Flying to Forget: A Vignette of Amman’s Pigeon Fancier
‘I am a pigeon addict, from a family of pigeon addicts’ Hamada announces over his rooftop. When everything had crumbled around him, he held onto flight, a stirring articulation of grief, chaos, pain and then … the place beyond.
Text Frankie Jenner | Photography Ali Asfour
‘For me, pigeons are like this cigarette’, you hold them gently between your fingers, letting the wind shed its feathers, sometimes encouraged with a gentle flick. You watch its ashes fly off, carried for a while, whimsical in the air, before they eventually fall, delicately to the ground, and here they will lay for a little while, before the wind takes them further still.
‘For me, pigeons are like this cigarette’, you hold them gently between your fingers, letting the wind shed its feathers, sometimes encouraged with a gentle flick. You watch its ashes fly off, carried for a while, whimsical in the air, before they eventually fall, delicately to the ground, and here they will lay for a little while, before the wind takes them further still.
I am sat with Hamada outside one of Downtown Amman’s many coffee stalls, sipping on Iraqi tea and dragging slowly on LD Blue cigarettes. Conversations flutter over and around our heads, horns compete with one another, and the calls of market sellers echo through the labyrinth of the souk, trying to shift the last of their days’ stock.
It is Thursday evening, and we have just been to the pigeon market. Scattered along the backstreets of Amman, men line the narrow roads with bird cages and cardboard boxes filled with pigeons, exhibiting their loot and haggling to secure the best deal. The affair spills out towards the amphitheatre, where we find a litany of pigeon cafes. The air is a thick, throat-burning concoction of argeelah smoke and the sour smell of pigeon excrement, a combination not for the faint of heart.
Hamada clings to a brown paper bag, trying to stifle the subtle movement inside. He has bought three pigeons this evening. Soon, they will join his flock of around two hundred and fifty. He has not been to the pigeon market for a while, and the excitement is evident in his demeanour. He has clearly garnered a reputation amongst Amman’s pigeon fanciers. People step out of the way to let him pass, speaking to him only when addressed. He carries himself easily through the night.
‘I am a pigeon addict’, Hamada announces proudly, ‘from a family of pigeon addicts’. For generations, his family have participated in the tradition of Kash Hamam, which loosely translates from Arabic as pigeon swatters: a game played out in the sky, where rival pigeon fanciers release their birds in flight in an attempt to lure and steal from one another’s flocks. Flyers train their birds by throwing pieces of cardboard in the air, using distinct whistles and cries to encourage their agility. They devise traps and nets to capture and distract another keeper’s bounty. If they succeed in capturing a bird, referred to as ‘Kash’, then they will often proceed to cut off the feathers of the enemy bird.
Pigeons mark their territory on rooftops and areas that lie below their flight path. Young birds, specifically those under the age of a year, referred to as’ (مكلف) ‘mikhlif, swiftly grow attached to their environment, developing a rapid overview of their flight zone, signposting nearby landmarks and undulations in the landscape. Hamada proudly admits that if he were to sell one of his birds to someone more than sixty to seventy kilometres away, he would count just one or two weeks before it would find its way home. They are able to navigate such vast and complex terrains by using ‘magnetoreception’, allowing them to orient themselves to the magnetic field of the earth and helping them determine their direction, height, and position. Many species exhibit this sensory ability, but it is quite remarkable that such small birds, such as pigeons, are able to do so.
Embedded in the game of Kash Hamam is the act of stealing, and it is this that has largely fuelled a distrust of pigeon fanciers, often slandered as thieves, liars and criminals. An ancient Levantine law states that practitioners of Kash Hamam cannot be trusted as witnesses in a court of law. When I ask Hamada what he thinks of this, he kisses his teeth, ‘It’s not even a law to me, what’s the link? I can never see the link?’ He explains a loophole: if you bring forward four men who can testify that the accused raises pigeons, then the case would fall, and he would be believed. ‘People are misguided,’ he continues, ‘many different people partake in the hobby, even government ministers and doctors.’ Hamada seems unbothered by the reputation cast upon him as he continues to chuck a weighted piece of cardboard high into the air beyond his rooftop, trying to lure his pigeons home. ‘I hope that doesn’t fall on someone!’ I exclaim. ‘I hope to God it does fall on someone’s head; why are they standing under it?’
The more time I spend with Hamada, the more it becomes clear that his attitude towards pigeons stands in stark contrast to his opinions of humans and the world around him. When he talks about pigeons, he tells me that no words will ever be able to express his love for them: ‘Imagine having a thousand problems in your life. Try sitting here with me, open up to them, just look at them, listen to their sounds […] It gives me peace.’
Even the way he vets pigeons for purchase is filled with tenderness. Back at the pigeon market, Hamada inspects each bird meticulously before buying. He raises the bird to his face, gently licking its eye, lingering just as its bottom lid is stretched to ensure it’s healthy, rubbing its cheek against his own: it is intimate. He spans their wings delicately, counting each pleat to ascertain its age, making sure they are not damaged or weak.
When I ask him if this same tenderness translates to the relationships he holds with the people around him, he kisses his teeth again. ‘The dirtiest animal that God created was the human being. Even dogs are better than humans.’ For Hamada, part of the beauty of pigeon keeping is that these birds are so far removed from his daily reality at ground level. He points to his favourite bird, Shekshelly, ‘He’s my pal. He’s not shallow, he’s not going to use you, he’s not going to play games with you, he’s not going to hurt you. It’s only going to hurt when you have a really nice bird, and it will die.’
Hamada recalls the time that passed after his father died; he set about fixing the roof and caring for his father’s birds. He remembers that days would go by when he was not even able to buy bread or cigarettes, trying to get enough money to support his family by buying and selling pigeons. ‘My relationship with pigeons is far deeper than any relationship with humans.’ When Hamada is around the birds, it reminds him of everything he has faced and how, through their flight, they picked him up as well.
When everything crumbled around him, he held onto the flight. It is a stirring articulation of grief, chaos, pain and then … the place beyond. The place we go in search of peace. ‘It’s not even escapism to me, I just got hurt too many times, and I fell too many times, and to me, they grant me peace.’
Many accounts of pigeon fanciers try to forge a connection between the bird and the man, the bird and society, as a way to better understand the reality of the world around them. But the more time I spend with Hamada, the more I realize that, for him, the very beauty of these birds lies in their detachment from reality. Their ability to fly away, to dance across the sky, to return and do it all over again tomorrow, and the day after, and for as long as it takes. Suspended in a state of perpetual presence, the future is far beyond the horizon, and the past is below. ‘I talk to them sometimes, they don’t speak back, but they understand.’
We are sat atop Hamada’s roof one evening, and the light is descending over the shoulder of the afternoon. The falling sun offers itself to us, lingering amongst the pockets of the horizon. It sits for a while, perched above the rooftops, in between water tanks and telephone masts, then sinks into the white stone facades of apartment buildings and burys itself amongst the city’s parched patches of hillside.
The sky becomes filled with the collective flight of pigeons, swooping and circling, dancing and arcing above the hybrid fray. To the untrained eye, their movement initially appears frantic and unchoreographed as they dip and dive, muddling with other flocks, wings flapping and flailing, and heads ducking. But soon, a repetition of patterns emerges from their chaos. There is harmony and order to their flight, and they move in conjunction with, respond to, and act against one another.
As the wings of smaller birds begin to flail, they start to descend back to their rooftops, falling gently like dominoes from the sky, weary from the day. The messenger will always be the final bird to return, it will remain circling in the air long after the rest have retired, alone and fearless, chasing the sun to its bed.
Summer falls upon Amman like a fish out of water, clumsy and mistaken. From May through to September, you see far fewer pigeons flying. The weather is too hot and tyres the birds. These months are utilized instead for breeding and training the smaller ones (‘ مخلف ‘/ mikhlif). It had been a few weeks since I last saw Hamada, so we arranged to meet over tea. But as I am walking down the stairs towards his building, looking out over the roof, the space is desolate. The doors to the pigeon lofts are wide open, even for the ones usually housing the fragile and sick. One lone pigeon sits atop the roof, the messenger. Its presence is punctuated with loss.
When I enter Hamada’s apartment, he is sitting on the balcony, where a set of stairs lead up to the roof. His face is stricken with pain. ‘They’re all gone. My children are all gone.’
Someone had mixed poison into a handful of bird feed, put it in a lightbulb, and thrown it onto Hamada’s roof. The bulb smashed, and Hamada discovered them in the morning; there were one hundred and eighty dead pigeons. The remaining seventy were quickly transferred to a veterinary practice in the hope of saving them. The rest he gathered into black bags and placed in the trash on the street.
Not only had Hamada’s demeanour and appearance changed in the wake of this devastating loss, but so too had the space the pigeons once inhabited. His rooftop was barren. Feathers lay limp where feet used to dance to the sound of their bangles in motion. This was a ghostly reminder that the birds now existed as a figment of our imagination—an imitation of absence.
When forced to confront the rooftop, what was once so familiar had become an eerie surreality. A space designed, crafted and adapted for life, birds, and flight has become something else. It has become something else, but it is devoid of life. A space robbed of its context, a betrayal of itself. A liminal space, a threshold between the real and the remembered.
The concept of liminality has been around since the beginning of the twentieth century and refers to a state of ambiguity and confusion, betwixt and between, holding and waiting. For some, liminal spaces can offer hope, as they situate us in the place and time between ‘what was’ and ‘what will be’; a projection towards the future. But for Hamada, he cannot bring himself to confront this space. He cannot bear to be on his roof, in his apartment, near the reminder of death. When I see him, he talks about moving and leaving Jordan. He’s applied for a visa to the UK, hoping to stay for a short while before moving on to Mexico and maybe the States. This, too, is a familiar migratory pattern, a flight path.
You never want to outstay your welcome in a liminal space, you do not want to get stuck in them. In the end, you must leave them. ‘This city is nothing more than a graveyard to me now. There’s nothing left for me here.’