Sinan Antoon - The Book of Collateral Damage

The Book of Collateral Damage

SINAN ANTOON

TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC BY JONATHAN WRIGHT

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON

The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

The author wishes to thank The Lannan Foundation for a residency in Marfa, Texas, in June 2014.

English translation copyright 2019 by Jonathan Wright.
Published by arrangement with Rocking Chair Books Literary Agency and RAYA, the Agency for Arabic Literature.
Originally published in Arabic in 2016 as Fihris by Dar al-Jamal, Baghdad/Beirut.
Copyright 2016 by Sinan Antoon.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Quotation from Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time, from Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger, copyright 1999 by Maria Kodama; translation copyright 1999 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. All rights reserved.

Quotation from Jorge Luis Borges, Cambridge, translated by Hoyt Rogers, from Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, copyright 1999 by Maria Kodama; translation copyright 1999 by Hoyt Rogers. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955516
ISBN 978-0-300-22894-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

He left many blank pages in it.

On al-Fihris (The Index) by Ibn al-Nadim (d. 990)

They speak for the dead and translate the speech of the living.

Al-Jahiz (d. 868), on books

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collectors passion borders on the chaos of memories.

Walter Benjamin

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river. It is the tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time

We are our memory,
we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,
that pile of broken mirrors.

Borges, Cambridge

I can still remember the first time I flew.

Come on. Its time! my father said firmly before flying off. My mother pushed me gently with her beak toward the edge and whispered, Dont be frightened, my little one. Youll fly. We all fly. Ill be right behind you.

My three siblings were flying happily in the sky, oblivious to me. My heart was pounding, as if it, too, were also worried its wings might let it down. As if, like me, it was torn between the fear inside, which kept me in or close to the nest, and an overwhelming desire that compelled me to be like the grown-ups.

I moved forward warily to the tip of the branch, which dipped a little with my weight and that of my mother behind me. I didnt look down. I looked up, where my father was circling in a clear, cloudless sky. I spread my wings, then looked back toward my mother. She didnt say anything this time but her eyes gave me courage and she kissed my head with her beak. I remembered how she had often told me that we have strong wings and that mine would one day carry me to distant lands. I looked ahead and summoned all my courage and flapped my wings with vigor.

And I took off.

I couldnt believe myself. I flew with confidence, as if I had often flown before. The cold air swept past my white feathers. The whole sky was mine and the whole earth was laid out below me. With a flip of a wing I could twist and turn, rise and fall. I kept flying till the sun bade us farewell. I was the last to return home that day.

I laugh now, and Im embarrassed too, when I remember that moment and the fear that later left me. Here I am now, flying with the grown-ups for days on our journey to the warm lands.

A drop of sweat fell on the edge of the piece of paper and I stopped reading. His handwriting was neat and confident. The ink was black, maybe from a ballpoint pen. The words were perched like birds on lines that looked like small sky-blue threads running across small brown pages. I probably thought of this because he had written about the sky and flying. The passage reminded me of the storks nest I used to see in Shorja on the dome of a building when I was young. I turned the page. The title of the passage that followed also began with the word colloquy.

The air-conditioning unit in the room was panting and sputtering, and the pores of my skin were oozing sweat from the heat. I wiped the drop of sweat off the page with my finger and caught another one that was rolling down my forehead and about to drop. I left the pages on the bed next to the buff-colored notebook, stood up, went to the air-conditioning unit, and turned the dial counterclockwise as far as possible. I went to the bathroom and washed my face in cold water. I dried it with the towel and went back to stand in front of the air-conditioning unit for thirty seconds. I thought about the long, tiring journey to Amman. I had to pack and sleep a little, because we were scheduled to leave Baghdad at six a.m. I went back to the bed and read his letter a second time:

Dear Mr. al-Baghdadi,

I hope you had a productive day in the arms of your fatigued Baghdad. Apologies for intruding and daring to disturb you. But Ive thought long and hard about the happy coincidence that brought us together and about your sincere interest in my project and your kind offer to translate it (although Im not in a hurry to have it translated or even published, as I mentioned, at least not for now). I decided to take a risk and lay claim to more of your generosity and kindness. I sat down waiting for you at the hotel reception until half an hour before the start of the curfew so that I could deliver this part of the manuscript to you personally, but you didnt come back. Thats why Im writing this letter. I attach the first chapter (its the history of the first minute, which has yet to be completed, and I do have my own opinions on whether texts end or not and I might tell you about them in the future). I hope you like it and I hope youll give me your opinion with the candor and rigor of a critic and a writer, even if it is negative.