arts Home > Book Reviews

At an age when most Americans are contemplating their college majors, Hiner Saleem was crammed into the back of a refugee caravan speeding away from Iraq on the eve of the Ba’athist coup of 1968, heading toward the Syrian border with a falsified passport, never to see his family or homeland again. This seems like a hard way to turn 17, but it’s the least of hardships Saleem endures in My Father’s Rifle, a memoir of Saleem’s childhood lived in the unmapped nation of Kurdistan and a story of a boy’s emergence as an artist in an artless world.

Saleem’s gentle, understated prose illuminates vignettes from a childhood both brutal and remote. He remembers not only his neighbor’s stunt pigeons and the taste of pomegranates but also the day his warlord father deemed it necessary to execute his uncle under suspicion of treason. It’s charming when Saleem reveals that he cannot identify the flavor of the drink he’s licked off a discarded bottle cap, that there’s nothing in 1960s Aqra that tastes like Coca-Cola. But it’s jaw-dropping when, later that year, he sees pictures for the first time, printed illustrations in a book of poetry that inflame a passion for the visual image that’s bolstered by the Egyptian soap operas he watches on his neighbor’s television. He dreams of becoming the first Kurdish-language filmmaker and struggles through all-Arabic school lessons in order to fulfill his father’s wish of having at least one son with a university degree. But the family’s hope of a Kurdish nation slowly erodes after internment in an Iranian refugee camp and the punitive middle years of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The style of Saleem the author grows sharper and more mature as Saleem the protagonist becomes an adult, adrift in a totalitarian state, choosing to fight for the resistance for a while but ultimately deciding to follow his dreams to freedom. Well written and evocative, with a poetic scarcity of language and an apt gift for metaphor, My Father’s Rifle is not only an intriguing window on a lost time and place but also a stirring reminder of how hope can triumph over grim reality and a humanizing account of a people Americans have seen on the news for the past 30 years but still know much too little about.