laughter. I couldn’t feel my jaw, was I laughing?

It’s Canakkale in Turkey, I still hadn’t arrived on the Greek island of Mytilene. The barge betrayed us, it wasn’t big enough for us all, or maybe we betrayed it, being more than double what it could fit with all our bags. Those suitcases that were thrown in the sea weighed sixty kilos. They were in the bow of the barge (the rubber boat) and the owners refused to give them up. We were forty-seven in a boat that was meant for 25 refugees (individual immigrants are a commodity). Damn all the definitions. We were five hundred metres out to sea, the cold licked my limbs, it was licking my navel like the coarse tongue of a cat, but its sprays were cool. I couldn’t feel my navel, none of us felt that hole in the middle of our bellies, we were from (Ethiopia, Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Iran. We were from Iraq, Syria, and Palestine). Five and a half hours, three more and the water will go over our heads. The Ethiopian’s hair remained wrapped around my fingers. The coarseness of this hair told me of a force I had been previously unaware of, until the muscles in my hands weakened from the strength I needed to not let go. Those strands of hair seemed to like this Canaanite’s hands. The temperature didn’t rise above -15 degrees, perhaps even lower.

I was dancing, yes, dancing in that club, that Iranian girl, she was beautiful, like an old Canaanite. I wonder if we had invaded her homeland as we invaded our own. Oh, I don’t know, it’s the sound of loud music, I felt the swelling of every atom in my body and my mind. Did the cold store all this in my body? I felt as if I were drowning. Why did the sensation come late after the brush with death? That noose I hung to hang myself with in my parents’ ancient house, or those pills that piled up in my stomach… and I did not die.

Why do I scrutinise all the methods of the end from the ancient sacred and philosophical books? Or is everything a journey like everything is fate. Was I not guided except for this journey? The journey of silent drowning. Why were they screaming, if death was inevitable then let it be light on the larynx lest the soul be scratched on the way out.

It is Nietzsche, the corrector of human error, no, religious mythology. There was consciousness and nothing preceding it. God had nothing with Him and it was God and nothing before Him. One plus one does not equal two, but is equal to an infinite number of everything, of metres and kilograms. Time is the only measure of things. What did God say according to the Prophet ‘Don’t inveigh against time for God is time.’ God needs time to pass through existence.

I was at school, dreaming of birds and killer reptiles. My mother took me to sheikhs who read verses of Qur’an with their hands on my head, perhaps the creepy crawlers might crawl away from this boy’s head, who in the third grade and at eight years old thought that he would grow up and become a prophet. Even if he died, then he would be resurrected to another planet far away, for new inhabitants, a mother and a father who didn’t belong to his old planet. 

What did Mahmoud Darwish say in the Dice Player? “Who am I to say to you

what I say to you, I am not a stone burnished by water to become a face, nor was I a reed, punctured by wind to become a flute. I played no role in what I am, I happened to be a man, I happened to see a moon…”

A curve ball, a transitory dream despite human nature. A coarse but handsome hand, it was my father’s hand, it couldn’t pull me out of the water but it struck a passing ball. My mind juggled too many balls. They struck. I couldn’t stop my hand from reaching for one cigarette after another. I smoke too much. I smoked long Marlboroughs, a good fit for my imagination.

In dice everything is chance, even my dream. I danced and danced, my hands and legs moved like ants that time, I felt as thin as a thread. A bazooka in one hand and Vodka in the other. Oh, I was flying in the river, I broke the oath I made to my mother and threw myself in it to save that (immigrant guide), who lost his balance when he put his foot in that other torn rubber boat.

The cold rubbed up against my body. But I was the Canaanite soldier, the one who ran away from his military service in what they call Palestine. I performed my soldiering on the river when I saved that guide, the killer of the ancients, the moderns and the passers-by.

I kissed a bronze medal bearing the badge of victory, a necklace given to me by a young man, an immigrant like me, in a neighbourhood called Aksaray in Istanbul. Aksaray, the Turkish witness to the Syrian tragedy. How many Syrian immigrants live around me, behind their walls in their rented apartments, who can’t find the price of a stale loaf of bread. My immigrant friend could only wish me good luck.

It’s Las Vegas, no Vegas, yes that was the name of the Turkish nightclub. Another boat roamed near my face. I saw a wooden bar, embossed with ancient carvings, and a reddish-brown tinge lighting up its edges. But it only carried glasses: six glasses of tequila, sprinkles of salt, but it isn’t of this sea, rather it belongs to a sea I have yet to cross. The acidity of the lime squeezed me to a seed. Yes, a seed of creation. Yes, death made his way, like myself.  It was the tequila, it relentlessly crushed the imagination. The colonial crushing of my new reality, but I was the noble savage once again, but I wasn’t on all fours, the bazooka in one hand and the ‘I.D.’ vodka in the other, yes, in the middle of the church of Aya Sophia. History mocked me. 

But who was this? It’s the Iranian, she’s feeling me up. Am I in her bed? Stop, I can’t do it when I’m like this. What was wrong with this Canaanite with the stirred desires, he didn’t want her to touch him! Was he chaste, or the painting of an artist that has yet to rot? No, it’s the noble savage once again.

I was not in Turkish Aderna and I hadn’t arrived in Marasia (the Greek side). That smuggler duped me. I was imprisoned in a disgusting bathroom, no bigger than two by two metres. We were nine young men inside. It was brutally cold, dirty walls, foul smelling… Where would we find drinking water when the water from the toilet ran out, after we had sucked the ice into milk, after we were lost in the white snow of Mount Olympus, witnessed by the logs and the trunks. Nestled in the branches of the trunks of the oak and pine trees were the ghosts of all the immigrant soldiers throughout history and novels.

I didn’t know if my shoe was expanding to make room for my foot, or if it was my foot that drowned inside the shoe, or were they bruises I no longer felt, after we had crossed 220 kilometres on foot towards the white hell of Thessaloniki. How many thorns had grazed our faces as we threw ourselves into the snow at the sight of a police car.

The wool gloves I wore under my leather gloves could no longer protect my finger nails, I didn’t feel any pain, as if they fell off, perhaps it was unfair of me to suck on the nipples of the Iranian woman, for who was I? Who did I think I was? She possessed a Canaanite beauty that melted the Arabic definitions. Damn it, ‘Even riding the wind, I cannot escape the alphabet,’ Isn’t that what Darwish said? Yes, it’s Darwish once more, helping me to destroy the fantasy. Didn’t he say: ‘We wrote the texts for them, and hid behind Olympus, the starving pottery sellers believed them, and the quenched gold masters made liars out of us, it is the author’s misfortune, that fantasy is reality on the theatre stage.’

Damn the entire Arabic language, it’s only a manipulative form of communication, just as I manipulated that woman’s nipples, without desire or lust. Two and a half million Arabic words, the largest number of words on the planet. Did the sound come before the letter, or did the signal come before the sound? Or was it the pain of the Iranian woman that preceded everything? Nothing suits me, but I am not tired of travelling.

My friends were arguing, they pounced on each other like hungry coyotes, and for what? The dry date that was forgotten in my pocket, along with the wet note, the last hundred euros I possessed, after I had paid thousands of euros to that smuggler in winter. They fought while I turned at the sound of the young man’s cry, whose name I didn’t know and who I couldn’t bring myself to rescue. It was the storm that pushed him down the foot of the mountain, as did our camp when it drove both him and I outside. Maybe he came from a camp that was like mine. Is he Palestinian, or a Syrian or an Iraqi or an Afghan? That camp was defiant but vindictive.

They say revolutionary anger is one of the most important elements of a successful revolt, but it was the camp which avenged itself on us. I didn’t know if it was his scream that I heard, or was it my own muffled yell, and I turned away as if I hadn’t seen him. I couldn’t go on any longer, I just couldn’t. I wanted to die by his side. He would have loved that cottage that sheltered us from the cold, and where we ate the boxed apples that had been set aside for fermentation (to make cider). That Christian cottage in the Greek village of Messinia, among the huts that belonged to Muslims speaking Turkish. There was a cross on the wall, and it was uninhabited. There were thorns lodged in my clothes, and I was covered in mud, completely soaked. The police took us after that warm night. There were two of us immigrants in that police car. They reported us, and headed from the village of Soufli to Athens, and we returned to Turkey, and didn’t cross the Greek border into Belgium.

These dying coals are keeping me company, it’s my childhood, but they were not the bullets that struck my father’s body. My father the volleyball player in that damn camp. These bullets hit me with a hunger I have yet to satisfy. A hunger I searched for, and still search for in mythology, archaeology and in every relic, and for my old name. One of the old gods of Canaan will take hold of me and swear by lightning, this is my orphan son.

Yes, I studied archaeology without finding my identity in stone. Am I really who I say I am, here I am, like Darwish searching once more, or did I, as Joe Bousquet said, ‘‘My wound existed before; I was born to embody it.”

And with all that filth that surrounded me in that narrow bathroom, with every ice storm that burned my tongue, with the last stolen date my friends fought over, with the victory medal that poor friend gave me, and with the embers of the coal, and with the bullets that only killed my father when the camp betrayed him and his comrades. With that comrade, one of my own, who blasphemed all that was holy and accused my father of harbouring disloyalty and his camp, and turned his weapon against him. I am still like Muzaffar al-Nawab, I love wine and the Arabic language and the world.

My legs encircle the flame of the brazier here in Istanbul, in Aksaray.

Notes

*Aksaray (meaning “white palace” in several Turkic languages)