Between Two Worlds (6 page)

One day early in the war something happened that was in equal parts terrifying and amazing. Mama and I were driving home from the grocery store one day when an Iranian jet suddenly zoomed down so low over the street we were on that we could see the pilot. Iraqi television had broadcast footage of some captured Iranian soldiers a few days earlier, and my mother and a friend of hers had whispered about how beautiful their Iranian faces were. Time froze. I remember looking through the windshield at the pilot to see if they were right. As he zoomed over us, I saw his face, and I know he saw ours. He had a mustache. He was just an ordinary man. What was he thinking as he looked at Mama and me? Was he going to kill us? Did he hate us? Had he meant to come to this part of Baghdad, or was he lost? They said on television that the Iranian mullahs were so ignorant that they sent their pilots to Iraq without any maps. Was he going to bomb a house like ours? Was I going to lose friends because of his bomb?

Logic tells me there was no time for all those thoughts to pass through my brain in that second or two, and yet I remember those and more.

Mama did an extraordinary thing as the young pilot zoomed past us that afternoon. She raised her hand and waved at him. Then, after he was safely back up in the sky where he belonged, she looked over at me and took my stricken face in both her hands.

“How cool was that?” she asked.

 

 

When the war started, the atmosphere in Baghdad changed almost immediately. You could feel it in the air. Iraqi flags—red, white, and black with green stars—were everywhere and somehow intimidating, rather than reassuring to me as a child. Streets filled with Baathist marchers chanting anti-Iranian slogans. Anti-Iranian graffiti proliferated on public walls. Almost overnight, there were soldiers with guns and pictures of Saddam Hussein everywhere. Our state newspaper portrayed Iraqi military leaders as uniformed generals sitting politely in a round table taking instructions from the president; Iranians were shown as crazy mullahs in dirty beards who stood on chairs arguing and yelling at each other. These crazed zealots had attacked us because they wanted to spread their revolution throughout the Arab world, Saddam Hussein had told us, vowing to defend us. He titled this war the Second Qadissiya, after the First Qadissiya, which was fought in the seventh century to advance the progress of Islam into Persia, and compared himself to the great Muslim warrior of that war, Saad Ben Abi Waqaas. He didn’t call our enemies Iranians, but
al furs Al Majoos,
“fire-worshiping Persians,” a term I later realized must have been designed to revive ethnic hatred that had lain dormant since Persians, mostly Zoroastrians who worshiped fire, had converted to Islam many centuries earlier. By reviving ancient animosities and claiming that he was protecting Iraq from the spread of the Iranian revolution, he was able to portray this as a defensive war, not a war of aggression, which is forbidden by the Quran. Our media was so controlled that I didn’t find out until I left Iraq that Iran wasn’t the one that even started the war.

At school, we learned to defend our country and our lives. We practiced hiding under our desks for air raid drills, took instruction in first aid, and found out that our enemies weren’t just Iranians, but unseen Iraqi collaborators who secretly supported Iranians. To combat these insidious traitors in our midst, we learned there existed a secret government agency called the Mukhabarat, which was described to us as men in civilian clothes who were working quietly to protect us from the danger these Iranian sympathizers posed to our safety. Mukhabarat means “informers” in Arabic.

“I know who they are—the men with the big black mustaches!” Mohammed said, as always ready to show off his superior knowledge.

Funny how you forget so many things teachers try to teach you, but you remember the looks on their faces when they’re caught off guard. My teacher looked nervous when Mohammed said that. I remember. After a moment, she corrected him.

“No one knows what they look like because they are
secret,
” she said. “That is the point.”

But Mohammed was right. Even I knew what they looked like. Mama had just complained about them hanging around outside the ice cream shop the week before, a bunch of men with big black mustaches who looked as if they were entitled to just stand there and look us over from head to toe as we came out licking our pistachio ice cream cones.

My parents had zero interest in politics. My father, the son of a prominent Ministry of Education official who had suffered censure for being frank about his political views, actively shunned politics. So, as I understand it, did many other educated Iraqis as Saddam Hussein brutally solidified his control of Iraq through his nationalistic pan-Arab Baath Party. Because both schools and airlines were nationalized, however, my parents had to join the Baath Party like most Iraqis just to hold a job. There were several levels of membership, however, and everyone came to know the difference between getting along and being a true believer. The entry level,
moua’ayed,
or
endorser,
was the least you could get away with. If you wanted a little more protection in your job then you could attend meetings for a few years and rise to
naseer,
or
follower
. Later, of course, it became clear to us all that to rise in the ranks of the Baath Party, you had to write reports on other people, in other words, become a spy.

My mother resented the notion of anyone trying to tell her how to act or dress, let alone how to think. When she got her recruitment notice to attend a Baath Party meeting, she showed up in heels and her Nina Ricci mink—a combination (from what I could ascertain later) of the bold and the oblivious. When the leader said, “One Arab United Nation with a United Glorious Message,” she knew enough to stand in unison with her fellow teachers and respond, “Unity, Freedom, and Socialism.” But, in the process of delivering her one required line, she fainted dead away on the floor. She had a tendency to faint, which I saw as romantic, one of her many skills I never quite mastered. I remember when a group of aunts brought her home that night, and how they were teasing her.

“Can’t stand the heat, can you?” teased her sister, my aunt Samer. Aunt Samer was a onetime political activist who felt her Baath revolution had been stolen by Saddam Hussein just as the Iranian revolution had been stolen by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

“It’s not that,” insisted Mama, fanning herself. “It’s my allergies. I’m allergic to the Baath Party!”

With the help of hindsight, I realize that sexism gave women a slight advantage over men when it came to political dissent. Slips of the tongue could be written off to ditziness. Once, when Aunt Samer answered her phone, a friendly voice greeted her with, “Hi, Samer, how’s the Baath Party?” and she quipped, “Oh God,
what
Baath Party?” Then she recognized the chuckle on the other end of the line: it was Saddam Hussein. No man could have gotten away with that. Early on in Saddam Hussein’s reign, a woman could occasionally express a contrary opinion as long as she joked, cried, or sounded like a bit of an airhead. My mother, I suspect, understood that game and played it occasionally, with utmost discretion, when it suited her needs. She was excused from future meetings on a technicality—my baby brother had just been born and was ill at the time—but she quit teaching not long afterward because, I suspect, of her allergies.

As war revived up, anti-Iranian sentiment grew. In the name of patriotism, people even stopped listening to Iranian music and buying Iranian pistachios. Our family didn’t vilify Iran as many people did, but we stopped dying eggs for Norouz, or Persian New Year, on March 21. We had always decorated dyed eggs with faces of a mama, baba, and children, glued cotton on top for hair, and displayed our egg family on our dining room table along with yogurt, cardamom and other foods to bring
baraka
for the new year ahead. I didn’t understand. Norouz wasn’t just a Persian holiday. It was an ancient holiday marking the coming of spring. Kurds, a separate ethnic group in the north with their own language and culture, celebrated Norouz too. Why couldn’t we? “Things are different now,” Mama told me with an unsatisfying vagueness. “We can’t do that anymore.”

Because our enemy’s government was run by Shia clerics, all things Shia began to feel suspect. Karbalā’ itself seemed to fall under suspicion, so my mother and her siblings moved Bibi to Baghdad and instructed me to erase from my mind the fact that Bibi had once known Khomeini. It was as if that look of disgust I had seen on Mohammed’s face in fourth grade was spreading nationwide, as if all Shia had cooties. I could feel the difference in school. Zainab is a common name across the Middle East, but Iraqis consider it classically Shia because it is the name of the daughter of the slain caliph Ali. Every time the teacher called on me, I felt she was labeling me. Zainab = Shia.

“I want to change my name,” I told Mama one day when she picked me up from school.

“Why, honey? Zainab is a beautiful name,” she said. “Zainab was one of the most courageous women in Islam. I thought you liked your name.”

I had always admired that historical Zainab. It was because of her that we celebrated Ashura, the night Shia commemorate the massacre of Ali’s sons with public acts of charity and mournful ceremonies retelling the massacre. In some areas Shia men flog themselves in symbolic penance for their ancestors who failed to prevent the murder of the prophet’s heirs that night. Even the public displays of charity for Ashura ended when we went to war. I’m not sure to this day if they were formally banned, or if we just thought they were; either way, they were forbidden. That year, instead of going to Uncle Adel’s house for a ritual that ended with sharing pots of steaming food with hundreds of people, we stayed home. That day, Mama listened to a voice on a distant radio station wailing the traditional stories of mourning as she prepared a single special dish, rice pudding with saffron and cinnamon.

Then, like generations of women before her, she recounted for her children how Ali’s sons and cousins were massacred on the Night of Ashura. She talked in particular that night about Zainab, who had witnessed a bloody battle in which her brothers and cousins were all beheaded. Zainab had already lost her mother, Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed and Islam’s earliest heroine, as well as her father, Ali. After the massacre, she and the other women and children were taken prisoner by the man who had led the uneven battle, and she dared to speak out against him to his face. So eloquent and powerful was she that he became afraid and sent her into exile. She spent the rest of her life spreading word about the atrocity and urging others to repeat the story so no oppressor could ever commit such an injustice again.

I loved that story of Zainab. But I was a preteen. I didn’t want to stand out. I wanted to fit in. It had nothing to do with religion, I told myself. Zainab was an old lady’s name, and I just wanted to be called something cool, like Jasmine.

Mama was right, you can’t freeze life, not even for war. In that first year after war broke out, my baby brother began to walk, I got my period, and I found out that my mother was keeping secrets that could take her away from me.

I was the very last one of my friends to get my period. Every other girl I knew got hers before I got mine. This is an important rite of passage everywhere, but particularly in Islam, where a girl is treated as an adult and starts fasting at Ramadan. In some societies, she takes a veil. In our more liberal circle in Baghdad in the early 1980s, it meant that I was supposed to stop swimming with the boys and girls at the Hunting Club and start swimming with my aunts on days set aside for women, which as far as I could see was the only downside of being an adult. I learned about reproductive health, as we later called it in school, when Mama and I went to pick up my friend Wasen to spend the night with me. Her mother was in London at the time, and when I went inside her house to get her, she said something was wrong with her, that she was bleeding “down there.” Her grandmother was home, but she was uncomfortable talking to her about it.

“Don’t worry,” I told her confidently. “My mother’s a teacher. You can ask her. Mama knows about
everything.
”

When we went outside, I got into my normal seat in the front of the car next to Mama, and Wasen climbed in back. I started tuning in the radio, and when Wasen didn’t say anything, I finally turned to Mama and told her that Wasen had a secret question to ask her.

Wasen leaned over, put her arms on the top of the front seat, and told her what had happened.

“I don’t know what to do, Aunt Amel!” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Oh, honey, don’t worry!” she said. “You’re fine. You’re perfectly normal.”

And, when we got home, Mama and Wasen and I sat down at the kitchen table, and Mama talked to her in such a gentle way, her eyes searching Wasen’s eyes, being a mother to her at that moment. She explained that what had happened was a wonderful thing, the thing that makes a girl a woman and allows us to have babies. As I listened, I felt proud that I had a mother who was so knowledgeable and gentle. Yet I felt left out. Wasen was an adult now, and I was still a child.

Later, my friends teased me that I just a little girl playing with Barbies. I went into my room, packed up all my dolls except for Basma, and gave them to Radya to take home to her little sisters. Then I took the Quran down from the highest shelf in our house, where the holy book is supposed to be kept, and put it in my lap. I didn’t exactly pray to get my period, I just recited some phrases I remembered from Bibi and wished. Not long afterward, I got my wish.

I was the only girl I knew who was excited about getting her period, and certainly the only one who ran out of the bathroom upon discovering it and told her father. This sort of openness was unique to my family. A woman’s body is considered very private in Arab cultures and not to be discussed with men, even fathers.