Between Two Worlds (29 page)

“I don’t think so,
habibiti
. I no longer trust the advice that I gave you on love and marriage. I no longer trust in myself. Maybe what I taught you about being a strong woman was wrong. Maybe it is better to be a good wife.”

She was looking down at the floor, not meeting my eyes at all.

 

 

A few months later, my mother flew over with the wedding dress she had made for me, a gold-and-white dress she had embroidered with love poems and our names. Amjad and I were married in January 1993. His family arranged the ceremony, which in Iraqi Muslim tradition is hosted by the bridegroom’s family. Amjad and I had rented a hotel suite for our wedding night, and Mama and I checked in early to dress for the wedding. She looked beautiful that day. We combed each other’s hair and were giggling when the makeup lady came to our room. She thought we were sisters. When she left, I put my arm around my mother’s neck when we were still in our bathrobes and giggled. “We are two sisters!”

When my mother helped me into the dress, I worried about how low-cut it was.

“Oh, honey, don’t worry about it!” she said, kissing me on the forehead. “Just enjoy your wedding and your life. I love you,
habibiti
. Amjad is a good man. Take good care of him, and be happy. Don’t ever forget to do that! Be happy!”

I was happy that day. I was really happy. Mama looked like a bride herself, and everyone commented on how beautiful she was. I felt a spark of her old self shining through. That was my mama. The beautiful Alia. I could hear her laughter through the crowd as she enjoyed herself. My wedding was the best party I have ever gone to, though I didn’t really care. I spent practically the whole time just dancing with Amjad, reflecting on how much I loved him and how lucky we were.

 

 

Little by little, I came to trust him sexually, as he undoubtedly knew I would. Amjad was a healer, the most patient, understanding person I have ever met. There were times we stood in my little apartment kissing for hours—so long my knees would quiver—but I was afraid to lie down, and there was no place to sit. Then, later, we would lie together and he would just hold me for hours until we fell asleep. One night, when Natalie and Nat King Cole’s song, “Unforgettable,” was playing on the stereo, I was able to let my defenses down, and he talked to me and touched me and brought me through the other side of my pain, and I finally understood what my mother was talking about at our kitchen table.

Amjad was in his first year of a doctorate at the University of Virginia, a two-hour drive from Washington, D.C. I was twenty-three, working full-time and going to school at night. We were married, and it was logical that we would live together. But commuting seemed out of the question, and I was terrified that if I quit my job to move in with him, I would lose all the hard-won gains I had made toward controlling my own destiny. I had met the man of my dreams too soon.

“I can move in with you in Charlottesville, get depressed and leave you, or I can stay in D.C., see you on weekends, and be happy,” I informed him. He chose the latter, so we saw each other over the weekends.

The following fall I enrolled full-time at George Mason University and decided to major in women’s and international studies. Here, at last, I had an opportunity to read whatever I chose and say whatever I wanted. I learned about feminism and found it odd that Western women were still struggling for some rights, like equal pay for equal work, that were guaranteed in so many of what are called “developing” countries. I learned in one of my classes what I had never heard at a family gathering: Stalin ordered Russian soldiers to rape as many German women as possible during World War II. I learned about the Holocaust, the anti-slavery movement in the United States, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. My whole sense of the world was changing. Growing up as I had in a dictatorship frozen in place, I didn’t comprehend the basic dynamic of a world in active flux, with justice fighting injustice, actions and reactions, political and social changes, gender equality and gender-based discrimination, good and evil fighting each other constantly. I learned that other people had undergone oppression and survived, other nations had overthrown tyrants, and it gave me hope.

Amjad gave me books he knew would help me understand the world that had been off-limits to me until now. I saw patterns in Saddam Hussein’s atrocities and injustice and realized that these were common to all dictators, including Hitler and Stalin, whose work I had seen him read. I saw Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in George Orwell’s
1984
and felt the horror of Amo in Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. I read Kanan Makiya’s
Republic of Fear,
and learned of even more horrors Saddam Hussein had committed in Iraq and wondered if my parents knew about any of them. It was from that book that I finally came to understand that the wave of Shia deportations that nearly took away my mother was one of Amo’s early ethnic cleansing operations. Makiya estimated that two hundred thousand Shia had been deported, and that didn’t include thousands of families like Fakhri’s that had fled on their own. That campaign had been so ignored in the Western media, coming as it did as Saddam Hussein was fighting Iran with funding from the West, that even Amjad hadn’t heard about it.

I took all this information in but spoke to no one about it except Amjad. For me, it was personal and academic. It never occurred to me to join an opposition party, which might have had dangerous consequences for my family. I also completely opposed economic sanctions, which many exiled Iraqi dissidents supported. I didn’t believe in the idea of economic sanctions unless the oppressed people themselves requested it, as had been the case in South Africa. I knew that any economic blockade imposed on Iraq would only deprive average Iraqis of food and medicine while Amo got richer. Amo would never suffer, but the tortured logic behind sanctions was that Iraqis would suffer so much they would somehow rise up and overthrow him. How presumptuous this was, I thought, and how cruel, how removed from the reality of the average Iraqi family. The Amo I knew understood his people far better than those who favored imposing sanctions on him. Before I left Iraq, I already suspected he had deliberately distributed different foods to different marketplaces so people would spend all day just trying to put together a meal and have less time to make trouble. Now, I knew, he would do far worse to punish those who had risen up against him. And that, of course, is exactly what he did, making himself ever richer by selling Iraqi oil on the black market as he distributed rotten food to the Shia in the south, stole their electricity, their water, their villages, and many more of their lives.

 

I didn’t feel safe just because I was in America. Every Iraqi knew the Mukhabarat had spies around the world. There were many stories of Iraqis in exile who were attacked in their own homes or assassinated, and in one case, a videotape that contained images of the rape of a dissident’s sister was sent to him in exile as a blackmail. But my fear, like that of many Iraqis, was not based on reason alone. I feared Saddam with every part of my body and mind and soul, and that organic fear would never leave me, not even in the comfort of my marriage in Virginia. I shuddered to think how close I had been to Amo. Sometimes I envisioned fear as a part of my body, like my cells, like my blood. I’m sure my friends thought of me as odd. When I went to one friend’s house and saw a bottle of Chivas Regal whiskey, I asked him to put it away. When guests came over, I instinctively turned up the stereo if anyone mentioned politics or even personal gossip. One night, I accidentally used Amo’s fork as a serving utensil, and when an Egyptian friend picked it up and studied the insignia, I snatched it away and never put it out again. A careless slip. How could I ever explain how I had come by that fork? How could I explain to American authorities that my father was the one who flew Iraq’s commercial airliners to Tehran for safekeeping during the Gulf War and my mother had given Saddam moisturizer when he complained his face felt dry? I never shared any of these thoughts with anyone except Amjad. If we referred to him, I always said “Amo” because I was afraid to say “Saddam Hussein” out loud, even in my own home. I never participated in classroom discussions on Iraq. I never wrote school papers about Iraq. After a while, few people asked me about it. Millions of Iraqis were embarking on a decade of pain in which they would pay the price for the tyranny of a man almost everyone wanted overthrown. Americans were on to other issues.

So was I. Amjad and I had been married for six months when I read a story in
TIME
magazine about “rape camps” in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia where women were being held and raped day and night, apparently by Serbian soldiers. There was a picture of women sitting on what seemed like a hospital bed. Some were teenagers; some seemed to be their mothers. Something in those magazine pages triggered a pain so deep inside me and so sudden that I just started weeping. Amjad was in the kitchen with some friends cooking dinner, and he came running out, trying to see what had happened to me.

“We have to
do
something,” I said, showing him the story as he tried to both comfort me and read the story that was the source of my pain. “I have to
do
something to help these women.”

 

The next day, I went to the library and checked out as many books as I could find about the region. I needed to understand where it was, who its people were, what its history was, and what the fighting was about. I wasn’t sure what drove me—my own rape, my understanding of what it felt like to live in a war, my outrage at the social injustice, or maybe just the possibility that I could actually do something to help—but I felt as if I were on a mission. I got out the yellow pages and called women’s groups to volunteer to help support their projects in Bosnia and Croatia. To my surprise, I couldn’t find any organization working with these women. “Call us in six months,” one woman told me. “Maybe we will be doing something then.” Six months? How could we wait six months to respond to mass rape? From my reading, I now knew that people had explained the lack of action against the Nazi Holocaust by saying they didn’t know about it. No one could say that with Bosnia. Hundreds of thousands of Bosnian and Croatian civilians were being killed in a genocide that was practically being committed on television. Twenty thousand women had already been raped—
twenty thousand
. How could this be allowed to happen? What excuse did we have this time for the lack of action?

One night at a coffee shop, I told Amjad and his brother Eyad about an idea I had that was sort of like international programs in which families sponsor children, and we talked about it. A program could be set up in which one woman at a time would sponsor a rape victim, send her money each month that she could spend as she chose to help get herself going again, and write her letters of support so she would know she wasn’t alone. The next day, I tried another round of calls offering to help organizations set up such a program and was able to get an appointment with the All Souls Unitarian Church. I walked into their board of directors meeting a week later with my father-in-law’s briefcase, thinking it would make me look older and more serious. I had read Quranic verses asking God to release my tongue as he did Moses’ when he faced the Pharaoh, and the church board of directors agreed to allow me to start such a project under their nonprofit umbrella. They would advise me as needed and do the bookkeeping for the donations raised. I had one year to turn my project into an independent nonprofit. It was perfect!

Amjad was excited and supportive. We would start this organization together. He worked on incorporation papers as I drafted brochures with the help of some church volunteers. His family’s basement became our operations center where his parents volunteered to fold and collate. After two months of networking and fundraising, Amjad and I were cofounders of Women for Women International’s predecessor, which we called Women for Women in Bosnia. Between the money we raised and the savings we had been keeping for a honeymoon in Spain, we had enough to go to Croatia and start work. Judy Darnell, a Philadelphia nurse with a long history of volunteer work in Croatia, helped us make Women for Women International a reality on the ground. I had called her to ask for help, and she said, “Count me in.”

When we landed in Zagreb, she had meetings already set up to educate us and help us get going. Our first meeting was with Ajsa, a woman with short dark hair, a face puffy and reddened, and a polite smile. She had been recently released from a camp in a prisoner exchange—soldiers freed in exchange for imprisoned civilian women. She sat across the table from us in loose, donated clothes and started talking matter-of-factly, almost in a rote manner, after we explained to her that we were there to set up a program and needed to better understand women’s needs so we could respond to them properly.

“I was imprisoned in a rape camp for nine months, and they released me when I was eight months pregnant,” she said very fast, almost as if she were talking about someone else. “I had my baby two months ago, but she died because of health complications. I didn’t know how to feel about that child. I loved her because she was my baby, but every time I looked at her, I remembered what the soldiers kept saying as they raped me: ‘You are Muslim. You are a Turk. You deserve to be raped. This is to avenge what your ancestors have done to our people.’ They never stopped with their slurs, their spitting, and their raping of me.”

She didn’t know which one was the father of her child. She couldn’t even remember them all. I felt the blood draining from my face as she periodically stopped her recital for the interpreter, and used that time to sniff back tears before resuming. She talked about the life she used to have, a loving husband and two children and a farm with sheep.

“I had a life, and now it is all gone. Everything was taken away from me in a matter of moments. I don’t know why. What did I do to them? What did my husband do? I haven’t seen him or my children since the day they captured me. I don’t know if I will ever see them again. If I do, will they accept me? Will they be able to love me again after they see me in this shape? Look at me. Look at me!”