Sulaymaniyah -

33 years ago, Ranja Bawa Nuri did not see the raindrops of winter and the beauty of spring, but his fingers were able to paint them in oil paintings, touching the world and imagining what was around him in his poems and stories that he made a net to stare from it in the “farthest rooms of the world” to life, addressing it that he It remains, even if the darkness extends to infinity.

The life of the Iraqi writer Ranja Bawa Nuri was calm, like the threads of the morning sun in the smiles of orphans, the steps of fathers burdened with the worries of life, and the faces of mothers tired of waiting, how not when he embroidered himself from an early age by writing poetry, short stories, theater and drawing.

But suddenly darkness invaded his life.

This intrusion took place in 1990 when Bawah Nuri took his first steps in his thirtieth decade with the explosion of a capsule - a small bomb - from the remnants of the Iran-Iraq war, some of which he had collected in his home while trying to get rid of it, so that its fragments chose his eyes without the rest of his body parts to disable them from seeing life, and make him captive to blackness and darkness until today.

The writer Ranja gained his title from the name of his town, Ranja Bawah, in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. He worked in the theater as an author and director beginning in 1983, and dived into the world of literature by writing poetry, short stories, literary investigation and translation, until his town’s library boasted four of his books and the fifth is in print. .

The writings of the writer Ranja Bawa Nuri in poetry, story and translation (Al-Jazeera)

The furthest reaches of the world

After losing his sight, the writer remained a fugitive for isolation, loneliness, and darkness in his room, at the window of which he lost his sight, and his pain deepened even more when he left an oil painting that he began painting in 1990 of a portrait of his daughter when she was in her second year at the time without completing it until today, and she has been waiting since then for his fingers. To kohl his child's eyes with the dyes of his brush, but it seems that the wait will be longer.

After losing his sight for about 3 years, the Iraqi writer slowly loosened the shackles of his brokenness by returning to writing poetry, stories, translation, drawing and sculpture in his room, which he called "the farthest rooms in the world", isolated from people and lights throughout those years.

Blind Iraqi writer Ranja Bawa Nuri practices writing poetry, story, translation, painting and sculpture (Al-Jazeera)

During the meeting with him inside his room, and while he tries to preserve his pride by raising his glasses more to hide drops of tears that tried to infiltrate his cheeks, Nuri says in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net that it is "the room in which I died and was born again, and the windows of the world were opened for me, but they closed all the doors in front of me." And it made me far away and isolated from everything, even from life itself, and became a prisoner of solitude, so I gave it this name.

Despite the setbacks and disappointments that the room bears in the memory of the Iraqi writer, he returns and describes it as giving him a space wider than the darkness in his eyes to search for light and find it in the world of writing in which he embodies the secrets of his suffering and pain.

One of the difficulties that Paoh Nuri faced in the world of writing after losing his sight was that he used to record his poems, stories, and texts on cassette tapes to listen to them later, and then make amendments to them, and send them to newspapers and magazines for publication.

It would not have been easy for the Iraqi writer to spend more than 33 years of his life in a dark world covered by blackness, had it not been for the support of his family and his three children.

He says about them, "My family gave me the strength to continue in this life, and without it, I would not have had the will to resist a blind life."

Blind Iraqi writer Ranja Bawa Nuri says that his family gave him the will to resist (Al-Jazeera)

For his part, the writer and poet Salih Halaj describes the career of the blind writer Ranja Bawah Nuri as a "miracle," adding that "having a library in his home that includes dozens of books and various fields, even though he is blind, is nothing but a renewed spring in his life despite the fall of darkness prevalent in the seasons of his life." ".

Halaj believes - in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net - that Bawa Nuri's continuation in writing and his immersion in literature forced the difficulties of life to surrender to his solid will and not the other way around, as happens with many of his ilk, stressing that he is one of the pillars of literature and brought a lot of renewal in poetry and the short story in Kurdistan, and he succeeded in making himself a different pen among his peers in the literary community.

The blind writer dived from his isolated room into the world of literature by writing poetry, short stories, literary investigation and translation (Al-Jazeera)

town icon

As for the activist and journalist Dana Latif, he believes that the blind writer Ranja Bawa Nuri has turned into an "icon of literature" in his hometown.

And he adds with some criticism, "If there was a literary figure like him in another country, he would be in a position of greater appreciation than he is now."

Speaking to Al-Jazeera Net, he points out that Bawa Nuri's creations raised more than the literary value of their town compared to other regions in the region.

He says, "His talent is a gift from God, to compensate him for what he lost."