ESSAY
Dreaming an Almost Impossible Dream
by Anees Adam – Photography by the author
The story of my birth goes like this: I was born frail and sick, and it did not seem that I would survive. The elderly nurse asked my mother if she had any children, and when she was told that my mother had a daughter and two sons, the nurse said to her that I might not live, and that my mother already had three children anyway.
Adaka, my mother, wanted to name me Ali. I am told that I cried a lot. My elder brother tells me that he raised me more than our mother did, because she did not have time from her chores to look after me. We were poor. Father had a second wife. When my siblings and I were younger, we played a game where our parents had to choose only three children, and I rarely made the final cut.
*
I was friends with my female cousins before I got admission in school. There were five of us. After our daily sipara session at the mosque, we would usually fight boys from the neighborhood in the afternoons, and, later, we would play house or throw stones at the apricot trees in the neighboring gardens.
We climbed trees, stole eggs, and milked our cattle in secret, and dreamed of plastic bags full of tadpoles turning into fish. We collected white stones, wildflowers, and beetles that we called “airplanes,” and, occasionally, if we found porcupine quills, we fought over them. My cousins had friends from all over the village who would bring us turnips, figs, dried mulberries, and sunflower seeds in exchange for apples from our garden.
The walled garden attached to our house was our primary playground. It had two main doors, ninety-seven apple trees across four fields, five plum trees, two pomegranate trees, two water motors with their own separate pools, and a shallow well in which, one afternoon, a sheep fell. The women grew tomatoes, maize and vegetables, and there were nests hidden in the trees that us children looked for each summer. Even now, from time to time when I miss home, when the noise of the city gets to me, if I sit with myself for a good while, I can clearly recall the smell of apples from our garden.
Late in the evenings, we would gather around our favorite aunt, and she would narrate to us moral stories, folktales and myths. She would even indulge in gossip at our cajoling. She would tell us about the woman who was possessed because she had killed a white snake, and an old man who was in love with a Hindu girl half a century ago and sang of her in his dying days. This is how we got to know about all the interesting, unusual, and ridiculous characters of the village. We knew who howled at the moon, who remembered his past life, who had secretly grown a tail because of dealings in forbidden practices, who stayed up all night, and who visited the dead.
I do not discount anymore who I am and where I come from
Those were the simple days of joy and wonder. Life was young, and we delighted in the ordinary beauty of the seasons and attended to the world wholeheartedly. Curiosity was the only truth we knew, the only virtue. We were strangers to exhaustion – even in sleep, we ran after roosters and filled our pockets with frogs. We lived for fruits of all kinds, for play, and for stories. We would stare at the night sky till late, counting stars amidst whispers and giggles until we fell asleep.
*
I was not frightened of God or even men until I started school. It was there that I got to know more and more each day about what was going on in Waziristan. Post America’s invasion of Afghanistan, evil was inevitable at our home place – war and violence poured into the tribal countryside. People gave asylum in their guesthouses to the displaced from North Waziristan, and there was a constant fear that we in the South might have to leave. How much of your home can you pack to carry on your back? How do you process the news when you learn that a classmate’s father was executed on tape, or that a teacher who came to school with a gun has killed a man, or a model student has ended up somewhere across the border as a mujahid?
The so-called War on Terror, drone attacks, landmines, suicide bombers and bomb blasts, public executions and hangings, clashes between armed groups, and between militants and militia in the dead of the night, paranoia, and the news of death – all became routine. Religious extremism was voiced in public and in sermons, as the norm of the socio-political atmosphere. The countryside of our revered mountains was a theater of war while we went about our days of childhood in that war zone.
*
My boyhood in Waziristan was a constant nightmare. I was not yet ten years old when I was introduced to anxiety as a solid thing in my throat and in my stomach. Like a shopping bag wrapped around my brain. I was frightened of growing up further. I was frightened of becoming an older boy, possibly a man someday. It was men we were at the mercy of – angry ones, at school, at the mosque, and even at home. The good and kind ones could not make up for the menace.
Horror took place far too frequently – every other day, we would hear about something tragic. We had to cling to the happy things for us to want to go on living, to survive. The kind of things that made life possible for the time being, while we dreamed of a life elsewhere. Mothers and sisters, with whom I was surrounded, embodied the patience of stones. It meant the world to them that we returned home safe each day – even though some of us secretly desired violence and even death.
No one sat us down to explain to us our misfortune and make sense of the plight that had befallen us because of being born a Pashtun in Pakistan, near the Afghan border. And that we were at a time in history when artillery borrowed from the Cold War was smuggled across the border like toys from a charity organization. No one talked to us about the hundreds and thousands of landmines that were planted across our rough tribal country as if they were deodar seeds and acorns. Gunship helicopters would come along in the name of peace like aliens supervised by some Greek god with the threat of turning mountains into ashes. There were drones circling our villages, for years, high up beneath the clouds like dragonflies – even children knew that those objects were not cranes that they might have seen in their elder siblings’ textbooks. Fear accompanied us to school daily – out of the house on our little backs, as if it were a thing in our schoolbags.
*
My older siblings and cousins were readers. We were not allowed to go outside the house and join other boys in play, so we got into the habit of reading in order to escape our sudden new reality, and, with the passage of time, those of us who kept up with reading fervently looked for ourselves in books. By the time I could read there were enough books at home to keep me occupied.
I was given two Rupees of pocket money for school each day, and often I would save the money over the course of the week and buy booklets of short stories on Thursday. Tarzan with his talkative monkey companion and Umro Ayaar, the genius trickster, were my favorite series. Reading made me feel less alone. It was also necessary that I had a way to escape into myself and grow up in my head.
Later, getting my hands on an Urdu digest or the Akhbar-e-Jehan magazine used to be an event. Dastan-e-Mujahid by Naseem Hijazi was the first novel that I read. Everyone was reading Naseem Hijazi. We had the complete set of twenty-one books, and I read a dozen of them before I got into Urdu poetry in my teens. Poetry tended to my terrible tribal heart for a while, like prayers – against the alienation I was living through in my youth, and against my mutilated past.
I still hadn’t read a book in English by my early teens. That changed when I started helping a class fellow with homework, who, at my request, would bring me little books of tales, quotations, and an English-made-easy series from his uncle’s library. There was another friend who would let me borrow his phone so I could binge-watch half a dozen films on Fridays, usually Hollywood cinema in Hindi dubbing.
I got hold of two pocket dictionaries, Urdu to Urdu and English to Urdu. I became obsessed with learning new words. Around that time, I was trying my hand at writing Urdu poetry, and, once in a while, the boys in the class would ask me to write love letters on their behalf to their lovers. I wrote letters to an imaginary friend, and in time this exercise turned into a diary. I usually wrote about what I had dreamt the night before because I had read somewhere that dreams predicted your destiny.
I had first seen the face of a dead man when I was a young boy. He’d been killed. I had seen enough dead men by the time I had a trace of mustache and I stopped attending funerals altogether. God was an angry man who spoke a foreign language and surveilled our little lives 24/7. Young men killed and died in His name. Maulvis wagged their fingers at us with glares, and talked about the many layers of hell and the many many heavens. Fear defiled our lives and it was their fanaticism that got to us like a disease. We hated people that we did not know and were guilty of sins that we did not commit. When I sometimes think about that now, I feel that I would have easily believed in my mother’s God if I’d been born somewhere far away.
It must have been around the time when I got into reading, I thought that if I knew more, if I pried and inquired into things, somehow I would understand the disorder and reason away my hurt, and be able to think about hope and change. I thought that way for years. But my efforts were in vain – nothing made sense, nothing seemed to change. I was lost, and I could not contain the disorder. I did not know yet that I wanted to be a writer and tell stories. I was in pain. I wished to leave school and go far far away as if true life was elsewhere.
Post America’s invasion of Afghanistan, evil was inevitable at our home place
How do you give up on belonging to a place? How do you stop meeting people and visiting places from long ago in your dreams? How do you not seek fragments of home in foreign place? In what language do you grieve for a friend? How do you still believe in poetry to set you free, and the possibility of beauty and love, and not wish to die at a young age or to never have been born in the first place?
It had become widely accepted throughout my family and at my school, by the time I was fifteen years old, that books and cinema had messed up my mind – I got into arguments with teachers and with whoever claimed authority. I did not want to simply accept the things that were told to us. I questioned them because I could see and, for once, voice the disorder in my life and in the world around me. I did not want to hide behind our culture, and sermons were of no consolation to me. I had grown furious and rebellious.
Death concerned me the most in my teens, but somehow being a teenager meant hope as well and, at times, imminent escape, for the world was a big place now, in contrast to the helplessness of my boyhood. I was in the middle of things. I had an opportunity, a chance at change. What mattered was who was in love with the wheat-colored boy, who had the best music playlist, who scribbled love poems on scraps of cigarette packets and left them around the town. And every once in a while we went up to the barren black mountains to view sunsets.
I remember, early in my teens, I would keep little notebooks, hiding them from my siblings. In them, I would collect Urdu verses, proverbs, and quotations. It was only in the last year of high school that I started to think about writing, and from then on, I read like my life depended on it. Books, as always, proved to be my safe place, and I found the best of myself in them. They allowed me to make peace with who I was and with existing in the world. I learned that I only have to be a human being on earth and give uncertainty its due value at the end of the day.
I had read a good amount of books by the end of high school, and kept a daily journal. There was an essay competition in town promising cash, and I got second position. It meant that the dream of being a writer was fated. The prize money paid for the hostel in a far away city of another language, and allowed me to get into a college, a government college where I started FA in Urdu medium. I just had to leave – anything would have done.
*
Over the years, I have come to realize that there is not much in my life about which I can say that I want to live for it, except my writing – I believed in it even when I had no idea where and how to start. I have left home. I have left a degree and a job, I have stopped praying but the dream of writing has been constant. I kept journals for more than half a decade before I had the words and the courage to write about the things that matter to me. Since I have always sought to relate to others and to the larger human experience, I feel that I have to contribute to it as well. And, slowly, the blank page that once used to be a seemingly unending nightmare, is becoming a pathway home – across gardens and graveyards, the very landscape of my soul.
My writing oscillates between fear and acceptance. I worry that I do not really know how to be a writer, that I don’t have much of a voice. That I am unable to maintain the rational language of a detached narrative structure, a clever plot, a clear setting, and objectivity. But then I consider my life, and I forgive myself the superficiality, the broken voice, the woundedness, and the uncertainty. Whatever I am able to write is from my life. My words are stained with the questions at the center of my heart: who am I, where do I come from, what do I do, who do I become? I carry my people and our home place, both willingly and unwillingly, in my heart.
I know the dream of writing, of poetry and storytelling, seems like an impossible dream, but it is definitely the dream. It is a painful want because I can see that the struggle I had with writing four years ago is the same, and my inability haunts me. I write to remember. I am not good at forgetting; I try to recall details of my home and cling to bits while realizing that I’ve already left and that home is no more. It is my misfortune that I am what I remember, mostly, and it might be seen as a limitation, but right now I’m choosing it to be this way.
*
All through my late teens and early twenties I used to think that I was supposed to die at a young age. It was less a thought and more a belief. It was agonizing to be me. I could not cry for a long time. I could not imagine a life beyond my insecurities and anxiety attacks that corroded my heart. But I’d kept on, even when I was isolated and felt the most abandoned, because there were books to read and poetry to recite. I have only found home in books for the past couple of years. It was books that taught me that we become humans in relation to others and to the wide world.
Writing has allowed me to be someone—anyone. I am less a stranger to myself now than I used to be. I process displacement and seek wonder through writing. I seek to become again the curious young boy whose mother and teachers scolded him for his questions about everything. I have arrived at myself, in fragments, through writing, as it has revealed to me again and again what I had been hiding from myself.
I am not an anthology of loss and love poems, colorful and desperate. I am water out of a boulder that flows down a hill, a house sparrow for a heart, and sweet memories of apples. I am not the son of my father and I don’t speak his language. I am a bunch of strangers named after me that I have to house in my skin. I am not about the ways of others.
I do not discount anymore who I am and where I come from, the life that I have lived and survived, and the ideas and experiences that occupy the back of my head at all times. I am a witness, and I try to confess to things and claim my share of life, of love, of loss, and of all the other things of the human condition.
I am twenty-seven years old, and across my life I have only been able to earn money either by working in our apple garden during summers in my younger days or recently through content writing. I have not seen apple blossoms for almost a decade now, and I have given up on my fantasies of escaping into the mountains and becoming a shepherd. I would like to have a long creative life – a writing life – and earn a living that is, in one way or another, about books, about poetry, about ideas.
Writing started out for me as a way to retrieve my losses, to rage and grieve, and to name things for myself. Writing, now, is an attempt at freedom. It has allowed me to aim at becoming, and to desire, to dream impossible things, and to author a life for myself against an ensuing and invariably impending nameless despair that I have inherited in my blood. I learned only recently that I have to write whatever I can and approach it as an emergency – as though I have to meet a deadline. Subjectivity is usually considered a problem, but I have to stand by myself in kindness and own it, and let my writing be water. Thus, I come back to myself, to home.
Anees Adam is a poet and documentary photographer from Wana, Waziristan. He has an affinity for rocks—from little stones that one could carry home in one’s left pocket to big mountains. His work is usually centered around identity, home and belonging. He is doing his bachelor’s in English, and works as a content writer.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE