Saud Alsanousi - The Bamboo Stalk

When the Kuwaiti players started to sing their national anthem a shiver ran through me, from deep inside me to my hands and feet. ‘Kuwait, my country, may you be safe and glorious! May you always enjoy good fortune!’ I found myself singing along as the camera moved down the line of players. The players finished singing and I stopped too. Then the cameras switched to the line of Filipino players and the people around me started singing: ‘Country Dear, Pearl of the Orient, The blazing of the heart, In thy chest is alive.’

The feeling was indescribable. As much as I could, I tried to concentrate on the piece of paper I was holding but it was no use. I looked from my son to the television screen. I had expected my son to have blue eyes and fair skin but he turned out quite different — a swarthy Arab complexion and large eyes like those of his aunt Khawla.

My mother wanted to call him Juan. I almost agreed but then I remembered that in Filipino we pronounce it the English way, with an h sound, while in Portuguese it starts with a j sound like John and in Arabic it’s like in Spanish, with a kh sound. I told her I preferred not to inflict so many names on the boy and, besides, by tradition he should take his grandfather’s name — Rashid.

Little Rashid burst out crying in alarm at all the shouting that suddenly erupted in the sitting room when Filipino midfielder Stephan Schröck kicked the ball into the back of the Kuwaiti net in added time at the end of the first half. There was cheering and whistling on the screen and in the sitting room, and smiles on the faces of those around me. Everyone clapped for joy, except for me, who felt like I’d scored an own goal.

The second half began. Everyone was disappointed in the sixty-first minute when Yousef Nasser scored for the Kuwaitis.

Here I am, scoring again in my other goal.

The result so far is satisfactory, as far as I’m concerned. There’s still another half an hour to go but I don’t want to watch it. I don’t want to take sides. I don’t want one of my teams to defeat my other team. With the result like this, I’m neutral.

I’ll leave this last piece of paper aside so that I’ll be free to look at my little boy’s face as he sleeps at peace in his mother’s arms, or look deep into Adrian’s eyes, which just stare into space.

Manila, July 2011

A Note on the Author

Saud Alsanousi is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist, born in 1981. His work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi and he currently writes for Al-Qabas newspaper. He lives in Kuwait, and The Bamboo Stalk is his first book to be published in English. He is currently working on his next novel.

A Note on the Translator

Jonathan Wright has translated a dozen novels and other major works from Arabic to English, starting in 2008 after thirty years as a journalist, mostly in the Middle East. He won the 2013 Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014 for his translation of Hassan Blasim’s The Iraqi Christ .