-The dial Magazine asked me to write about my literary sin, so I did
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.
