My earliest reading memory
From as far back as I can remember, before I could read, I was read to mostly from the same book, The Arabian Nights, feeling the reverberations of Shahrazad’s sentences against my mother’s lap, and suspecting that it must be so: that to tell a story is to postpone death, that after she asks her would-be murderer, “Do I have your permission to tell a story?”, the world is made a little less certain.
The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 13 I read Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s Rain Song. I can’t claim to have understood it, but those poems ripped open a veil. The experience of being overrun by language, of being caught in the wake of lines that were just beyond reach, showed me how literature can be both the translation of an experience and also its manifestation.
