While we were all evacuated to the yard outside that separated the library and workshop buildings from the classrooms, the unruly gang were subsequently banished from the school. Everyone in the overlooking classrooms watched as they stood up and started to kick the tin, which eventually set fire to the wood piled up outside the workshop door. Having lit a fire in a tin of samneh or maybe dates, they sat around the flame, raising their hands toward it like a group of Zoroastrians. One day, they were loitering behind the woodworking shop near the school library. Our headteacher had been so worn down by a group of wild and troublemaking students from our school in Al Jahra that he left them to squander their education and future, rather than rile their parents.
Although, if confronted, I would always claim it was an accident. The books that no one bothered to chase me for, I kept.īut there was one time-and God may judge me harshly for this-when I deliberately stole a book from the school library in Kuwait. Some of the books were given to me by my teacher, while I borrowed others from various people I knew would never read them. And so, my multifaceted journey of collecting books began. It wasn’t perfect, given that it was the handiwork of a fourteen-year-old boy, but the joy I felt as I placed the first two books on the top shelf was indescribable, even though they were just books I’d found in a house that had been abandoned by its family. I took the dilapidated drawers to my room, brimming with joy, and used a hammer and some nails to stop them from wobbling. Bursting with an excitement that was clearly unreciprocated, I replied: “I’m going to make my own library!” My father just waved his hand at me dismissively and walked away. “What do you want with other people’s rubbish?” my father asked me. Once, when I was a young boy in Kuwait, I had brought home a set of rickety drawers. Then I sat back and simply gazed at them.
Once we’d settled into our accommodation in a small house on Norris Drive in Ottawa, I arranged the books on the sleek wooden flooring, the place being still unfurnished. These would constitute the entire library I would survive on, for however long I ended up living in estrangement. I could only bring four books with me from my vast library back home: Al-Mutannabi, in two parts the collected works of Mahmoud Darwish and just one of the volumes of The Unique Necklace. The suitcases were packed with clothes, kitchenware, Indian spices, and various items we didn’t think we’d be able to find abroad. I knew exactly what was in each bag, just as I knew the pain and angst of the five travelers heading toward the unknown. When my friends and I left the homeland, my second departure from Kuwait, there were five of us and ten suitcases.
Translated from the Arabic by NASHWA NASRELDIN
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