Aug 4
Confession: When we thought about what we wanted to ask our writers this summer, our desires immediately turned to the gossipy, the secret, the lurid. What was it that they were not telling us? What might they not even be telling themselves?The editorial process is, of course, set up to root out any misdeeds. Every piece of writing you read in our pages has been copy-edited, fact-checked and carefully scrutinized. Any expression of fault — a correction or apology — is the source of great embarrassment.And yet, as we put together this series of essays, we wondered: Is there value in occasionally stepping out of line? Could it be that, in a world that is always pushing us to conformity and similarity, a little sin here and there is the ultimate sign of individual spirit? Seven of our contributors gamely shared (some of) their secret sins.At the age of 13, I became addicted to stealing from other writers. It is what I call literary kleptomania. It started after I fell in love for the first time. She had green eyes, and I didn’t know what to do with the hungry fire inside me, so I fell ill with a fever. My grades were declining. My grandfather visited me, checked my temperature, and left a small book next to my bed. It was a study of Abu Nuwas, an Arabic poet (c. 756–814) famous for his poems on alcohol, love, homosexuality, and other sins.In bed, with a new notebook, I started to copy the lines of poetry that drew me in. I recovered from the love fever in a week. But I never recovered from my addiction to copying the work of other writers. I would go to the library and wander around, flipping through the books, not looking for something to read but for the jewelry hidden inside them. Sometimes it was a paragraph written in a style that was new to me, sometimes a sentence that blazed, sometimes a single word I was learning for the first time. I never cared about ideas, or plot, or themes. They were pebbles on the road; the true hidden diamonds were the words and phrases whose true power was hidden. Look, for example, at this jewel that I stole recently: “Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.” Because of it, I learned about the beautiful tree Laburnum, and its golden flowers in spring, which become pods in autumn, perfect as a metaphor or something to recycle to write a colorful picture. I will not tell you, of course, who I stole from, although any reader of American poetry might recognize her in those lines.There is a legend about Abu Nuwas. He went to a master and asked to be taught. The master told him to go and memorize a thousand lines of poetry. He spent a year doing it, then returned. The master said: "Good. Now forget them. If you can, you will be a poet." That is what I have been trying to do all these years in Arabic and English. I convince myself that I forget what I memorize, but ghosts of writers and people I stole from keep chasing me.I am a thief, good at hiding what I take, memorizing it, until it flows in my bloodstream, so no one can tell where the blood comes from, or which writers I stole from. Still, in most of my books, I have a list of writers that I stole from, to thank them.—Ahmed Naji
