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My Father's Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan by
Hiner Saleem is published by Atlantic Books
Hiner Saleem's first memory is of watching his
cousin being tied to the back of a Jeep and dragged
through the streets until he was a lifeless, bloody
rag. Saleem was five years old but he remembers it
well. Seven members of his family were murdered that
day. Today he is sitting on a rickety wooden chair
in his flat in Paris, clutching a set of beads: a
Kurd from Iraq in exile. Children's voices drift up
from a school playground to his sixth floor
sanctuary. From his attic window a thousand roofs
and balconies stretch out to the Eiffel Tower in the
distance, piercing the hazy winter smog. The Sacré-Coeur
Catholic basilica at the top of Montmartre is
visible to the right, its famous white pastry
architecture overlooking the city.
Saleem smiles warmly. "I gave up smoking three
months ago," he says, holding up his string of beads
as if wearing handcuffs. "These give my hands
something to do." The 39-year-old artist,
award-winning film director and writer is the author
of My Father's Rifle, a childhood memoir that has
become a best-seller in France, his adopted home.
The book is a poignant coming-of-age tale about a
boy growing up in war-torn Iraqi Kurdistan, a
touching portrait of the landless Kurds' struggle
for freedom, and a beguiling child's-eye view of
family life amid violence, murder and napalm bombs
during Saddam Hussein's rise to power. Under
Saddam's reign of terror, when he perpetrated his
genocide of the Kurds, more than 100,000 people were
killed or taken away by Iraqi security forces and
never seen again.
Saleem's novel is now being published in 20
languages and is a perfect
companion to Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and
Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul.
"Everything in the book happened," he says. "I
changed a few names, but it is all true." He has the
physique of Ben Stiller, albeit slightly stockier,
the spangly eyes of Kevin Spacey, and, when he
talks, the animated persona of Danny DeVito.
"Coffee, tea, vodka or wine?" he asks in loud,
deliberate English, before jumping up to the
kitchen.
A laptop sits on a small pink table against one
wall: a montage of pictures of Kurdish women in
headscarves looks down. Another wall is a mottled
orange and yellow, yet another turquoise. The floor
is pink concrete, and old wooden beams burst through
the white ceiling. Several of Saleem's pastel
paintings adorn the flat, but the centrepiece of the
room is a rough, pale blue wooden frame on one wall
containing four small
black and white pictures and a red, white and green
Kurdish flag with its golden sun emblem at the
centre. Saleem points at each picture. "That is an
Assyrian peshmarga [a Kurdish fighter], that is
General Barzani [legendary Kurdish leader] – and
that is a Don Juan peshmarga," he says, exploding
with laughter. "Don Juan peshmarga?" I ask, slightly
puzzled. "Yes, look at him. Look at his pose and
smile for the camera. Whoever he is, he thinks he's
a film star." Saleem grins broadly. His sense of
humour is Pythonesque and quite endearing: there
can't be many people who mount pictures of complete
strangers on walls in their homes simply for kicks.
The last picture is of Saleem's father. Shero Selim
Malay was a resistance fighter and morse-code
operator for the charismatic General Barzani, the
founder of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the
man who dominated the national movement for nearly
five decades. Saleem's father died on December 18,
1996. Saleem could not attend the funeral as it was
impossible for him to return to Iraqi Kurdistan. "It
was difficult, horrendous, of course," he says. "But
there was nothing I could do. They [the Iraqis]
would have executed me. Without any doubt." His
voice becomes quieter. Life now for Saleem is about
telling the world about the plight of the Kurds.
His memory of growing up in Kurdistan is bleak but
compelling, a continuum of pain and violence. The
brutal murders of his cousin and six other male
members of his extended family in Aqra by
pro-government Kurdish militia when he was five is
only the first of a catalogue of haunting memories:
an insight into the tragedies that made up the daily
life of the Kurds. "The militiamen caught Mamou
alive and, instead of executing
him, they brought him down from the hills, tied his
feet to the back of a Jeep and dragged him through
the town centre three times as a warning to other
Kurdish patriots," Saleem says, leaning forward in
his chair, the string of beads clicking between his
fingers. "I was a still a boy."
He recalls his father leaving on many occasions for
the mountains with an old Brno rifle, repeating:
"Next year Kurdistan will be free." "I believed him,
when I was a young boy," Saleem says.
The Kurds, who number between 20 and 25 million, are
the largest ethnic group in the world without their
own nation. They rose up to fight the Iraqis at the
end of the 1960s; Saleem's family fled to nearby
mountains to hide in caves after their town was
bombed with napalm. "I was surrounded by wounded
people who could not get proper medical treatment,"
Saleem says. "A man next to me was moaning his
children's names; then suddenly he stopped. I
scratched my neck and found blood on my fingertips.
I did it again and found I was covered in lice."
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When the Kurds realised the uprising was going to be
crushed, Saleem witnessed many of the peshmargas
committing suicide rather than be taken prisoner. He
and his family ended up as refugees, along with
100,000 other Kurds in Iran. "All our hopes and
dreams were broken and we felt shame that the
revolution had failed. All my family felt nothing
but shame," he says candidly. He describes the
experience of being in a UN camp as being treated
like a dog, and says all he and his friends wanted
to do was to become a peshmargas and resurrect the
armed struggle.
In 1970, the Iraqis offered an amnesty and a degree
of self-rule to the Kurds. Many thousands stayed in
Iran, and still
and then watch their reaction to see if they did not
smile or if they would turn their heads away."
He raises his eyebrows, breaks into a smile again
and opens his arms out as if he is about to embrace
me. "Looking back, it was a Kafka-esque comedy," he
says. Whatever the Iraqis might have taken from
Saleem's childhood, his propensity for seeking
humour in adversity remains. "Humour is the politics
of despair," he says.
After becoming involved with the peshmargas and
carrying out a failed assasination attempt on an
Iraqi security officer, Saleem fled from Iraq to
Syria when he was only 17. "I realised that
continuing the armed struggle was hopeless, and
because of my activities the Iraqis were going to
kill me," he says. "A friend tipped me off. It was a
very hard decision to make as I could not tell my
family and I did not know whether I would ever see
them again."
He stayed in Syria briefly, then moved to Italy,
where he worked as a painter in Florence and Venice,
scratching a living sketching caricatures of
tourists. "I arrived in Florence wearing a Kurdish
costume," he says, "my salwar [baggy pantaloons]."
He stands up, putting his hands on his hips and
kicking his legs up. From Italy he travelled to
Paris and was granted political asylum before
returning to Italy to study in Venice for a degree
in international relations.
It was when he returned to France that his ambition
to make films was fulfilled. "I had always wanted to
bring the Kurds to film, because as a child we only
ever saw Arab-controlled TV and propaganda," he
says. "I remember as a young boy saying that I
wanted to make the television speak Kurdish."
Largely self-taught in the art of directing, he
completed two low-budget
films, Shero (1992) and A Bit of Border (1994),
before being awarded the prize for the best
screenplay at the French Festival of Angers in 1997
for a film called Long Live the Bride … and the
Liberation of Kurdistan. The film, which is full of
real stories, tells of Kurds living in exile in
Europe whose hearts remain in Kurdistan. It is a
journey into the tea houses and restaurants of the
Kurdish village of Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, where
Saleem spends hours in conversation with his
friends.
French filmgoers embraced Saleem's comedy but
Kurdish audiences were divided. While most women
loved it, many Kurdish men disliked the image the
film portrayed, especially with regard to their
relations with women: the film shows some Kurdish
men drinking and using force to collect a so-called
"revolutionary tax", and others eschewing work to
meet with their French girlfriends.
"I am also a Kurd," says Saleem in answer to his
critics. "I myself and my friends like to drink
vodka, we like to sing and have a joyful party. We
love women. Some blame me for doing a comedy, but it
is a comedy with a cause and I can do what I want
with it and with the Kurdish flag."
He springs up once again and asks if I have a
girlfriend, before going to his kitchen and
returning with a bottle of red wine. "Give this to
her, it is very fruity, she will like it," he says,
insisting I take it.
Comedy is in Saleem's blood, and in 2003 his highly
acclaimed film Vodka Lemon won the Venice Film
Festival's San Marco Prize. Set in a snow-bound
Kurdish-Armenian village, where state and economy
are so marginal that everyone seems to be selling
themselves to stay alive, Vodka Lemon should be
truly grim. Instead it transcends its locality to
become pure art, its visual and spoken language
crackling with a humour that is as humane as it is
absurd.
"I need humour. People need humour. Humour is part
of being Kurdish and it is absolutely necessary,"
Saleem says simply.
Who are his influences, then? "I must admit I don't
watch a lot of cinema," he says. "I am not a
cinephile, and I do not go in for intellectualism.
But I do like Jack London for his resistance, and I
like George Bernard Shaw for his culture."
In his book, he talks about Jean-Paul Sartre – but
at the mention of the French existentialist's name,
Saleem just laughs. "I did read Sartre but I did not
understand any of it," he says. "I was young,
though."
His next project – another comedy, this one called
Kilometre Zero – broaches the thorny subject of
Kurdish-Arab
relations. Although Kurdish factions in Iraq have
been running their own affairs ever since the first
Gulf War in 1991, holding their own elections in
1992 and building up an army of around 70,000
peshmarga, the Kurds still face an uncertain future.
Many of them fear an Arab-dominated government in
Baghdad will curtail the freedoms they achieved
after decades of oppression. For Saleem, Saddam
might be gone but his culture still manifests itself
in extreme Arab nationalism.
"The Arabs who have those views have no respect for
other people," says Saleem. "With that mentality
persisting, we will have another ten Saddam Husseins
and we as people may suffer again. The Kurds want
self-determination, democracy and freedom, not Arab
hegemony." For the first time, Saleem's pain and
anger surface.
In March he will return to his homeland
for the premiere of his new film; he is also looking
forward to the chance to see his mother, his brother
and his sister. He has another brother in Germany
and a sister in Sweden, whom he regularly visits.
For the moment, though, his life is in France, with
his actress girlfriend and the many different
projects he is now involved in. He travels as much
as possible, he says, visiting friends for leisure
as well as for work, but for now there are no plans
to return to his homeland for good.
"I am from everywhere," he says. "I feel French when
I am in Kurdistan, Parisian when I am in Italy and
Kurdish when I am in France. I am not a socialist,
nor a capitalist, nor religious. I am a human
being."
http://www.theherald.co.uk
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