A
Family Drawn Apart

                         A Family Drawn Apart

                         Their Son Is a Talented Artist. That Is Both
                         Their Pride and Their Pain.

                         Sometimes his father tells Shukri Sindi a story
                         from the old country, when he was young and the
                         soldiers first came. Fearing slaughter, the
                         Kurds had escaped to the mountains. In the
                         crush of people, a pregnant woman stumbled and
                         strayed from the path. She fell to the ground
                         in labor, and no one stopped to help her. After
                         giving birth to twins, she was too weak to move
                         on. Mother and babies were abandoned, and
                         wolves devoured them all.

                         "It's true," Shukri insists. "It happened."

                         Six years ago, Shukri and his family were
                         forced to flee to the mountains themselves.
                         Eventually they reached America and settled in
                         the Virginia suburbs, where Shukri enrolled in
                         school and learned to speak a language his
                         parents do not understand.

                         And now, at 20, Shukri finds himself a refugee
                         alone on his own roadside.

                         Some men are guided by their beliefs, others by
                         their doubts. Shukri is still undecided,
                         unfinished. He yearns to become an artist, a
                         passion at odds with both his faith and his
                         family. To continue his journey, he may have to
                         forsake both. He leaves for college soon. It is
                         time to sort through his tumultuous young life
                         and decide what to take and what to leave
                         behind.

                         From the beginning, his parents say, Shukri was
                         a bright but willful boy. As soon as he could
                         hold a pencil in his small fingers, he drew. He
                         drew his family, he drew himself, he drew
                         houses and trees and farm animals. His parents
                         were both chagrined and impressed by his
                         obvious talent.

                         "Since first grade, we told him to stop, but he
                         wouldn't listen," says his mother, Rezbar, her
                         soft Kurdish cadences translated into English
                         by her children. She knits her fingers together
                         and smiles in embarrassment.

                         The conflict is rooted in the Koran, which
                         frowns upon art and forbids any rendering of
                         living creatures. Only God has the power to
                         create, it is believed, and man's attempt to
                         capture what God has made is sacrilegious, a
                         mockery. The Sindis are deeply Muslim.

                         His parents issued doomsday warnings, but could
                         never bring themselves to punish Shukri. He
                         drew what he pleased. As a child, when he drew
                         people and animals, teachers would scold him.
                         "They would make me draw a line across the
                         necks, to symbolize that they were dead," he
                         recalls. Dutifully, he slit the throats of his
                         creations, only to go back and draw them again.

                         America, his mother laments, has made her son
                         even more stubborn.

                         There are 10 Sindi children, with Shukri near
                         the middle. He is thin in his baggy jeans, with
                         a face that is almost puckish and dark eyes
                         that laugh at some secret joke. His father,
                         Ramazan, is a religious scholar, his lifelong
                         study of the Koran underwritten first by Iraq's
                         socialist regime and now by his sons.

                         "My father never worked," Shukri says, not
                         bothering to hide his disdain. His mother is a
                         conservative Muslim as well. The oldest sons
                         support the extended family by cleaning houses;
                         one repairs cars. Shukri himself has worked as
                         a dishwasher and cook since 15. Once he drew
                         the restaurant's lobsters swimming in the tank.
                         He shrugs off this affront to Allah. "They're
                         interesting creatures," he protests.

                         Shukri remembers when an artist in his town of
                         Zakhu set about sculpting a gigantic woman. "He
                         was going to do her in six separate parts, but
                         it was never completed," Shukri says. "Each
                         time he finished one part, religious fanatics
                         would destroy it." Shukri wonders what it might
                         have looked like, what the sculptor meant to
                         say, whether he survived when the soldiers
                         came.

                         It was 3 a.m. on March 18, 1991. Shukri's
                         mother awakened her children. "Get your clothes
                         on," she urged, "we're leaving." The Kurdish
                         rebellion that erupted after the Persian Gulf
                         War had been crushed by Iraqi dictator Saddam
                         Hussein's soldiers. There were rumors that
                         Kurdish civilians were being gassed, chemical
                         weapons felling women as they hung out their
                         wash and children as they played. Now the
                         soldiers had reached a neighboring town. The
                         Sindis packed what they could carry and ran
                         into the night. Shukri forgot his shoes.

                         "There was no time to cry," he remembers.

                         "We could hear bombs exploding around us, and
                         helicopters on the outskirts of town," Shukri
                         says. His father separated from them to run
                         back for the family's sheep, and after a while,
                         Shukri remembers, his mother stopped walking
                         and began to sob, the younger children weeping
                         with her in terror and confusion. Shukri's back
                         hurt beneath the load of food and clothing he
                         carried.

                         It took three days to reach the mountains.
                         Ramazan caught up with his family on the
                         Turkish border, and they walked for another
                         mile, until they reached a dark valley. Tired
                         and hungry, Shukri saw thousands of refugees
                         huddled around bonfires against the bitter
                         wind.

                         "The morning after we finally reached the
                         camp," he recalls, "it started snowing.

                         "Even God was not on our side."

                         Pictures of Pain

                         Color, Shukri, color!

                         Joyce Ellen Weinstein thought she would never
                         win the battle with her hesitant pupil. In art
                         class during the two years he spent at
                         Annandale High School, Shukri Sindi drew in
                         black and white, and painted only in shades of
                         brown. Weinstein, a professional artist
                         herself, was frustrated. The boy was one of the
                         most talented students she had known. What was
                         holding him back?

                         "His work is very beautiful and he's very
                         talented," she explains now, "but unless you
                         get in touch with something personal inside you
                         . . . it's not going to have meaning. I mean,
                         what's another still life?"

                         And so they began to talk, this animated
                         silver-haired teacher and this puzzling
                         dark-eyed boy.

                         "We did a lot of talking about the meaning of
                         art, the purpose of art and the process of
                         art," she recalls. "But it's very scary,
                         because art makes you very vulnerable and open
                         and naked because you're telling the world:
                         This is who I really am."

                         Shukri was friendly and well-liked, the art
                         teacher noticed, but he was different from most
                         of the kids chattering in the hallways.
                         Football games and dances didn't interest him.
                         "He was very much his own person," she recalls.
                         "He was sophisticated in an unusual way."

                         Shukri's pastel still life of radishes and
                         lettuce won a prize, and he sent some of the
                         money to a struggling poet back in Iraq. He
                         told Weinstein that pursuing his dream might
                         shame or anger his family.

                         She reminded him that immigrants and refugees
                         come to this country seeking freedom. How could
                         Shukri not accept America's greatest gift?

                         "He talked about gathering strength to do what
                         he needed," she says, "about how changed he was
                         going to become, how separate."

                         Toward the end of that year he finished his
                         first painting. The large canvas showed two old
                         women in scarves crouched on a dirt floor,
                         making tea over a fire.

                         He knew them, Shukri explained. They were
                         friends from a squalid camp where he had spent
                         three years as a refugee. Slowly, in pencil and
                         in paint, his story began to unfold:

                         Nearly half a million Kurds sought sanctuary in
                         the valley where the Sindis found themselves
                         that terrifying spring of 1991. There wasn't
                         enough food or fresh water. People were
                         starving and freezing. The State Department
                         estimated at the time that an average of 1,000
                         Kurds were dying there daily. Relief convoys
                         could not reach the rugged, mountainous region,
                         and riots broke out when planes dropped meager
                         supplies. Turkey would not permit the refugees
                         to press forward, yet turning back meant almost
                         certain death at the hands of the Iraqi army.

                         After three months in the mountains, the Sindis
                         were among those moved to a compound surrounded
                         by barbed wire in the Turkish desert.

                         "That's when the suffering started," Shukri
                         recounts.

                         The family of 12 lived beneath two tents tied
                         together. At first, the United Nations brought
                         food and clothing, and sympathetic countries
                         sent help as well. But as the crisis dragged
                         on, the international relief effort dwindled.
                         There were reports of beatings and of supplies
                         being stolen by Turkish soldiers who controlled
                         the camp. No one could leave the compound, and
                         protests over the living conditions were
                         quashed. The Kurdish language was banned, and
                         children were taught Turkish.

                         Amid this misery, Shukri's devout parents still
                         knelt in prayer five times a day. Shukri
                         refused to join them. When they asked why, he
                         never would say.

                         He sought solace in his art. Another refugee
                         asked Shukri to draw his portrait, and paid him
                         with paper -- a treasure so precious he brought
                         the remainder with him to America.

                         One day, some artists who lived in the camp had
                         an art show in one of the tents. Shukri went to
                         see, and shyly offered one of his drawings. The
                         artists displayed it, and after the show one of
                         them sent for the boy.

                         "He was very old," Shukri says, "in his
                         mid-thirties. He did paintings which he would
                         sell for supplies. There was a tent where three
                         artists and a poet lived. I spent all my days
                         there."

                         The artists taught their new protege basic
                         lessons about color and composition. At first
                         he merely copied masterpieces from the books
                         they had, meticulously re-creating the drawings
                         of Picasso. The artists shooed him out of the
                         tent, telling him to draw whatever he saw. And
                         so he drew overflowing trash cans, or people
                         planting in the sweltering fields. But these
                         were merely exercises, devoid of feeling, like
                         a musician practicing scales. Sometimes he
                         secretly drew his father while he slept.

                         His mentor was a wild-haired Baghdad artist
                         named Mahmood Syamansori, who splotched red
                         paint on his clothes to mimic bullet wounds.
                         "Everything changed," Shukri says of this time.
                         "Art got to be the center of my life because
                         there really was no center if you looked for
                         it."

                         His sketchbooks now are filled with the painful
                         images he struggles to retrieve: "This is in
                         the beginning," he narrates, "sleeping beneath
                         tents made of boughs and sheepskin. This is
                         when it was raining so hard, and we had to
                         hunker under the tents. The bugs would come out
                         of the sheepskin and suck your blood."

                         There is his favorite drawing, of someone
                         standing beneath a guard tower, his hand on the
                         barbed-wire fence. "This is one of my friends,"
                         Shukri explains. "Sad man! He's a poet. He saw
                         better than most other people. He was trying to
                         get a book together. He was always sad. He was
                         forced to go back to Iraq. He stayed in Turkey
                         seven years and it didn't do him any good."

                         Sitting in the dim living room of his family's
                         rented house, Shukri flips through the pages
                         again, until he comes across a drawing of a
                         teenager. He doesn't know his name. "Just
                         another victim," he shrugs.

                         "Don't ever forget this," the man with painted
                         bullet wounds said before they parted.

                         The Family Forces

                         Ramazan and Rezbar Sindi sit side by side on
                         their sofa in their living room, where a PBS
                         special about creatures of the desert drones on
                         a big color TV. Ramazan fingers his worry
                         beads. He is 68 years old, his face creased
                         with sorrow.

                         "In our religion," Ramazan explains, "art is
                         not the best thing." He repeats the edicts of
                         the Koran and gets up to fetch a small
                         porcelain bird from a bookshelf. This bird is
                         forbidden, he says.

                         "God is going to punish you for creating living
                         things," he adds, "especially sculptors." The
                         bird stays because it was a gift from a
                         non-Muslim friend.

                         Shukri brings out a mobile he created. It is a
                         family tree made of slender branches, with
                         slips of paper bearing names. At the base is a
                         block painted with portraits of Shukri's mother
                         and father. His mother is laughing; his father
                         is solemn. They have never told Shukri what
                         they think of it, and he has never asked.

                         "We don't communicate out loud," Shukri says,
                         adding, "We have very strong ties. That's what
                         I'm saying with this tree. We went through
                         this, and we stick together.

                         "I think they do like it," he says of his
                         artistic talent. "Deep inside. Deep, deep."

                         His 54-year-old mother shakes her head
                         vehemently, and Shukri blinks at her in
                         surprise. It is his father's disapproval he
                         expected, not this. "We don't want to hurt your
                         feelings," she demurs.

                         Shukri graduated from Annandale High this year
                         with a 3.8 grade-point average and a partial
                         scholarship to the Pratt Institute in New York
                         City, where he will major in architecture for
                         reasons both pragmatic and conciliatory. Even
                         so, his parents cannot grasp why Shukri -- so
                         bright, so capable -- would choose the path he
                         has.

                         "We love him. We want him to become a doctor or
                         archaeologist," Ramazan says, "not an artist.
                         He won't listen." He turns to speak directly to
                         his son, but Shukri looks straight ahead and
                         translates the words as if they were meant for
                         someone else:

                         "We're going to pray that you will be happy,
                         that you will go the right way."

                         But Shukri's evident talent stirs a conflicted
                         passion in his father as well. Ramazan gets up
                         from the couch to search for a book. The volume
                         is a coffee-table chronicle of atrocities
                         against the Kurds. Photographs show bodies
                         blackened by the poisonous mustard gas,
                         children maimed by bombs. Ramazan urges his son
                         to capture the horrors of war and oppression
                         with his pencil and paints.

                         "Sometimes," Shukri says, "he even gives me
                         ideas for drawings. He tells me stories and
                         says, `Draw this, draw this.' " He told his son
                         to draw the woman and babies being devoured by
                         wolves, but Shukri's imagination couldn't
                         summon the horrible image. His father was angry
                         and won't stop asking.

                         "I wanted everyone to see the torture and
                         oppression the Iraqi government causes, so they
                         would never forget it," Ramazan explains. "I
                         wanted there to be a question: Why? Why would
                         such a thing happen?"

                         He seems not to know that this very same rage
                         inspires his son to draw sad poets behind
                         barbed wire and forlorn men hunkered in a tent
                         against cold rain.

                         "I feel I am getting something of myself that
                         needs to get out," Shukri says, "and then
                         you're assured it's still alive. I want other
                         people to remember it, too -- this society,
                         this life. It's easy to forget. It's what
                         shaped me, and as long as I remember it, I'll
                         know who I am.

                         "But I feel like I lose myself if I lose this."

                         Once his teacher persuaded him to work from his
                         heart, Shukri focused entirely on works
                         depicting life as a refugee. "Joyce made me
                         realize I have to do this now, not later," he
                         explains. "I really can't start anything else
                         till I'm finished."

                         He doesn't know when that might be. "When it's
                         enough."

                         His father offers a small consolation. Shukri's
                         art is tolerable, he allows, because at least
                         it is not sculpture.

                         "We could never allow that," Ramazan intones.
                         Shukri lets a defiant grin flit across his
                         face.

                         "I have done it already," he confides. "It's
                         upstairs. A nude woman. Actually, I think
                         sculpture might be my medium."

                         His parents smile politely, unable to
                         comprehend.

                         The Next Journey

                         Shukri leaves for college in a matter of days.
                         It's not talked about much in his family, but
                         sometimes his mother will suddenly say he can't
                         go, that he's never been on his own. Why can't
                         he stay in Virginia, she implores.

                         And Shukri tells her gently, If I want to be
                         somebody, I have to leave.

                         Joyce Weinstein spent the summer on a
                         fellowship in Israel and returned elated by the
                         experience of exploring her Jewish identity
                         through her art. She called Shukri, no longer a
                         student but now a friend, and made plans to see
                         him one last time before he is gone. They meet
                         at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
                         and walk slowly through the serene white rooms.

                         Shukri tells her about the demanding schedule
                         he has waiting for him at Pratt: six classes.
                         English, physics, architecture . . . . They
                         pause before a large sculpture in wax and
                         tallow by Joseph Beuys: "Memories of My Youth
                         in the Mountains," the title reads in German.
                         Weinstein's bracelets jangle as she explains
                         the piece to Shukri.

                         They admire a work by Joseph Cornell called
                         "The Uncertainty Principle," and then walk some
                         more until Picasso consumes them, leaving
                         Shukri dazed by the colors so vibrant beyond
                         the dark valley.

                         Kurdish refugee Shukri Sindi, 20,
                         found solace in his art during a horrific exile
                         with his family in a Turkish camp.

                         Sindi, flanked by mother Rezbar and
                         father Ramazan, both devout Muslims, has
                         pursued art despite their strong objections on
                         religious grounds. "But I feel like I lose
                         myself if I lose this," the son says.

                         Kurdish refugee Shukri Sindi, 20,
                         shows one of his works chronicling life in a
                         Turkish refugee camp.

                         Sindi, with mentor Joyce Ellen
                         Weinstein, soaks up the art at the Hirshhorn
                         Museum. He'll soon be leaving to study
                         architecture in New York City.

                           © Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company