A Childhood in Kurdistan

on to literature. Since American bombing campaigns altered the political and social landscape of Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been a steady progression of books from a previously ignored region. Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul was a surprise international bestseller; Jon Lee Anderson’s The Lion’s Grave was a wonderfully scripted account of a voyage into a strange and dark world.

It’s a perfect insight into the worldview of certain sections of our liberal intelligentsia. If any good at all has come out of George W. Bush’s messianic War on Terror, it is a contribution to literature. This is particularly grotesque given the subject of her interviewee’s book:

Hiner Saleem’s My Father’s Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan begins with a vision of idyllic rural life. The names are changed, but it is Saleem’s story. It opens with the author as a child, eating pomegranates under a leafy mulberry tree at the feet of his mother. He feels secure within his extended family. We meet his father, his brother — a rebel fighter — and his cousins. We are drawn into an intimate, lost world.

Then things grow dark. We slowly begin to wake up to life under Saddam Hussein. A cousin is brutally murdered by Saddam’s forces, tied and dragged behind a car until he is bloody and unrecognisable. There are whispered conversations of armed struggle, resistance, punishment. The narrator’s father, a Morse code operator for the Kurdish rebels, takes his family to live temporarily in a cave.

The idyllic world is shattered. Instead, there are refugees, anxiety, fear, escape. And the realisation that there is no real home for the Kurds, no friends, as the Kurdish expression goes, except the mountains.

Saleem brings us into this very intimate world of a country that had been forgotten and was persecuted relentlessly by Saddam. It is a portrait of a people who have been hunted down, gassed, beaten and still do not have their real freedom. The narrator tearfully describes being forced to attend classes in Arabic, rather than his mother tongue, Kurdish; of leaving his home and coming back to find it occupied by another family. He describes the sound of warplanes razing his country as he’s sitting in school.

Hmm. Whatever happened to that nasty Saddam?

Given that Hiner Saleem is a deeply political man who dreams of a free Kurdistan, it would have been good to hear his thoughts on the current situation in Iraq, but Janine isn’t interested. Instead she wonders if he shares her views on the “soulnessness of Hollywood”, but he fails to rise to the anti-American bait. And nowhere is there a hint that, thanks to Bush’s “messianic War on Terror”, for the first time in decades these are hopeful times for Iraqi Kurds.