In our home, Grandfather prepared the family for the revolution. He had five sons and four daughters. My father was his oldest, already married with four children. His youngest was my uncle, more boy than man at thirteen years old. In the evening, after our meals, Grandfather gathered us on a carpet in the courtyard beneath those beloved fruit trees. Grandmother tried to censor him with her eyes. She whispered to him, “Even the walls have ears.” But Grandfather was too caught up in what the future could look like for our people, for us. His serious, handsome face was at once philosophical and poetic, his hands, the rings he wore glinting in the light of evening, drew in the air in front of his heart a road to the future.
Al Fahood, our village, sat in between the two great rivers of creation, the Tigris to the east and the Euphrates to the west. We were in the cradle of civilization; my people had lived there for as long as we could recall. Countless generations had farmed the fertile valley. The Euphrates River was hailed as “the soul of the land” and the Tigris River was known as “the bestower of blessings.” Grandfather never imagined that we would have to leave, or that he would have to die for this place he loved.
At first, things happened quickly in the direction of our fondest desires. Within two months, we learned that fourteen of the eighteen provinces of Iraq had fallen from Saddam Hussein’s rule. In our family home, we celebrated, waiting for the fall of Baghdad, the seat of Saddam’s power, Tikrit, his hometown in northern Iraq, and its few surrounding provinces. We ate freshly picked fruit and sang songs of joy around the courtyard.
We celebrated far too soon. Within the span of the next month, many of the anti-Saddam forces were out of weapons. The United States, while calling for an uprising, refused to offer support—fearful of what Iran would do. Without American support, we were left with no recourse. Armed with this knowledge, Hussein and his Ba’ath Party went on an execution spree, killing all who had been interested in overthrowing their government. Grandfather and all of his sons, except for my young uncle, were among the first on the list to be killed in our village.
The men in my family knew they had to flee or we would all be massacred. My father and my uncles fled to the nearby marshlands to hide with other men whose names were also on the killing lists. Grandfather could not leave with them. He could not leave Grandmother; his teenage son; my mother, his only daughter-in-law; or us, his grandchildren; but most especially an unmarried aunt who was wheelchair bound and would not be able to make the escape without a horse and carriage. Grandfather had a plan to sell all the family valuables and collect his life savings, then arrange for a horse and carriage to help everyone escape to the marshes to meet my father and his other sons. Once we were reunited, we would flee the country together until conditions within were more contained and safer.
The date was March 24, 1991. Grandfather, always an early riser, was up before dawn that morning, eager to put his plans into action. He walked quickly from one room of the house to the next collecting valuables. Grandmother followed closely behind him to help him and to voice her anger toward him. It was his fault. If he had not dreamed of a different future, if he had not risen up in protest, then her sons would be safe at home where they belonged. How come he didn’t think of the danger? Who was he to endanger the whole family? Everyone she loved and everything she cherished was at stake. This part of the world was all they’d ever known. If her sons, if even one of them died, she would never forgive him. Grandmother was angry and she demanded a peace of heart Grandfather couldn’t offer. All he could do was repeat his plan for a temporary escape, reassure her that he would make arrangements quickly and then be home and attend to the details with the family. Grandfather told Grandmother everything would be fine. He took his gun and the valuables he’d collected from the different rooms and the whole of the family’s savings and left the house quickly, closing its wooden door firmly behind him, calling for Grandmother to keep it locked until his return.
Grandfather was killed that very morning in the village square. He was caught by members of the Ba’ath Party. They demanded to know where his sons were. He would not tell them. An argument ensued. They opened fire. They shot him thirty-four times. When it was clear that he was dead, they searched through his clothes and the bags he carried. They took all his money and his gun. They even pulled off the rings he wore on his fingers. They watched as blood pooled around his body and called for the terrified village people to witness the horror. A few made moves to go toward his body, but the men who killed him demanded that no one touch it. They said they wanted his body there in the wide open, beneath the big sky and hot sun, rotting for his crimes against the government. Let all the other insurgents in the village be warned. Let the news of his death carry far.
A kind neighbor brought my family the news of Grandfather’s death and of the warnings that had been issued. There was little we could do in the daylight beneath the watch of the Ba’ath men, so we crowded together in our courtyard, surrounded by the mud walls my grandfather had patched countless times with his hands, cowering among the trees in the orchard he’d planted. My young uncle, now the man of the house, and the women around him cried quietly throughout the day. Grandmother was consumed by guilt and regret. Why hadn’t she sent him off with the words of love that lived in her heart for him, only him? How could her fear have shaken her faith in the man who she had spent her life building a family with? Grandmother was inconsolable, hands to her mouth with a kerchief soaked with tears.
That night, beneath a moonless sky, my thirteen-year-old uncle and grandmother, along with loving neighbors, snuck into the village square to retrieve Grandfather’s fallen body. In the family courtyard, they buried his stiff form, without ceremony or light, beneath his beloved trees. My young uncle was the first and last to hold the shovel, the weight of the heavens pushing on his thin back.
News of Grandfather’s death traveled swiftly to my father and uncles in the marshlands. They made arrangements for us. They found a horse and carriage for my aunt, who couldn’t walk, and the youngest of the children to leave the village for the marshes. From there, we would rent canoes and boats and make the treacherous journey to Safwan, a small desert town on the border of Kuwait where the US Army had set up a base camp. They sent a messenger with information: the streets were not safe; Saddam Hussein’s army had taken over the roads and its planes were surveying all other avenues of escape.
Our one married aunt, whose husband had taken no part in the uprising, helped make the arrangements for the family’s departure. At the door of the courtyard, beside the fresh mound of earth where Grandfather had been buried, this aunt promised Grandmother that when it was safe she would retrieve Grandfather’s body from our courtyard and have it interred at Wadi-us-Salaam. She told Grandmother that she need not worry anymore over Grandfather, for he would know peace in death regardless of how his life had ended. She assured my mother that she would take care of the house and its belongings and that everything would wait for our safe return when Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party had played out their role in the history of our country.
Our family made the journey to the marshes quietly and without interruption. There, my father and uncles waited for us with rented canoes. We and some thirty thousand other refugee families made it safely to Safwan.
We were the last wave of families to escape Iraq via the marshes. After we left, Saddam Hussein ordered the marshlands to be drained. His followers diverted the flow of the mighty Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, destroying an ecosystem that had fed 450,000 thousand people and countless animals and plant life. They dislocated the Marsh Arabs who had lived nearby for centuries, whose whole lives were lived in rhythm with and dependent on what the wetlands could provide. The insurgents that were still hiding in the marshes found themselves easy prey for the soldiers who came to hunt them down.
In Safwan, we all became refugees of war. Each family was given a tent, food, and clothes.
Shortly after our arrival, the American army withdre
w from the war officially. We, the whole of Iraq, had been reduced to the fire bombs that flashed across the television screens of America. The death toll of Americans in the Gulf War was 219; 212 were men and 7 were women. Of that number, 154 had been killed in battle, 65 had died from nonbattle causes, and 35 from friendly fire. The Pentagon has never offered an estimate on the Iraqi casualties in the war and has been quick to disavow the numbers. The only official American statement that has been made about the Iraqi deaths was by General Norman Schwarzkopf, who said near the end of Operation Desert Storm, “There was a very, very large number of dead in the forward units, a very, very large number of dead.” When prodded by members of the press for an exact toll, he said, “The people who will know best, unfortunately, are the families that won’t see their loved ones come home.”
We are one of those families, the lucky ones who escaped. But even we do not know how many Iraqis died; all we know is that Grandfather was one of the men lost to that war. But we were not dead yet, and unlike the American soldiers who would all be returning home, we had nowhere to go, no way to withdraw. Under the auspices of the United Nations and with the support of Saudi Arabia and the sympathies of the United States, a camp was built for us in the desert on the borders of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
I was a child, not yet four years old, but I remember getting loaded onto the US warplanes. I was so afraid, so little, and so unsure, and I clung to my mother, who held tightly to all four of us children, as the plane lifted off the ground, and rose higher and higher into the sky. It was dark inside the cavern of the plane and the American soldiers in charge of us were all men of war who behaved the part, their faces serious and solemn. Beside them, the men in my family, my father and uncles, in their traditional clothes, looked defenseless and unsure about where we were going or what was to become of us. I felt we had been swallowed up in the belly of a flying beast.
We were flown to a nearby town. There, we were directed to board buses that took us to the Rafha refugee camp, one of the six camps scattered throughout the northeast of the Saudi kingdom for Iraqi refugees. At Rafha, we became one of the 150,000 forgotten refugees in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. The Americans and United Nations left; we were abandoned in the sole custody of the Saudi guards. Except for early on in the crisis when a few reporters were given limited access to the Rafha refugee camp, no human rights organizations or foreign reporters were allowed into any of the camps. We were not allowed out. There, we lived for five years heavily guarded by Saudi military personnel, with little access to the outside world.
I grew up in the camp. After a year of living in the tent with my big family—Grandmother, Father, Mother, my three unmarried aunts, my four unmarried uncles, and my three siblings and I—we were all moved into a mud house. One of my older uncles got married in the camp and his young family made the decision to leave the camp. He registered for resettlement in the United States. The adults were sad and they cried a lot, but my father, being the oldest, held on tightly to the hope of a return to Iraq, to raise his children and become an old man in our family home among the fruit trees his father had planted. Soon after Uncle and his family left, the resettlement process was closed for all of us in the camp.
I remember the camp like a city. There were thirty thousand of us living in close proximity. The organizers of the camp divided us into small neighborhoods of families and tribes. I went to first and second grade in the camp. I had school uniforms. I had friends who played with me outside our mud house. It was a strangely happy time despite the fact that we lived behind a barricade of wires and men with guns, despite the fact that the young, unmarried men had all been taken into a separate camp away from us. My father, grandmother, and mother whispered of sexual abuse and beatings by the Saudi guards, but in our mud home, we played with the toys our grandmother made for us, traditional Iraqi dolls made out of sticks and bits of fabric. And like any other city in the world, the camp was divided into family groups of those who had more money and others who had less.
My family did not have much money. We were not very popular and lived modestly on the family stipend of eighty dollars a month, using the money to buy things like toothpaste, toothbrushes, and soap. We saved parts of our food rations—flour, sugar, and rice—for our family back home in Iraq who we knew were starving because of the harsh sanctions—believing a return could happen as quickly as our departure. The wealthier families opened up shops and bakeries, restaurants and other businesses in the camp. My family did not frequent these places because we were poor.
In 1995, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees came back to the camp to do another round of resettlement. By then, my father had lost all hope of returning home. My young uncle, who’d been responsible for the ghastly task of burying his father, had turned seventeen. He’d taught himself how to speak English fluently and competently. He was hired as an interpreter for the international agency.
The people he worked with were impressed with his intelligence and the source of his fire, which he did not hide: the murder of his father. They encouraged him to apply for resettlement. He began teaching my siblings and me the alphabet after school. He convinced Grandmother and my father and mother that our only chances of knowing anything beyond our homelessness was to leave the camp. He applied for resettlement for all of us. We were unsurprised when we were interviewed—so confident were we in our young uncle—but we were grateful when we cleared security.
My family was taken to Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia, for our medical exams. I fell in love with the feeling of freedom, life beyond a fence. In Riyadh, I saw cars and I saw lights and we got to sleep in a hotel the night before our trip to the hospital for our exams. It was amazing and I started thinking America would be, too. I was sad to return to camp to await news of our examination results.
We passed our medical exams. We were approved for resettlement. We were given a few choices of where to resettle in the United States. We chose San Diego, where my uncle who had left in 1992 had gone, our young uncle leading the way.
On May 22, 1996, my whole family arrived in San Diego, California. I was eight years old. I didn’t know what to expect of the world beyond my one night in Riyadh. I was astounded by the ocean and the mountains. I had no idea that with little money and no language skills, our family was not equipped to live in such an expensive city with few job opportunities, but it did not take any of us long to figure this out.
For we children, English was not too hard. By the end of our first year in school, we were speaking English well. This was not the case for my father, mother, or grandmother. The low-skilled jobs were all taken. After some thought and research, two of my uncles decided that we should move to Minnesota, a state with many low-level jobs. More enticingly, they wanted to open a small grocery store so that we could work for ourselves and build something in America. My father thought that the idea was good enough, so our time in California did not last long.
My father and one of his friends took turns driving us across the country in a used van. We all kept our gazes glued to the window. America was a movie with never-ending highways, cars and trucks full of people going places. We could have kept the movie going forever, but eventually we got to Minnesota and became one of seven Iraqi families in the state.
In Minnesota, my young uncle quickly distinguished himself academically. He was accepted into St. Cloud State University where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in teaching English-language learners. After his graduations, he found teaching positions for himself all over the world. When he returned from his international study of education, he applied to the University of Chicago. There, he used the fire in his belly to work on a doctorate specializing in refugee children and education. He wanted to speak to the traumas of war in the classroom, to use his own personal experiences to fuel the work of making education successful for children who had learned of death before they could meet life fully.
My own journey as a student has not
been as smooth as my brilliant uncle’s. Before September 11, 2001, school was fine enough, but after that day everything changed for us in Minnesota. My family was living in Fridley, a close suburb of Minneapolis. I was in eighth grade in a predominantly white school. The first incident happened in art class. A group of kids started saying that I was Osama bin Laden’s sister. When I told them I didn’t know who he was, they started asking if I was bald underneath my scarf. I had never heard of Osama bin Laden before that day but I knew they hated him because they all started to hate me. I made what I thought was a brave decision; I told the principal of the school about the incident. The principal talked to the students who had said the mean things to me. I thought that the principal’s conversation with the students would make it easier for my sisters and me, but the principal didn’t talk to the teachers, just the students, and that was only part of the problem.
I had a social studies teacher whom I’d known since seventh grade. He had been kind to me. After the fall of the twin towers in New York City, he changed. He started being hostile. He couldn’t look at me in the classroom. I started to hate being there. I knew he didn’t want to see me, and I didn’t want to see him anymore either. I struggled to get to the end of the school year.
My sisters and I could not tolerate the thought of returning to school in the fall. We pleaded with our mother and father to be homeschooled. They saw our fear and the meanness we were encountering at school; as a family we made the decision to enroll us in an online public high school based in Chicago. We received textbooks in the mail. We studied by ourselves at the dining table. We took tests on the computer. We passed the tests that were graded by teachers whom we never had to look at and who didn’t have to avert their gazes from ours. We advanced from one grade to the next without meeting anyone outside of our house.
Somewhere in the Unknown World Page 9
