A journey into a Kurdish garden - author Rauf Naqishbendi signs books at Florey's

By Jean Bartlett

On the morning of March 17, 1988, Rauf Naqishbendi picked up a cup of coffee and a San Francisco Chronicle as he headed into his office.

The morning's headline took direct aim at his heart.

Saddam Hussein had unleashed a chemical attack on the city of Halabja, Kurdistan and just like that, 5,000 beautiful lives, gone.

Rauf is from Halabja and at the time of the attack, the majority of his family lived there.

As Rauf drove home to his wife and children in Pacifica, he was pulled over by a concerned police officer who had seen him crying and wanted to be sure everything was okay.

Rauf Naqishbendi has written a book about his hometown which people once called the garden of the poets.

As Rauf explains in the first lines of his book, "it was a community of people who embraced beauty and art. Many modern Kurdish poets had lived in this place at one time or another." While the book definitely has wrenching sorrow and shocking acts of horror, the reader will also be treated to surprising playfulness and pastoral charm. There is also a real celebration of Kurdish culture throughout its pages. For many world citizens, Naqishbendi's memoirs will be a compelling, honest and highly readable look at a nation which can trace its roots back 5,000 years. A nation divided between the countries of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey - a nation of human beings struggling for independence.

Naqishbendi will be at Florey's Books this Saturday to sign copies of his work: "The Garden Of The Poets."

Rauf said one of the reasons he wrote this book is because the people of Halabja were never talked about.

"Every time our leaders were trying to rough up on Saddam Hussein, they showed this (film) clip of Halabja being bombed by chemical and biological agents," said Naqishbendi. "It was political propaganda. They didn't identify the father holding his dead child in his arms or all the other children lying dead in their colorful Kurdish clothes. They didn't identify who these people were. They were not Saddam's people as the news claimed. Saddam was an Arab. These victims were Kurds."

Naqishbendi's book begins when he was a very young boy before the Kurdish Revolution of 1961.

"Halabja was really a small town then, only about 7,000 people," said Rauf. "It is laid out between three mountains and it is very much like Midwest weather, really hot summer and very cold winter. Sometimes we had 3 to 5 feet of snow. On one side there was a huge landscape of maybe 60 or 70 miles of farms growing tomatoes, cucumbers, melon, cotton, tobacco and what not. My grandfather's fabric shop was located on the curved lane between the two main streets. My father kept a store and my Uncle Kazem had a store as well.

There were places to play backgammon and cards. There were several cafes where people met and talked. It was a beautiful town, a place where you could see a natural democracy. Everyone was respected. Everyone had a place."

While the revolution started in 1961, it didn't really arrive in Halabja until 1963. In 1963, Rauf was 10.

"I remember when the Kurdish revolutionaries came to our town and they came in land rovers and they lined up in a procession with their guns," said Naqishbendi. "They were lining up just like a real army procession and then the people in town were all going out there and looking at them and clapping for them. We thought they were going to be a liberation army."

Naqishbendi added there is a pattern to revolutions. They start with violence, then a killing and then a mass imprisonment.

"The first conflict in Halabja ended in the brutal suppression of its citizens. Our house was burned while we were inside."

The family escaped in their pajamas, without shoes in the snow. Rauf's mother was nine months pregnant.

There is so much in this book, but not too much. There is Rauf's father's arrest by the Iraqi Secret police. There is the story of a brave young boy who manages to sneak past Iraqi soldiers to bring a critical message to Kurdish troops.

There is the missile attack on Halabja the last day of Ramadan in 1968. There is Rauf's time at the University of Tehran where he was studying to be a doctor and his experiences with the ruthlessness of Savak, the Iranian intelligence agency.

There is Rauf being granted asylum in the United States in 1976 when the Iranian-Islamic revolution was brewing and there is humor as Rauf tries to find his way around the English language while working as a dishwasher in New York City.

Naqishbendi ended up coming out to San Francisco because New York was simply too big for someone from such a small town.

He met his Daly City born wife in 1985 while both were attending San Francisco State University. The couple have two daughters, both at Skyline College, and a son at San Francisco State.

Naqishbendi said after the 1988 devastating chemical attack on Halabja it would be two years before he knew his parents were alive. It was impossible to find someone from the United States to hand deliver them a letter and his parents could not contact Rauf.

In 1990, Rauf received a phone call from his father and he knew then, some of the story but it was not until he was able to visit his family in 2005, in Kurdistan that he knew all the details of what had happened. His parents hadn't told him because they thought it would kill him.

"Even after everything that happened to my parents, when I was there in 2005, nobody in my family or in the town even cursed Saddam Hussein, not even once, because they are so polite and so dignified - they would never lower themselves to that position. The Kurds just don't label people. They are a very good natured people. The people still love jokes, they still love stories and they love music and singing and that really helps psychologically and it really helps people to live healthy. I've aged way more than anyone in my family because I didn't know what happened to them for so long."

"The Kurds are very different people. They are not hysterical and they are very capable of burying their past and they have a capacity to forgive. They do not want to return the horrors that have happened to them. Why would they want to do that, they've lived it, they know it is horror. If you smile, they forgive you."

As recently as March 19, 2009, U.S. House and Senate members commemorated the Halabja genocide with Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Howard Berman and Senator Joe Lieberman issuing statements recalling the horrors of the chemical attacks and demanding help for those who survived. (Many who survived the three days of chemical bombings by the Iraqi Air Force suffered such horrific consequences as: disfiguring burns, mutated DNA, different forms of cancer, neurological damage, blindness, respiratory damage, miscarriages, infertility, paralysis - and birth defects are on the rise in this garden of the poets.)

Lieberman strongly stated the need to "uphold our most cherished humanitarian values" by fighting against such evil. But perhaps that "fight" is not meant to be solved by the unleashing of old or new weapons against lives bound to earth by flesh and bone and dreams and hopes.

After all the Kurds even now are the first to quote an old Kurdish proverb which translates to: "If you are not a rose, don't be a thorn."

Perhaps the fight begins with something as simple as reading Naqishbendi's "The Garden Of The Poets" and discovering that here, within these pages, are people who are no longer strangers. These are people who have entered our hearts. Perhaps that is when we will lend our voices to fight for their freedom.

Rauf Naqishbendi, a software engineer, is a contributing columnist for Kurdishaspect.com, American Chronicle, Kurdishmedia.com and has written Op/Ed pages for the LA Times.