The Pianist of Yarmouk Aeham Ahmad

From every conflict emerges an iconic photograph. Nine-year-old Kim Phuk, in 1972, running naked from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War, or the body of refugee Alan Kurdi, aged three, washed up on the shore near Bodrum in 2015. The 2014 image of Aeham Ahmad, playing an upright piano surrounded by the debris of Yarmuck, is also unforgettable.

It does not have as much pathos, of course, as depictions of wounded or dead children, but there is poignancy and romance in the idea of music floating through devastated streets. The minaret piercing the dust-laden air provides an alternative hint of hope. On the one side is art, culture and religion and balanced against it is hatred and violence. These are the creations of humankind.

A picture is, allegedly, worth a thousand words. And here is the nub. The Pianist of Yarmouk presents itself ‘as told to Sandra Hetzl and Ariel Hauptmeier’ and then translated by Emanuel Bergmann. It is like a camel, in that the ungainly humped animal is, it is said, a horse developed by a committee. Hetzl and Hauptmeier, and many other people, appear in the final acknowledgments, credited as having ‘stood by the side’ of Aeham Ahmad and given him support, help and encouragement.

Collaboration is admirable but it doesn’t make the book well written. The language is inelegant and the structure is clumsy and repetitive. But it is a great story. Or, in fact, two. Firstly Ahmad describes his blind father, a character who merits a memoir or biography of his own. His relationship with his talented son, Aeham, and with the music they make, is extraordinary.

Secondly Ahmad tells the tale of the Seige of Yarmouk. His account of the former refugee camp and its fate provides another piece of the jigsaw which Europeans need to construct if they are to get a better understanding of Syria and its ongoing war. Sitting cosily in Ireland, worrying about the availability of tinned tuna after Brexit, becomes ridiculous.

Ahmad, who won the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights in 2015, demonstrates immense strength of spirit in his refusal to sell out to extremism even in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances.

Ahmad was born in 1988 to parents of Palestinian heritage. The family lived in Yarmouk which had grown beyond its refugee camp origins to become an impoverished suburb on the outskirts of Damascus in Syria. Because his father is blind his elder son became his seeing-eyes guide and companion. The lack of eyesight did not affect the patriarch’s ambition and confidence. He made his living as a carpenter and a wedding violinist but determined that his son would be a classical musician.

Higher Institute of Music, Damascus

The first section of The Pianist of Yarmouk details the struggles that father and son faced to secure places at prestigious music establishments where the boy faced hostility and prejudice from wealthier, more bourgeois Syrians. Being blind meant that Ahmad’s father could often get entry to places from which his lack of status would normally have excluded him, and enabled him to persuade school authorities to accept his son as a pupil.

Ahmad’s studies demanded all sorts of unaffordable equipment such as solfège exercise books, music scores and, of course, a piano to replace the family’s lowly electronic keyboard. Although Ahmad was naturally musical he was no genius and success came only as a result of hours of practice. Sometimes, as is natural, Ahmad preferred to go out and play football in the streets but the influence and wrath of his father repressed these urges most days.

The story that Ahmad tells lists events in his progress through his musical training but does not really explore his relationships with his mother or brother. Neither does he provide a three dimensional impression of his own character and emotions. He states baldly that from an early age all he wanted was a family of his own but he does not seem that interested in girls. After many attempts he persuades his mother to find a wife for him and then he gets married. That’s it, really. Although the young couple seem to have been inseparable from the moment they met.

Equally sparse are references to religion. It appears that Ahmad’s attitude to God is pragmatic and not in any way fanatical. He prays passionately only when he is in trouble. It is reminiscent of most people’s attitude to Christianity. Much of the time they don’t give it a thought but at times of crisis they turn to God for help. On the other hand his faith in humanity is strong. He states, ‘whether someone was Jewish or Christian or Muslim, Orthodox or agnostic, gay or not, didn’t matter to me. The only thing that matters is being a wonderful human being’.

Yarmouk before the civil war. Alexios Konstantos

In Yarmouk life was a constant struggle for Palestinian Syrians. They had very few conveniences. Journeys to school, involved three buses and walking, taking two hours or longer each way. Building and labouring had to be done by the men of the family. Everything took forever. Money was short. But they were happy within their community. Ahmad says, ‘we’re sitting in our store throwing another log onto the stove, roasting chestnuts in the embers’.

But then the Syrian Civil War intruded. The streets were barricaded and their neighbourhood sealed off. Tahani, his wife, gave birth to a son. The small family existed surrounded by ‘hunger and death’. Reports came in from the rest of the country. Towns controlled by the Free Syrian Army were now besieged by President al-Assad’s forces and their populations were being starved to death. Before long the citizens of Yarmouk would also be eating clover and leaves. Ahmad’s brother, Alaa, disappeared in 2013 and his parents have still found no trace of him.

 

 

Ahmad himself was not entirely despondent. He and a friend, Abu Mohammed started a street choir. At first it was for men only. The participants brought in poems and Ahmad set them to music making refugee songs about longing and survival.   The band had the idea of taking a piano out into the street and a local journalist filmed them. The song, ‘Oh You Emigrants Return’ was uploaded on YouTube. Thus the concept of Ahmad as the piano man of Yarmouk was launched on January 28^th, 2014.

The Yarmouk Boys soon disbanded. It was the usual story of ‘petty jealousies’. For a while Ahmad played with a choir of children until a young girl, Zainab, was killed by a sniper as she sang, ‘Yarmouk Misses You Brother’. Now Ahmad felt he could risk no one but himself. And so it was in April of the same year that he was photographed by Niraz Saled, wearing his green shirt – a pianist amid the rubble. The image went viral.

Chronologically The Pianist of Yarmouk terminates in 2018. By then Ahmad had escaped from Syria and brought his wife and children and then his parents to live in Wiesbaden in Germany.

The image says Ahmad, ‘can never tell you what happened before or what came after’. His book can and does.

Works cited

Ahmad, A.  The Pianist of Yarmouk. 2019. Michael Joseph.

A version of this review was first published on pages 33 and 34 of the Weekend Section of the Irish Examiner on 18th May 2019.  It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Freedom Fighter by Joanna Palani

Freedom Fighter: My War against ISIS on the Frontlines of Syria          Joanna Palani with Lara Whyte

Joanna Palani: image Joanna Palani

Joanna Palani was taken into custody when she returned to Denmark from Syria after fighting Isis alongside coalition forces. The ex-Isis Danes, on the other hand, were placed onto a programme, the Aarhus, which provided them with mentors, psychiatric counselling and job-seeking support.

The prologue of Palani’s Freedom Fighter details the Siege of Kobana: a battle between Isis and the YPG or People’s Protection Unit.   Part of this Kurdish force was the all-female YPJ to which Palani belonged. She and her sisters-in-arms were shoulder-to-shoulder with the men of the YPG trying to prevent the incursion of Isis into the streets and houses of the city.

Palani and her comrades were nearly starving and had been reduced to eating boiled leaves and twigs. They had no radio and their weapons were old and broken whilst ammunition was scarce. Isis, Palani states, used rocket-propelled grenades and other firearms taken from US-backed Iraqi deserters. In spite of the danger Palani and two male Kurdish Turks sneak out on a mission to find food.

Her account of the excursion is terrifying and exciting. Both men are wounded and, in order to distract the enemy, one blows himself up with a grenade. Palani’s description of the effect of the blast on his body is unflinching.

Lara Whyte:Guardian

She ends the section with a denigration of war correspondents who, through their cameras, see only ‘burning buildings, but I watched the burning bodies of my friends’. Nevertheless she turned to Belfast-based political journalist, Lara Whyte, to help her write Freedom Fighter.

This powerful and moving opening is followed by a chronological tale of how, born in the Syrian refugee camp, Ramadi, to Kurdish parents, Palani grew up in Denmark. Because many Danish Muslims fought for Isis she calls her country the most jihad-friendly in Europe. It is, in fact, second only to Belgium in terms of numbers per head of population.

Joanna Palani: spot the difference

Palani does not emerge as a particularly likeable person. She complains frequently about being betrayed by people who should help her. These include family members, friends and peers as well as the authorities. It may well be that she is a very difficult person and invites rejection. But it is difficult not to sympathise with someone who has suffered such an extreme culture clash between her parents’ conservative Sunni mode of life and her secular, liberal, feminist peers.

Life back in Denmark is not as frightening for Palani, now 27, as being constantly under fire. But there is a price on her head because repatriated Isis fighters seek her life. That is not all that is stacked against her. It is difficult to enter the somewhat puritanical Danish systems such as employment and accommodation if there is anything like a custodial sentence or sniping on your record.

The Siege of Kobani is frequently in her thoughts. She misses the intimacy of comradeship and totally shared commitment. She was valued then for her courage and skill and not diminished by her gender.  Now every night she revisits still, in her dreams, the horrors of fighting and violent death. Warm blood seems to be flushing her body and she wakes from the nightmares to find herself soaked with the sweat of fear.

Works cited

Palani, J and Whyte, L.  Freedom Fighter: My War Against ISIS on the Frontliines of Syria.  2019. Atlantic.

A version of this review was first published on page 37 in the Weekend Section of the Irish Examiner on 16th February 2019.  It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Partition – 70 years on

Partition: the story of Indian independence and the creation of             Pakistan in 1947 by Barney White-Spunner

In the comprehensive index of Barney White-Spunner’s Partition there is no entry under Ireland. This is surprising because in the text there are many occasions when Ireland is important. For example, White-Spunner mentions that the representative of the Calcutta branch of Congress ‘visited Ireland and learned about leading revolutions against Britain from Michael Collins and the IRA’.

Subhas Chandra Bose.  Image: oneindia.com

Strange wording since he arrived in Ireland in 1936 fourteen years after Collins’s death. The visitor was Subhas Chandra Bose who, like his fellow party member Mohandas Gandhi, had been educated in England, at Cambridge. Bose was in opposition to the non-violent ‘Mahatma’ and believed in an armed struggle against the British. Some historians interpret Bose’s beliefs and efforts as those of an ‘Indian Michael Collins’.

The internecine struggle in Congress took place before the Second World War and, as White-Spunner shows, was only a small part of the complexity of the situation in which both India and Ireland found themselves in terms of their relationship with Britain. Indian politicians and thinkers kept a close eye on events in Ireland considering that there were parallels in the two countries’ roads toward independence.

What is revealed in Partition is that the British botch of the process in India was infinitely more incompetent, more negligent and more numbskulled than it was in Ireland. And it was an independence botch that left millions dead or maimed. The resultant partition of India and Pakistan caused political, religious and violent outcomes which are explosive even today.

At the beginning of the book White-Spunner provides a useful potted history of the relationship between Britain and India in the eighteenth, nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries. Most striking perhaps is the fact that with so few settlers the empire retained the colony for nearly 200 years.

In compiling his account the author has to juggle all the different linguistic areas, provinces, administrative districts, princely states, political systems, religions, taxes, plagues, famines and uprisings. His skill in doing so reflects, symbolically, the way in which the Viceroys and the Indian Civil Service administered the multitudinous complexities of the subcontinent for generations.

Nehru during the Quit India campaign in 1942.

 

In 1937 Congress emerged as the strongest party and, states White-Spunner, men like Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, ‘intelligent students of how the Raj had managed to exercise total control across India with only the slenderest of resources’, learnt that they must keep all the key branches of government centrally in Delhi. This was one of the seeds of partition since if everything was so centralised a binary split into two nations would seem better than devolution or federation.

Subhas Chandra Bose.  Image: source unknown.

In 1938 the colourful character of Bose returns to the narrative arriving to take his place as president of Congress perched high on a 51 bull chariot. By 1941 he was in Berlin flirting with Nazism and organising Indian prisoners into an adjunct of the Waffen-SS. Bose then travelled, in a German submarine, to Japan and involved himself in developing the Indian National Army. The remnants of the INA were troublesome in the post-war run up to independence causing ructions during a series of courts-martial trials. Many regarded the INA as national and nationalist heroes rather than traitors. Bose, however, had died in an air crash in 1945 leaving India still under the yoke of imperialism.

Nehru, Gandhi and Patel in 1946. Image: The Hindu Archives.

After the war Congress was, according to White-Spunner, ‘the universal voice of the Hindu majority’. But within the party there were divisions and oppositions. Gandhi did not think that religion was problematic: instead he believed that all Indians should live together, as they had proved they could under the British, in an undivided post-colonial India. Patel was keen to proceed at speed and was likely to accept partition if necessary. Nehru, a socialist, was also impatient to govern – seeing India in a secular light but containing within his faction, to his left virulently anti-British refusniks and to his right, extremely intolerant, Muslim-hating Hindus.

The Muslim League was led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He broke from Congress in 1920 when he disputed Gandhi’s preferred method of civil disobedience. Jinnah preferred an approach of high-level negotiation with British rulers. In 1927 he had attempted to build bridges between Congress and the League but his proposals were rejected. Again in 1937 he approached Congress with power-sharing ideas, but again he was rebuffed. White-Spunner suggests that these occurrences were two of the ‘tragic missed opportunities that would ultimately lead to 1947’.

Louis, Lord Mountbatten takes the salute from the Governor-General’s bodyguard as he takes on the Vice-Regency.  Image: Getty.

Meanwhile, on the British side, Viceroy Archibald Wavell, had been sacked and minor royal, Louis Lord Mountbatten, briefed by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, was preparing to take the reins. Sworn in on 24^th March 1947 Mountbatten was the twentieth and last governor-general and viceroy. Mountbatten realised that India was on the edge of chaos but also that Congress, not himself, was in the driving seat so that his own role would be to facilitate speedy action.

The Indian Army were, according to White-Spunner, ‘the only effective instrument of power in the government’s hands’. But their commander-in-chief Auchinleck, devastated by the likelihood of dividing his command into two forces – one for what was to be Hindustan and the other for Pakistan – seemed no longer able to focus on what needed to be done. Plans should have been drawn up and further troops obtained to police the partition process. Instead the senior staff concentrated on the remaining Europeans and their protection. This inaction had disastrous results for Indians.

The Indian Army in 1948. Image: kindlemag.

Jinnah who had demanded separation mainly as leverage to achieve a federal India now found himself accepting the imminent existence of Pakistan. Congress, whilst insisting that the new state would not be called Hindustan, agreed reluctantly to ‘a partition of India… as it was a peaceful settlement involving the least compulsion of any group or area’.

Jinnah, first Governor-General of the Muslim Dominion of Pakistan takes the salute in Karachi 1947. Image: Getty.

Things were moving fast now and by May there was a date for transfer of power: 14^th/15^th August 1947. Mountbatten would attend celebrations in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan on 14^th before travelling across to Delhi for India’s festivities on 15^th.

The stage was set for the gory finale. In the preface White-Spunner warns the reader that the story he tells is full of violence and horror. In the subcontinent human life became, for a period, of little value. Neighbours raped, maimed and killed each other. Some killed themselves to avoid forced conversion to another religion. Trainloads of refugees were butchered as six million Muslims attempted to move to Pakistan whilst six million non-Muslims moved in the opposite direction.

Gandhi with Muslim refugees in 1947. Image: Getty.

White-Spunner, an experienced and senior commander himself, mulls over the British colonisation of the Indian states and the preparations for independence. He thinks, as did many of his colleagues, that the British Army experience in Iraq after the 2003 invasion can be analysed against the framework of Indian independence. He identifies a poisonous pattern of British governments interfering in other countries for money or status and then finding it difficult to leave.

The book deals clearly with the political process but White-Spunner also interweaves eyewitness accounts given by ordinary Indians from all walks of life. The personal stories add poignancy to what is already an entirely compassionate rendition of history. He dedicates Partition to ‘all those who lost their lives in India and Pakistan in 1947’. It would be interesting if White-Spunner were to write a similar account of the British in Ireland along with the manner of their leaving.

Works cited

White-Spunner, B. Partition: the story of Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan in 1947. London: Simon & Shuster. 2017.

A version of this review was first published on pages 34 and 35 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 24th February 2018.  It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

‘The Golden Legend’ by Nadeem Aslam

How is it possible that I have never heard of this wonderful writer?  I came to this novel, unenthusiastically, having just completed Sebastian Barry’s superb Days Without End.  I have long been a fan of Barry’s work and have read almost everything that he has written.  On the back cover of Barry’s 2005 novel A Long Long Way Frank McGuinness says that Barry ‘writes like an angel’ and I agree with that. McGuinness adds that Barry is ‘on the side of the angels that fell’.

But I have now discovered that Aslam is Barry’s equal: he too ‘writes like an angel’ and ‘is on the side of the angels that fell’. I will be putting his four previous novels on my birthday list.  If you look at the video below of the choir at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge you will see, between one minute 14 seconds and two minutes 12 seconds, a sort of representation of the regiments of ‘angels’ who fell in the First World War, and are currently falling all over the world, in its various theatres of war, as well as in so-called peaceful democracies.

The Golden Legend, deals directly with angels. Or, at least, the angel Gabriel.  Gabriel ‘from heaven came’ and visited Mary, mother of the Christian God, to impregnate her; he visited the Prophet Mohammed to dictate words of the Koran. An equivalence, the liberal thinkers among us – leave Trump out of this – might think.  But, now, to The Golden Legend.

Mohammed receiving his first revelation from the angel Gabriel.  Miniature illustration on vellum from the book Jame’ all Tawarikh by Rashid al-Din, Published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 A.D.  Now in the collection of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland.

For Pakistan born, Aslam, who was brought up and educated in the north of England, paper is the “strongest material in the world. Things under which a mountain will crumble, you can place on paper and it will hold: beauty at its most intense; love at its fiercest; the greatest grief; the greatest rage”.

Paper is literally at the centre of the novel, which opens in the home of Nargis and Massud, architects who live and work in a defunct paper factory now converted into their home/work space. Surrounding this edifice is the city of Zamana, an Urdu word meaning period, era or age, pulsating with the noises of modern and ancient Pakistan. One sound is that of the loudspeakers, in the multiplicity of mosques, which, as well as emitting the muezzin, are being violated by a mysterious broadcaster who, night-by-night reveals the scurrilous secrets of citizens. Vigilantes punish the accused, especially Christians, especially women.

The Tree of Immortality. Palace of Shaki Khans, Azerbaijan

The former factory, however, is set in an oasis of bright fertility: an orchard, largely developed for cheap housing, but leaving a demesne of trees; almond, rosewood, mango, silk-cotton and coral. From the beginning the novel seems surreal, juxtaposing calm with sudden violence, silence with cacophony, cleanliness with filth.

Nargis and Massud’s vast library contains two elaborate and ornate Wendy House-sized miniature mosques, both reproductions of cathedrals/mosques which served in different ages, as places of worship for both Christians and Muslims.  Nargis and Massed use them in the winter months as small studies; easily heated in the freezing space. In the summer they are winched up, towards the high ceiling, hanging, floorless, above the dwellers. Elsewhere in the house, huge, spread, swan wings are pinned to the pink wall alongside the wings of a golden eagle, a parakeet and other birds. The house is full of ‘intense’ beauty and provides a crucible from which the architects can create more beauty in an ideological attempt to fight, as Aslam himself does with his art, the evil of the outside world.

image: pallasweb

studyblue.com

It is not magic-realism: it is Aslam’s portrait of a world in which all that exists is extreme. Social and religious hierarchies are fiercely maintained, with the Christians, including two other central characters, Helen and Lily, as the butt of prejudice; their blood thought to be black, not red. Nargis thinks “everything this land and others like it were going through was about power and influence. All of it. And these struggles of Pakistanis were not just about Pakistan, they were about the survival of the entire human race. They were about the whole planet”.

Life is precarious amid frequent acts of sectarian violence. Vicious assaults against vulnerable flesh come from the most unexpected sources and are perpetrated against gentle and educated characters as often as not. There is no sense that those who might be considered liberal, rational and moral are thought of as such by their neighbours.

Strangely, the most shocking knife slashes are directed at a book from the Islamic section of one of the city’s oldest libraries. This book is ‘That They Might Know Each Other, words inspired by a verse in the Koran. A meditation of how pilgrimage, wars, trades and curiosity had led to contact between cultures’. This book, written by Massud’s father, contains reproductions of iconic art.

The first page to be vandalised contains an image of the Prophet Mohammed receiving a revelation from the angel Gabriel. ‘He perforated the face with the steel tip, and then the blade continued upwards through the angel’s headdress, the various ribbons and gems. Continuing, it cut into the sky full of gold stars’. The congress between Christianity and Islam is severed in an act of ‘conscienceless temper’.

Later, and, seemingly whilst Nargis is lying, sleepless, in bed, the entire book is ‘razored’ into pieces.

Copyright: Giusto Manetti Battiloro

In an act of indefatigable hope and unremitting courage Nargis begins the task of sewing, her needle threaded with shining gold, the 987 pages back together. She is performing her own version of the Japanese process of Kintsugi. “The art of mending pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The logic was that damage and restoration were part of the story of an object, to be accepted rather than concealed. Some things were more beautiful and valuable for having been broken’.

In The Golden Legend, Aslam opposes the vituperative Pakistani laws of blasphemy with his call for the freedom of language, both written and spoken, especially when uttering words of love. He, like Nargis, is trying to accept and restore damage. He states that when he starts writing a novel, “I begin to think … beyond the despair, what is the moment of hope?”

Illustration by Faraz Aamer Khan/Dawn.com

 

Works cited

Aslam, N. The Golden Legend. Faber & Faber. 2017.

Barry, S. A Long Long Way. Faber & Faber. 2005.

—.  Days Without End. 2016.

An earlier version of this review appeared in The Irish Examiner‘s Weekend Section page 37 on 8th April 2017.

See also is a short piece by Aslam which describes his working practices.