The language of brotherhood
Salar Abdoh's beautiful essay on friendship and blindness in the British Empire
This weekend many of our newsfeeds have offered a strange blend of happy athletes qualifying for Olympic events alongside disturbing scenes from an attempted assassination, an act that left one man dead and two others in critical condition.
The essay below, Salar Abdoh’s “Khalid,” takes place in 1972, in a different era of instability, before a different Olympics, one with horrifying scenes of violence. But Abdoh’s piece is set far away from Munich, in the bowels of British hospital, where he arrives from Iran, age seven, to have surgery on his eyes and develops a profound friendship with an Arab boy that reverberates throughout his life.
It’s a quiet story on a small human scale and yet it’s knitted tightly to a British colonial system and to international incidents that have nothing and everything to with these two young boys stuck in a cold ward far from home.
When we began our Complicating Colonialism project in partnership with Coda, our editor, Kira Brunner Don, said she wanted stories that examine how colonialist legacies still shape our personal lives and seeps in our choices, our cultures, our family life and even our friendships. It was a brilliant approach; instead of commissioning a series of essays on the political explanations for how empires work or articles on colonialist theory and policy, the issue is rooted in deeply personal stakes.
In may ways, “Khalid” epitomizes Kira’s vision for this issue—how colonialism shapes what goes unsaid and what gets forgotten, the forces and systems that shape our lives without our consent.
—Abby Rapoport
Empty beds in an empty ward at Walsgrave Hospital. 1979. (Getty Images).
“Khalid,” Salar Abdoh. Stranger’s Guide: Complicating Colonialism.
This piece is published in collaboration with Coda Story as part of the Complicating Colonialism issue.
All my life I’ve known versions of blindness. It began at a very young age when, from certain angles I would see two of everything – two homes, two cars, two of the same boy in kindergarten who wanted to fight me and did, two mothers, two of the Turkish dayah whom I always considered my real mother.
Blindness can be seeing too much of things, just as much as seeing too little.
To fix my eyes, in the summer of 1972 I was sent to England. I was seven then. My father had to be at the Munich Olympic games with the Iranian contingent and my mother was an absence that I never questioned. One day my grandmother and my older brother took me to the hospital where I was to remain that summer. What I recall of the place were the nurses, who seemed like nuns to me; they were always serious and laughter was not in their vocabulary. I dreaded the place from the moment I set foot in it.
My grandmother, who was the counterweight to my mother’s perennial absence, asked if I wanted to begin staying at the hospital that day or start my stay the following day.
“How long will I be here?”
“Oh, just a few days.”
“Then I’ll start today,” I said. It was a boy’s stab at courage and wishing to get the nightmare of loneliness in the hospital of a foreign country out of the way as quickly as possible.
But days turned into weeks at that hospital. And there were times when in the deficiency of my child’s logic I asked myself if I should have bought that extra day for myself away from this dreaded place.
Yet the dread came in waves. Sometimes it wasn’t there at all and I didn’t mind so much being at the hospital. The reason was an Arab boy whose bed lay next to mine, though in not an actual room but a wide, corridor-like area of the hospital. I wish I recalled his name. Since I do not, I will call him Khalid.
How Khalid and I came together is something I’ve thought about for decades. That first day the administration of the hospital gave us a tour of the floor I was to stay at. As we were passing the corridor where Khalid lay in bed, alone, with a longing and a fear that I was fast coming to identify as my own in that place of sickness, our eyes met. I didn’t know then that we could not speak each other’s languages. But the language of fear is universal and something snapped in me as we moved on from Khalid and the corridor into an overly large room where there must have been twelve or more beds. On each bed lay a British boy, staring dead-eyed at us. My color of skin was far closer to theirs than it was to Khalid’s; nevertheless, something in the avalanche of that paleness of theirs seemed threatening to me.
And, also, I had a question which I never asked. Why was I being offered the possibility of a bed in this room while Khalid had to sleep in the corridor? It seemed unfair. What was even more odd was that I, a mere kid, was being allowed to choose where I’d stay, with the British boys or with Khalid.
My grandmother said, “Do you want to stay in this room or stay with that boy back there?”
I swallowed hard and said, “I’ll stay with that boy.”
Our language was the language of brotherhood.
There was a pause. That long, sickroom seemed to grow in size, and if I am not mistaken the nurse who accompanied us looked at me strangely. As if I had failed some kind of a test.
Khalid became my brother. It took all of an afternoon for that to happen. To this day I don’t know what his sickness was and why he was there. We were often in trouble, doing the things none of those British boys would dream of doing. The apparent unfairness of the corridor, as opposed to a ‘real’ room, was the ticket that allowed us to roam the hospital at will. We haunted its stairways, smiled and laughed when the nurses scolded us with words we did not understand for not staying in our beds. Our language was the language of brotherhood. I spoke no Arabic and he obviously spoke no Persian, and English was not yet ours to share. We spoke with gestures. With hand signs and the hungry eyes of boys who grow in each other’s estimation with every new mischief they accomplish together. Sometimes we would stick our heads in the room of those British kids and each of us, I’m certain, knew what the other was thinking: “Thank God we are not the prisoners of that room!”
My grandmother would visit every few days. One day she came with my mother’s brother, Uncle Ali, who was a surgeon in Switzerland.
“The staff tell me you and this Arab boy misbehave. They say they might be forced to change your bed to another place.”
There was a television. Where exactly that TV was located I’m not sure now, but its presence is inscribed in the inmost recesses of my memory. A small, fat thing which that afternoon everybody was staring at and listening to intently, even as they were telling me that Khalid and I might be separated.
Something had happened at the Munich Olympics. Something serious. People had been killed. People were about to be killed, and I would be lying today if I said that I knew back then what or who or where Palestine was and what or who the Israelis were. Khalid and I, in trouble with the adults, looked at each other confusedly and I wanted to somehow convey to him that my father was actually there, right there in that TV at that moment, in Munich. And that I was not worried about my father because he was strong and I wished he would soon come here so Khalid could know just how strong he was.
Some days later they operated on my eyes and this time real blindness came. Maybe it was my child’s sense of the expansion of time that imagines the days of post-surgery blindness were weeks and months. In truth, it was probably only a few days. Days of utter darkness with bandages over both my eyes and nearly no movement.
Blindness can be seeing too much of things, just as much as seeing too little.
Khalid wanted me back. He wanted us to roam those hallways like before and get in trouble together. When my grandmother and brother and uncle came to visit, their talks always inevitably turned to Munich. In the stillness and desolation of blindness I imagined what if my father came back from that apparently ill-fated city and my blindness would not let me see him again, ever.
Khalid was bored without me. He would come and poke at me and say things I didn’t understand. I wasn’t in the mood. I was not hurting, but I could not see. And the not seeing made me sulky. Khalid was still Khalid, but I had somehow been reduced. I told him to lay off me in the best non-language we had between the two of us. But he would not listen. He wanted his friend back.
One day I complained about him to either my grandmother or uncle, I don’t recall which one. And soon, that very day in fact, Khalid’s corner of the corridor turned quiet. I sat in the shadow of my blindness and my betrayal of him and wondered where he had been taken. Was it my complaint that had sent him away? Or was it that he had been sent to whatever surgery he was in line for? The long stretch of dark days of not seeing, with Khalid no longer there, turned my world into a torment that only those who have committed betrayal know something about. I had betrayed our brotherhood by telling on him. Khalid was no longer there and I would have to search a lifetime to find him and beg his forgiveness. I would look for Khalid when years and years later someone first recited to me the love poems of Ibn Zaydun in the original Arabic, and I would look for him in the eyes of lost comrades on the battlefields of Mesopotamia. And perhaps, just perhaps, I felt him nearest when on a spring evening in the Sadr City quarter of Baghdad a gentle old man whom I had been talking to, casually and with no sense of bitterness or resentment, said these words to me in my own language, “It’s just that the blood of you Persians runs a little cold, Mr. Abdoh. Doesn’t it!”
Often I’ve wondered why I have never remembered Khalid’s name. You would think one would at the very least remember the name of someone they’ve thought about for so many years. Someone who was really nothing to them, but also everything. Nowadays I know why: I don’t remember Khalid’s name because I never called him by his name. Nor did he ever call me by mine. In our special brotherhood of that summer of ’72 in London, the absence of words – in Arabic, in Persian, in distant English – did not require our names. So we never used them. We used instead a language much more intimate, that of touch and laughter and exquisite youthful mayhem. I don’t recall ever seeing two Khalids with my pre-surgery, problematic eyes during our hospital stay. I only recall seeing one Khalid, whom I betrayed, and whose name I will never remember.
that was so beautiful 😭