In his own words

   
 

 

My body reached maturity early, on a day in 1975. When the breast’s cherry touched me, I flourished and recognised God’s paradise on earth. My mother channelled springs of fresh water into my heart, covered my body with scented herbs, and poured the water of God into my soul.

Silence descended on me and became my companion. I travelled through the first years of my life astonished by all I saw. My body overflowed its banks. I often wore my clothes inside out, and gathered birds and the neighbours’ peaches in my pockets, unaware of the curse to come.

Of my brothers and sisters I was the eighth. When my father descended from the night, fragrant with prayers and rosewater, his desire was to be blessed with an imam, so he called me ‘Ali’. I carried this inheritance, and the sacred tablets, and I pulled the skies along with me.

I was sent to the compulsory university, accused of love, and for the sake of a poem, because I had contemplated the lifelines of my hand at the age of seventeen. Then at the age of twenty I joined it again to complete my higher studies.

I graduated, stripped of my certainty about wisdom and revolution. Nevertheless, those thoughts still beat in my heart.

Maybe I am a kind of bee, because I have loved, and love, and will love more than one flower, but what a curse this is…

 

Translated by Ayesha Saldanha

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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