Days of Iowa

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Days have been nothing but inconsistent blocks of time. Some long, some short. Some so vague they hardly existed. And now the clock ticks and all that remains are a few weeks, which can either last as long as a one night’s dream, or a song, or as long as they hours permit.

Iowa City is a town of beautiful demons. You see them scattered, darting, imposing, at times fleeting. They look at us with awe and disgust, us writers from another planet, us writers from across the borders.

Here, there are no borders. Here, there are no limitations. Here, there are pools and each pool is of a different color. But still, they are all pools.

In Iowa City you drink and you dance and you love. Pretty much like anywhere else, right? Wrong. Here you do the living with a bunch of writers and poets, most confused, some amused.

It’s a funny thing, being part of a community of writers and poets. As one myself, I’ve never felt this odd sense of foreign belonging.

There’s constant chatter of literature, which I often find rather pertinacious. But every once in a while, you engage in a revelatory conversation that brings your own writing into prospective. And often, these happen when we are NOT discussing the “impact of the global novel” and the like.

I’ve asked myself many questions that I thought I will have the answers to here. All I ended up having is more questions. We are in this bubble and life is happening out there in the world.

And we convince ourselves that what we write will somehow save the world, one day, one word at a time. But that’s an overly romantic view.

A crazy person in a town full of crazy people will seem like a normal person.

This is what Iowa City is like for writers.

The clock ticks.

A Song For A Generation

If there is one song that captures the feeling, aspirations and fears of a generation of young, moderate Bahraini, it is the haunting and bittersweet “Rebellion” by Bahraini folk singer/songwriter Ala Ghawas.

As we live in extraordinary times and witness an era that has ravaged our humanity, our peace and our nation, the words that resonate with us are that which we hear so achingly sung by Ala in this song.The song is originally a very personal one to Ala. It is perhaps his most personal of all his songs. It tells of his heartbreak at losing a dear part of him, a close friend, to cultural and social prejudices.

Let’s take a closer look at the lyrics of “Rebellion”, which starts with:

Father, I’m running through the fire

I don’t want to belong, I just need a place to admire

Which makes me think of how our Bahrain, the one we were all used to, before the recent tragic events that unfolded. It’s a cry for help, for someone to hear us, help us. It evokes an image of our country on fire, us running through trying to find salvation, our search for not a place to belong, but to embrace.

My friends are gone, one by one

To the fighting, they just can’t live without it

How many of us have lost friends because of what happened? Either because of our strong difference of opinions, or due to fear, or even a friend in one of those who had lost their lives?

And yet in spite of this bloodshed, we continue to fight each other. We continue to distance ourselves, as if fighting has become the only thing we know how to do, even though it was never in us before.

You know I’ve never lost the faith within

If God is with us, then who’s with them?

In the second line of this verse, we find perhaps one of the strongest statements ever put to song. “If God is with us, then who’s with them?” we all claim that god is with us and are sometimes blinded by faith so much that we forget the very basics of what makes us human.

Towards the end of the song, Ala spells out his guts, bears his soul out to us, and in those next few words, paints a picture of how perception, ideas and conflict can either break us or make us stronger.

I don’t wear the black

I don’t close my eyes and ears

To prove piety

I don’t grow my beard

I don’t preach slaughter

I don’t raise a sword for the lord

To show loyalty

And that’s what I see

What’s wrong with unity?

Indeed, what’s wrong with unity? If there is one thing we desperately need today it’s abandoning our own prejudices, religious phobias and piousness, and to remember why we were all here to begin with.

On the Strangness of Life

Life sure is strange. You can never get what you really want from it, or figure out what it wants from you! It’s just a whole mess. Day after day. Day in day out. Comes and goes. Passes and ticks by. And you haven’t a clue what’s going on. You just ride the wave. Go with the flow. Events and decisions (not all yours, matter of fact most of them aren’t yours) and other people, that’s what makes up your life. It all comes together and produces this mixture, sometimes colorful sometimes colorless, but either way you accept it and learn to live with it. Or just let it be. Sit tight and watch it manipulate your life, your mind, your time. Some might call that fate.

Do you know how many times I’ve been carried off the playground at school? Seems that I always get knocked pretty bad, been happening all my life. Sometimes I'd be crying as some classmates pick me up and take me to the principal’s office, and I would sit and wait for mother to come for me. All dirty and sweaty and eyes filled with tears. No matter how many times I got hurt playing, mother always had that same concerned look on her face when she found me.

I’m just waiting. I’m letting the decisions be made for me. I’m running along. That’s what I always did all my life. It’s never up to me alone to decide what to do; actually no one can make a decision solely on their own.

There are always powers and sources interfering, guiding or leading you to make a decision. You’re never in control of your own life. It’s not your life alone, no matter how much you think it is. People and events around us make up our lives, without them we have nothing. Things will always happen in the end. Its the choices you make on the impulses you get in one particular event resulted by a decision that would draw up your recent future till the next decision is made up for you. And then you’re faced with another set of choices, and even then it’s not entirely your choice to go for whichever choice you tell yourself so hard to believe that is right. Tomorrow is just another day, just like today was just another day. Sometimes I feel like there is no past and no future. There is only present. There is only now. So that days aren’t bulks of time anymore, they are just symbols of something, some place, to be in. We don’t move forward. Days, they come to us. We stand still. We wait.

I remember my granddad (from my mum's side) he used to make us laugh so hard, he'd jut out his denture and start clattering them against each other and make these funny noises with them... or he'd take them off and give us this huge toothless smile! It was silly but when you're little anything like that makes you laugh. When he died, I remember how bad mother took it. She was very close to him. And somehow he used to hold the whole family together (after he was gone everybody get further apart and lost contact). Everybody loved him, he was such a character.

Funny all the time, even at the worst moments and situations. I remember that night I heard he had died, I sneaked to the back of the house and started crying silently, alone. I don't know. I just didn’t want anyone to see me cry, for some reason. I missed him that night more than I did afterward. I used to keep his thick black sunshades and his old, rusted ring... the glasses have disappeared since, but I still have that ring.

What Do We Want?!

What do I want from life? What do you want from life? What does anyone want from life?

Beats me. That kind of changes every so often doesn’t it? Well, perhaps the essence of it doesn’t. How often we get asked that question? How often do we ask it ourselves? We always think we know the answer. It’s somewhere tucked away at the back of our heads. Surely, we DO know what we want! We must, mustn’t we? Otherwise the world is callous and preposterous.

I want…

I want to love
I want to live
I want to dream
I want to fly
I want to become
I want to be complete
I want to smile
I want to be happy
I want to be loved
I want to have lots of sex
I want to trek the Himalayas
I want to wake up every morning and not feel that there is something missing, that there is an emptiness, that, next to me, ahead of me, behind me, there is no more than what I see
I want to take pictures, write books, make movies

I want to
I want…
I…