Khoshaba Jaber, an Assyrian living in West London, plays a tambura, a traditional instrument known as the "mother of strings," after singing an epic poem he learned in his boyhood village in northern Iraq. Alice Fordham/NPR
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Alice
Fordham, January 13, 2017
When
I meet Nineb Lamassu
at England's Cambridge University, where he's a researcher, he transports us to
his Middle Eastern homeland by opening his computer and playing me a recording
of a man reciting a poem.
Somewhere
between speech and song, the voice is old, a little gruff, rising and falling
rhythmically. Even in Aramaic — I don't speak a word of Aramaic — the effect is
hypnotic.
This
is the traditional epic poetry of the Assyrian ethnic minority. Thousands of
years ago, their empire
dominated the Middle East, spreading out from what is now northern Iraq.
There
are still an estimated 3 million to 4 million Assyrians today who trace their
roots back to that time, though much has changed and they are now Christian.
But war and turmoil have seen them displaced from the region and their
traditions are fading.
Lamassu
is trying to hang on to that culture. The story of his love for the epic poems
begins in the 1980s, when he was a little boy in Kirkuk, in northern Iraq.
"Kirkuk
actually is — was — an example of coexistence and a beautiful example of the
Iraqi multi-ethnic, multireligious mosaic," he says.
"I
grew up speaking Arabic at school," he says. At home, he spoke a modern
version of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. "And then conversing in Turkish
and Kurdish with my friends, and then being told off in Armenian by our
next-door neighbor — this was the beauty of Kirkuk," he says.
But
in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, it could be dangerous to be from a minority or
politically active.
Lamassu's
father was both, and so the family fled to Iran in the 1980s, to a refugee camp
with other Assyrians. Most were from remote areas, and they kept kids
entertained the old fashioned way — with long poems.
There
was one man who Lamassu says was just amazing.
"As
kids, we would go around the tents trying to find his flip-flops outside the
tent," he says. "And we would know that he is in this particular tent
tonight and, you know, performing his stories, and you know, doing his art. And
we would beg to be allowed in so we could hear him."
The
memory affects Lamassu to this day. "In the cold winter night in a refugee
camp, freezing, literally freezing in a tent, but kept warm by the animated
performance of the epic," he says.
Lamassu
became an academic researcher and now travels among the Assyrian diaspora
recording the epics as told by men he calls bards — including the storyteller
he loved listening to in the refugee camp, whose name is Khananya Zayya. Years
later, Lamassu tracked him down living in New Zealand.
"It
almost felt I was back in the refugee camp, right in that tent on that cold
winter night with him. He had not changed" — aside from a little
artificial help keeping his mustache black, he says.
Lamassu
tells me there's a bard living close by in Southall, London, so of course I
travel to meet him.
When
I arrive, it feels a little odd to be looking for an Assyrian bard to sing me
an ancient poem in a busy suburb where most people are originally from India.
But when I knock on the door of an ordinary, gray-terraced house, there he is:
Khoshaba Jaber, silver-haired, shuffling a bit, but excited to tell me about
the poems he grew up with.
He
was born in northern Iraq, in 1952, in a little village, and his dad used to
sing him the stories.
"When
you are a child, you remember your father or one old man in the village coming
to tell you stories or legends," he says.
But
when he was eight, his father was killed in a tribal dispute. After that, it
fell to the little boy to sing the poems.
The poems
varied from village to village — which is why Lamassu is so keen to record as
many as possible from the widely scattered diaspora. He has made dozens of
recordings, about 10 of which are of complete poems. Several of the bards have
died since he recorded their voices. The recordings will become part of a
Cambridge University database that will be available online.
Jaber's
version of the old stories is wild and thrilling. There are echoes of ancient
stories from Greek myths to ancient Assyrian epics to the Bible.
The
hero of this tale is named Qatine, the product of virgin birth — just like
Jesus. He becomes a shepherd and goes to a magical garden to take on a female
monster who has been terrorizing people.
"He
went, he went to the big monster, the woman monster," says Jaber, "to
the garden and when he went there and he went to the tree, the big tree and was
hiding himself."
He
pauses for effect and becomes increasingly animated as he relays an English
version of the epic — which goes on for more than an hour. Qatine defeats the
monster, and then goes on a quest for a plant that grants eternal youth, a
theme that also crops up in the epic of Gilgamesh, a poem dating back maybe
four millennia from Babylonia, discovered in its most complete form in the ruins
of an Assyrian palace in the 1800s.
The
story ends with another echo of the Bible: Qatine dead in a cave with a stone
in front, and a prophecy of resurrection.
"The
stone will be opened and come in Qatine. He will free us from those enemies,
but he is still there," Jaber finishes triumphantly.
The
echoes of the myths, the Bible, the ancient Assyrian epic, are tantalizing to
researchers like Lamassu because they raise questions of how far back these
tales go and whether they share a common origin.
And
there's another factor that makes Lamassu's work valuable right now. In Iraq,
ISIS has destroyed a number of ancient Assyrian sites, calling them idolatrous.
When Lamassu spoke at a recent conference, the man introducing him showed a
video of ISIS destroying ancient Assyrian monuments and heritage.
"And
he said, 'If we cannot keep them and preserve them, maybe we can preserve our
other heritage that they cannot destroy,'" says Lamassu.
He
means recording the poems, of course — capturing at least the memory of an
ancient people whose presence in their homeland is gradually fading away.
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