Khuteibe Hashim
Birds flying high A story
© 2020 Khuteibe Hashim
Förlag: BoD – Books on Demand, Stockholm, Sverige Tryck: BoD – Books on Demand, Norderstedt, Tyskland ISBN: 978-91-7969-721-1
I long for that feeling to not feel at all I cannot drown my demons, they know how to swim
T
ZERO (WHITE NOISE)
I lived in a house in Baghdad where I have spent all my life. My life was just an ordinary life of a young nine-year-old Iraqi boy. After school, I used to meet up with my friends and play football in the street when there were not any cars passing by. That was because we did not have any football fields to play in. My father was in the army and my mother was a schoolteacher at my school. I have a brother whom I bicker with regularly. My brother is 3 years older than me. One week before my 10th birthday, my family, and all the older people started acting weird and scared. I felt like something was going to happen and I did not really understand that my entire world was about to change. “What do you want for your tenth birthday?” asked my mom. “I do not know,” I said. “I want my family to be healthy and safe,” I thought inside, but I dared not to say this out loud.
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For different reasons, the worst thing I feared in life was the death of my father. Every single day of my existence I have wondered whether he is alive or dead, will he come home, or will he not? Some people call this trauma, and some people call this caring about your father. I do not know which is which. I regularly had dreams where I found out, in various ways, that my father is dead. One day, I heard two gunshots outside my house. I ran outside and there were suddenly many birds hovering over my father who was lying on the ground. I saw him lying there in the walkway outside of my house soaked in blood and I saw that he was shot twice in the chest. My white noise-filled head and body rushed to him to hug him as hard as I ever hugged a person. He took my hand and looked into my eyes and said his last words. ‘Numbness’ is described as a loss of sensation or feeling in a part of the human body, but ever since that day and to this day, numbness coexists with each inhale and exhale I take. My head and thoughts were filled with bird noises from this day on. Just birds, birds, and birds.
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ONE (THE END)
“...My fellow citizens. At this hour, X and coalition forces are in the early stages of 10 military operations to disarm Y, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger” said the evil man on the television. It was a foggy morning just before school. My father took his olive-green army cap and rushed to his yellow car as I ran behind him. “Dad, don’t go!” I yelled. “Can you promise me that you will come back?” I said. I did not know where he was going or why, but the feeling I had was similar to someone whose world was about to end. Never before have I ever seen my black- moustached and army general of a father shed a tear, but this time it was different. Mother tore me away from, what I assumed was my last time, hugging him. “He will be back, just like he always does,” said my mother with a tearful and uncertain voice. My mother was a teacher and we used to always walk to school every day - from Ameria to Hay-Al-Jihad. As we walked every day, I used to look up to the sky and count each
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and every bird I saw until we arrived at school. This way, the time would go faster, and I would meet my friends at the schoolyard just in time before school started. That day, I did not see any birds whatsoever. When I arrived at school, the empty schoolyard was scary and daunting. All I saw was the school staff discussing things I was not allowed to hear and most of my classmates were at home and sick, my teacher said. I wished I was at home playing my favourite videogame, I thought.
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This is a book about a young boy's journey and immigration from Iraq to Sweden. It is an easy read meant for school use and young adults. This book helps introduce subjects such as trauma, emotional development, belonging, and immigration. It offers tools and assignments in the form of fo questionnaires to help analyze the text and it can be used to help develop students reading- and writing comprehension.