The Last Solm- Part I and Part II
This story was written by an online friend, he's a young man named Saeed Al Zaabi from the UAE... i loved his writing technique, looks like this is publish material, what do you think?
The Last Solm- Part I
Salem Hussein was truly amazing. His soul joined us on earth in 1975, the year Iran occupied his birthplace, Shatt al Arab. As a child he did not face the struggle his parents, along with the whole community, faced trying to maintain the Arabic and Sunni identity of the region. Being born with the Iraqi-Iranian conflict in the same year, they grew with one another. Once he reached six, the conflict decided to disturb his life. Through the eyes of a child, he saw his house burning and falling down, leaving a legacy of a house under which his father’s cries faded into ashes. His mother planted in his heart the seeds of hatred to everything related to Iran or Shiite, the killers of his father, but those seeds had no sustenance, at least nothing that he mentioned.
In 1982, he moved with his mother to Basra, where he joined a traditional Islamic school in a nearby mosque. Discussions about the war with Iran, the Iranians and their different beliefs were on the tongues of everyone. I still remember him uniquely taking a note as the Imam, who usually faced us in our circle on the floor, and taught us, “All the destruction you see around you will soon be forgotten, but the echoes underneath the conversations, initiated by the sounds of weapons, will never fade.‿ I noticed then that he started recording everything he heard, from his mother’s curses to the sarcastic TV shows he used to watch in my house. The Imam suggested to him that he could connect his notes in the shadows of his imagination making stories that sub-represented…
***“Aaah, NOT NOW‿ I cried in disappointment for having to stop watching the show about Salem Hussein. I looked at the number in the screen of my ringing cell. Then, I left the room.“Did I miss anything important?‿ I asked curiously once I got back in the room.“Not really, he just continued talking about how Salem Hussein created himself as a writer. He also talked about how both of them left to Baghdad after the end of the war with Iran.‿ My sister Mona answered without being able to take her eyes off the TV. I stared at my hero’s friend and editor centered in the screen as he went into further details about Salem Hussein’s life.
***He became a well known writer for fictionalizing his criticism of the Iraqi government, especially after the end of the first Gulf War. He wrote many stories symbolizing the harsh life his people faced. As you may know, all his stories were written about a community of people he imagined living on an isolated island. He named them “the Solms.‿ The life of the Solms was different in each of his stories to the point where one forgot that he was talking about the same community. He always signed his stories using his nickname, the first Solm. I always had a feeling that some aspects of the Solms’ island resembled Baghdad, his real birthplace as a writer.
His first story talked about the discovery of the Solms’ island by a neighboring state. The king of that state degraded the Solms’ way of life and declared that it should be changed to look like his own way life. The president of the Solms, considering the amount of wealth the king promised to shower him with, loved the idea. Naturally, the rest of the Solms refused to be forced to dress in others’ clothes so they announced their revolution against any change. Salem, then, went on talking about the struggle these people faced seeing their friends being either killed or deported.
In another story, “how to be a Solm?‿ he said, “O Salem, first you should know that shrinking your name and twisting it would not change who you are, but it will certainly change the way you are inspected. To be a Solm, be a child. Fear not the punishment when you say what’s in your heart. Cry loudly to get your candy. Show your tears when you need, but do not forget that you can always threaten to throw a stone on the window.‿ It took Salem ten more pages before he reached his last sentence, “but if being a child doesn’t seem to fit you, then die as an infant.
‿He was indeed a revolutionary writer. But as you know, under Saddam’s dictatorship, such men as Salem Hussein were ought to disappear. His true identity was soon discovered and he was buried behind cages twenty meters under the sea surface in a hole where no light was allowed in. For many years, he suffered in the hands of the masters of torturing. As he then told us, they once heated iron until it melted and then pour it on the ground, writing “I LOVE SADDAM‿. Then he was laid on his back on the liquefied iron until he could taste the smell of his own burnt skin.
The Second Gulf War occurred in 2003. Salem was freed, along with others, by the occupying armies or what Salem had called “the soldiers of misery for the sake of freedom.‿ Regardless of all crises that were unveiled in his life, walking through the destroyed streets of what seemed to be Baghdad he could not recognize his city. He missed Baghdad that he encountered during Saddam’s era. Depression started to eat him. He preferred to live in the memories of the united world he saw in jail. He came to see me one day, holding in his hands a red binder. That was the last time I saw him. All what he said that day made him a mystery to me as if that was the first time I listened to him. He said things like, “To be under a dictatorship that we built is better than to be under democracy that is building dictators.
‿ He handed me the bleeding binder and said in a serious tone, “Saeed, keep this story with you, but don’t publish it. It’s not ready yet and I’m not sure if it will ever be.‿ I both felt that I understood what he meant and that I was confused. All what I could do was nodding in agreement every time he said something. Few weeks later, Salem, whom crises made an artistic writer, unfolded his mystery and chose to withdraw from this world in his very young age, leaving an unfinished story.[the Unfinished Story]- Part II
The Last Solm- Part II
In January 2020, the first Solm was born. He was described to be a human in the form of glass, or a transparent human whom (or which) you could look through. In few days more Solms were born. The baby Solms seemed to be more developed than regular babies. They had the ability to walk and talk right after their birth. Studies tried to unleash how these creatures appeared. Were they what Darwin suggested long ago, a more developed form of humans? Or was it an invasion from space?
Most scientists, scared of being stamped with failure to discover the Solms’ mystery, agreed that the Solms’ mothers were infected with a virus. That virus, they claimed, was manufactured in the laboratories of World War Three. They suggested that the only way to prevent the disease from spreading would be by getting rid of the Solms. Considering the fact that the Solms were humans with nothing significantly different about them except their transparency, the human rights’ movements successfully convinced the world’s governments not to kill them, but to allow them to live alone. The world united against the Solms, and forced them to live apart from the rest of the people on an island in the Indian Ocean.
Hundreds of Solms, being thrown in isolation, decided that they would live alone for the rest of their lives. Neither they, nor their children, would ever try to go back to the world, they said. They were expelled and excluded and now they had their own world. A decision of making the first born Solm a leader was made with consensus. Being the leader of a newborn world, he wrote the Solms’ book of philosophy in which he put forth what he thought to be the best way for them to live. The most important chapter in the book was about why and how the Solms would never tell their children where they came from. Accordingly, in the center of the island, a town was born. Beautiful little houses were uniquely built by the Solms in an attempt to themselves. Generation passed on the island not knowing that there existed another world other than the island.
Even India, the continent-like region, was left empty and its people deserted it. No one could blame them; people were scared of something they were not given the chance to see. Rarely, a person would travel near the island. Once in a while, a rumor would spread about what a person saw near the island of the Solms. In fact, some people believed that the whole Solms’ story was created in the world of imaginations in the mind of poet. The last striking rumor I heard said that a huge sky-touching fort was seen in the middle of the island.
As time passed by, the community of the Solms became larger. Their book of philosophies was lost. Accordingly, the rules that had been created by the first Solm started to seem fuzzy and most people went astray. Everyone had his own interpretation of what was said to be the rules. The Solms, who were until that point one community, became divided into two groups. The first group stuck religiously to their forefathers philosophies of life. The other group, out of a revolutionary perspective, decided that nothing was real about the old philosophies they inherited, so they rejected everything about them.
The philosophical debate between the two groups grew and then exploded when the people of strict vision built for themselves the Holy Fort. “By thee who created us, we shall depart you forever.‿ The shouted angrily. Their fort was made huge enough to contain thousands of the houses behind its walls. The Holy Fort stood there in the center of the island as red as an apple and as tall as a mountain.
The contact between the two groups was lost long ago for, as time passed by, the new generations had no knowledge that the world around them is much larger that just the fort. In their minds, the fort was the world and the world was a fort. The people outside in the island were still aware that the fort standing in the middle of their town contained a group of the Solms. They knew that with that group, they shared common ancestors, and that they were all tied by the blood they carried in their veins. However, they were scared from trying to have any contact with them because that group was talked about as killers. Anyone who disagreed with them was to be killed, as their first ancestor was thought to have said.
Hundreds of years have passed now and the Holy Fort is still standing in the middle. Its walls are weaker, desiring to fall but nonetheless standing and watching the people walk by it in the town, in the island, in the world. Circles of cultures and differences. Who knows where the final circle of worlds will be? Are we part of a system of circular isolation created to prove that the human mind can create boundaries to form worlds of differences?
As I am sailing through the Indian Ocean, I am thinking about my decision to explore a little world I know. The ocean looks similar to the space surrounding our Earth, dark and endless. I wonder when and how our ancestors differentiated themselves and lived on the earth apart from the rest of the worlds. By forces of cunning and lies, these worlds were created, and by the same forces, I shall be in the Island of the Solms. I shall fight for a world with no boundaries.
***
I put the story away thinking about Salem Hussein and his unfinished story. As I laid disturbed on my bed waiting for sleep to visit my eyes, my eyelids became heavier and heavier, separating that which was within from that which was not.
The Last Solm- Part I
Salem Hussein was truly amazing. His soul joined us on earth in 1975, the year Iran occupied his birthplace, Shatt al Arab. As a child he did not face the struggle his parents, along with the whole community, faced trying to maintain the Arabic and Sunni identity of the region. Being born with the Iraqi-Iranian conflict in the same year, they grew with one another. Once he reached six, the conflict decided to disturb his life. Through the eyes of a child, he saw his house burning and falling down, leaving a legacy of a house under which his father’s cries faded into ashes. His mother planted in his heart the seeds of hatred to everything related to Iran or Shiite, the killers of his father, but those seeds had no sustenance, at least nothing that he mentioned.
In 1982, he moved with his mother to Basra, where he joined a traditional Islamic school in a nearby mosque. Discussions about the war with Iran, the Iranians and their different beliefs were on the tongues of everyone. I still remember him uniquely taking a note as the Imam, who usually faced us in our circle on the floor, and taught us, “All the destruction you see around you will soon be forgotten, but the echoes underneath the conversations, initiated by the sounds of weapons, will never fade.‿ I noticed then that he started recording everything he heard, from his mother’s curses to the sarcastic TV shows he used to watch in my house. The Imam suggested to him that he could connect his notes in the shadows of his imagination making stories that sub-represented…
***“Aaah, NOT NOW‿ I cried in disappointment for having to stop watching the show about Salem Hussein. I looked at the number in the screen of my ringing cell. Then, I left the room.“Did I miss anything important?‿ I asked curiously once I got back in the room.“Not really, he just continued talking about how Salem Hussein created himself as a writer. He also talked about how both of them left to Baghdad after the end of the war with Iran.‿ My sister Mona answered without being able to take her eyes off the TV. I stared at my hero’s friend and editor centered in the screen as he went into further details about Salem Hussein’s life.
***He became a well known writer for fictionalizing his criticism of the Iraqi government, especially after the end of the first Gulf War. He wrote many stories symbolizing the harsh life his people faced. As you may know, all his stories were written about a community of people he imagined living on an isolated island. He named them “the Solms.‿ The life of the Solms was different in each of his stories to the point where one forgot that he was talking about the same community. He always signed his stories using his nickname, the first Solm. I always had a feeling that some aspects of the Solms’ island resembled Baghdad, his real birthplace as a writer.
His first story talked about the discovery of the Solms’ island by a neighboring state. The king of that state degraded the Solms’ way of life and declared that it should be changed to look like his own way life. The president of the Solms, considering the amount of wealth the king promised to shower him with, loved the idea. Naturally, the rest of the Solms refused to be forced to dress in others’ clothes so they announced their revolution against any change. Salem, then, went on talking about the struggle these people faced seeing their friends being either killed or deported.
In another story, “how to be a Solm?‿ he said, “O Salem, first you should know that shrinking your name and twisting it would not change who you are, but it will certainly change the way you are inspected. To be a Solm, be a child. Fear not the punishment when you say what’s in your heart. Cry loudly to get your candy. Show your tears when you need, but do not forget that you can always threaten to throw a stone on the window.‿ It took Salem ten more pages before he reached his last sentence, “but if being a child doesn’t seem to fit you, then die as an infant.
‿He was indeed a revolutionary writer. But as you know, under Saddam’s dictatorship, such men as Salem Hussein were ought to disappear. His true identity was soon discovered and he was buried behind cages twenty meters under the sea surface in a hole where no light was allowed in. For many years, he suffered in the hands of the masters of torturing. As he then told us, they once heated iron until it melted and then pour it on the ground, writing “I LOVE SADDAM‿. Then he was laid on his back on the liquefied iron until he could taste the smell of his own burnt skin.
The Second Gulf War occurred in 2003. Salem was freed, along with others, by the occupying armies or what Salem had called “the soldiers of misery for the sake of freedom.‿ Regardless of all crises that were unveiled in his life, walking through the destroyed streets of what seemed to be Baghdad he could not recognize his city. He missed Baghdad that he encountered during Saddam’s era. Depression started to eat him. He preferred to live in the memories of the united world he saw in jail. He came to see me one day, holding in his hands a red binder. That was the last time I saw him. All what he said that day made him a mystery to me as if that was the first time I listened to him. He said things like, “To be under a dictatorship that we built is better than to be under democracy that is building dictators.
‿ He handed me the bleeding binder and said in a serious tone, “Saeed, keep this story with you, but don’t publish it. It’s not ready yet and I’m not sure if it will ever be.‿ I both felt that I understood what he meant and that I was confused. All what I could do was nodding in agreement every time he said something. Few weeks later, Salem, whom crises made an artistic writer, unfolded his mystery and chose to withdraw from this world in his very young age, leaving an unfinished story.[the Unfinished Story]- Part II
The Last Solm- Part II
In January 2020, the first Solm was born. He was described to be a human in the form of glass, or a transparent human whom (or which) you could look through. In few days more Solms were born. The baby Solms seemed to be more developed than regular babies. They had the ability to walk and talk right after their birth. Studies tried to unleash how these creatures appeared. Were they what Darwin suggested long ago, a more developed form of humans? Or was it an invasion from space?
Most scientists, scared of being stamped with failure to discover the Solms’ mystery, agreed that the Solms’ mothers were infected with a virus. That virus, they claimed, was manufactured in the laboratories of World War Three. They suggested that the only way to prevent the disease from spreading would be by getting rid of the Solms. Considering the fact that the Solms were humans with nothing significantly different about them except their transparency, the human rights’ movements successfully convinced the world’s governments not to kill them, but to allow them to live alone. The world united against the Solms, and forced them to live apart from the rest of the people on an island in the Indian Ocean.
Hundreds of Solms, being thrown in isolation, decided that they would live alone for the rest of their lives. Neither they, nor their children, would ever try to go back to the world, they said. They were expelled and excluded and now they had their own world. A decision of making the first born Solm a leader was made with consensus. Being the leader of a newborn world, he wrote the Solms’ book of philosophy in which he put forth what he thought to be the best way for them to live. The most important chapter in the book was about why and how the Solms would never tell their children where they came from. Accordingly, in the center of the island, a town was born. Beautiful little houses were uniquely built by the Solms in an attempt to themselves. Generation passed on the island not knowing that there existed another world other than the island.
Even India, the continent-like region, was left empty and its people deserted it. No one could blame them; people were scared of something they were not given the chance to see. Rarely, a person would travel near the island. Once in a while, a rumor would spread about what a person saw near the island of the Solms. In fact, some people believed that the whole Solms’ story was created in the world of imaginations in the mind of poet. The last striking rumor I heard said that a huge sky-touching fort was seen in the middle of the island.
As time passed by, the community of the Solms became larger. Their book of philosophies was lost. Accordingly, the rules that had been created by the first Solm started to seem fuzzy and most people went astray. Everyone had his own interpretation of what was said to be the rules. The Solms, who were until that point one community, became divided into two groups. The first group stuck religiously to their forefathers philosophies of life. The other group, out of a revolutionary perspective, decided that nothing was real about the old philosophies they inherited, so they rejected everything about them.
The philosophical debate between the two groups grew and then exploded when the people of strict vision built for themselves the Holy Fort. “By thee who created us, we shall depart you forever.‿ The shouted angrily. Their fort was made huge enough to contain thousands of the houses behind its walls. The Holy Fort stood there in the center of the island as red as an apple and as tall as a mountain.
The contact between the two groups was lost long ago for, as time passed by, the new generations had no knowledge that the world around them is much larger that just the fort. In their minds, the fort was the world and the world was a fort. The people outside in the island were still aware that the fort standing in the middle of their town contained a group of the Solms. They knew that with that group, they shared common ancestors, and that they were all tied by the blood they carried in their veins. However, they were scared from trying to have any contact with them because that group was talked about as killers. Anyone who disagreed with them was to be killed, as their first ancestor was thought to have said.
Hundreds of years have passed now and the Holy Fort is still standing in the middle. Its walls are weaker, desiring to fall but nonetheless standing and watching the people walk by it in the town, in the island, in the world. Circles of cultures and differences. Who knows where the final circle of worlds will be? Are we part of a system of circular isolation created to prove that the human mind can create boundaries to form worlds of differences?
As I am sailing through the Indian Ocean, I am thinking about my decision to explore a little world I know. The ocean looks similar to the space surrounding our Earth, dark and endless. I wonder when and how our ancestors differentiated themselves and lived on the earth apart from the rest of the worlds. By forces of cunning and lies, these worlds were created, and by the same forces, I shall be in the Island of the Solms. I shall fight for a world with no boundaries.
***
I put the story away thinking about Salem Hussein and his unfinished story. As I laid disturbed on my bed waiting for sleep to visit my eyes, my eyelids became heavier and heavier, separating that which was within from that which was not.
all i can say is
WOW
amazing read
Posted by
eshda3wa |
28/4/07 10:23 AM
eshda3wa
For me, I enjoyed the second to last paragraph in Part I. It’s a pretty interesting story/article, in a sense it mirrors the world we live in. Every generation that comes and goes holds on to its beliefs, traditions and values. They resist change because change is something they're not used to. You can see it in our everyday lives, compare your life to that of your parents or your grandparents, they've been taught values and traditions that, to them, are set in stone. We, as younger somewhat more educated individuals, take from their generations the values, traditions, & cultures that we feel will enhance our day to day lives. We let go of the values that seem, in our eyes, archaic. When you chat with an older person, like a grandparent, they always insist that the times they grew up in were much simpler and easier to live in. So, even though the story as a whole covers a spectrum of issues, for me, me resonating theme will be man’s resistance to change, for better or worse.
thank you for passing by ;-)
Posted by
Mother Courage |
1/5/07 11:11 AM
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