by Zainab Salbi
Mama slept a long time and awoke weak and exhausted from the ordeal. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but she looked embarrassed and funny.
She just kept saying, “I’m sorry, Zanooba. I’m so sorry, honey. I’m so sorry.” She patted my hair. Then she said something I will never forget:
“I feel like a bird in a cage,” she said. “Don’t ever let yourself be a bird in a cage, Zainab. Promise me, honey. Always be a free spirit.”
“I promise, Mama,” I said.
But I didn’t understand. She was telling me not to be like her, and until that night I had never wanted to be anything else.
From Alia’s Notebook
One night, he sent for us and we were partying by the Tigris River. There were only a few of us around him that night, and Saddam was drinking whiskey as if it were water. Every hour one of his bodyguards came to whisper something in his ears. At midnight, after he had drunk about three-quarters of a bottle of whiskey, he responded in a loud voice to a bodyguard, “Hit them and let the game start, may God curse them all!” We didn’t know what he was talking about until the next morning when we learned that he had sent his ships sailing in Shat Al-Arab [the waterway dividing Iraq and Iran near the Persian Gulf] thus the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war.
He was very happy the first few months of the war. As a matter of fact, we had never seen him as happy as he was these few months. He was partying almost every night. These nights were filled with village women who would dance and sing for him. A band often showed up in these parties known as Thubab’s band. Its lead singer was a woman known as Aneesa who used to sit by his feet as she sang traditional melancholy songs from rural areas that made him emotional as he remembered his past. He used to distribute about 2000 dinar for his friends at the party so they could throw this money to the dancers and the singer. Money was everywhere in these parties, flying around the dancers and filling the floors.
We used to leave these parties with headaches from the Bedouin music and his war talks, but we had no choice but to attend. He wanted everyone around him in those days, so the parties were big and loud. Sometimes he would talk about his military plans at these parties and brag about different battles that he orchestrated. He enjoyed reviewing scenes from these battles, and he ordered the TV station to broadcast them for hours at a time so he could watch them. Your father and I couldn’t even look at these scenes, which were filled with images of dead Iranian soldiers. He, on the other hand, would talk about how these scenes would open his appetite for food.
3
AFTER PIG’S ISLAND
I ENTERED JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL a year after war began. In Iraq, boys and girls attend elementary school together and are separated in junior high and high school. I decided I didn’t want to attend the elite girls’ school with my friends who were suddenly into gossip and clothes, so I asked to go to Al-Shamella, the Comprehensive Experimental School, a model junior high-high school. My mother had a friend who was a teacher there, and she had gotten me excited about its nontraditional curriculum where home-making classes included budgeting, electricity, carpentry, and metal work. They also offered extracurricular music, pottery-making, and a variety of other subjects that other schools didn’t.
I didn’t know anyone at my new school, and the adjustment turned out to be hard. The school wasn’t far from our home, but it was located in a marginalized neighborhood that was part of a whole different world than the one I lived in. The first day of school, I felt eyes from all over the schoolyard look at me when my mother dropped me off in our Toyota. It would never have occurred to anyone in our family to send me on the bus because public transportation was used only by people who didn’t have cars. Here, everyone walked or took the bus. It turned out I was the only rich kid in a school filled with kids from poor and working-class families.
A fair number of students dropped out at fourteen or fifteen to be married. We all wore the same uniform, but mine was imported from Germany or England while my classmates made their own. I could go home and take a bubble bath and start classes the next day smelling like kiwi or lavender, while some of them went home to abusive parents. I began hearing about domestic violence for the first time and began to understand the price classmates paid for generations of endemic poverty and inadequate education. I remember one girl telling me about how her stepfather had beaten her, thrown her out of the house, and left her to spend the night all alone on the doorstep. I could not find the right words to say to her. There were none. Nothing I could say would matter. Her life was unfair. She had done nothing wrong except be born into the wrong family, and I had been lucky enough to be born into the right family.
I did everything I could at school to prove I wasn’t a spoiled rich kid. I joined the Iraqi Girl Scouts. I participated in afterschool activities. If our driver was late coming to pick me up, I would use his tardiness as an excuse to board the bus, oblivious to the fact that I was acting exactly like a spoiled kid by leaving him waiting, fearing something had happened to me. One time he apparently saw me get on the bus and followed it to every stop. When I finally saw him, I had to climb down off the bus and get in the car as everyone I had been trying to impress stared at me out the windows. I wanted to fit in, to make friends, but I had left the largely secular world I was used to and found myself plunged into a world of observant Muslims, both Sunni and Shia. Prayer was a part of daily life for most of my classmates. One day, I found myself standing quietly, somewhat awkwardly, with a group of other girls who were talking about prayer.
I said, “I pray too.”
“Oh, sure,” one girl said. “I don’t believe you. Tell us the order of what you recite in a prayer—if you really know it.”
I started with the Shahada, the phrase that makes Muslims Muslims: “I witness that there is no God but one God, and Mohammed is his Prophet.” Nervous about the ending, I left off the part about Ali. Then, I said the declaration of the intention of the prayer, and a verse from the Quran.
“Okay, go on,” the girl told me.
They let me keep talking, searching my memory, until they finally all started laughing.
“You don’t even know how to pray, you rich girl!” one girl said. “You’re from the ooh-la-la class!”
I tried to make light of it as the bell rang and we went back inside. But I felt hurt and shunned, back to being judged on the basis of how I prayed—or didn’t pray—and I felt angry at my parents for failing to teach me or even to pray themselves. When Bibi came over, I asked her to show me how, and I got out my prayer rug and made a point of praying in front of my family. Aunt Samer was visiting. The television was on. The mothers were laughing and drinking Turkish coffee. My brothers and cousins were playing all around me.
“This is good, Zanooba,” Bibi said. “But next time you might try praying with the television off, maybe alone in your room—it feels better if you concentrate.” I dutifully prayed at dawn and dusk for a while. I got more religious the night before tests.
One day, fighting my own shyness, I gathered my nerve and joined a basketball game during recess. I had played with my cousins in our cul-de-sac and with Mama during one of our summers in Seattle when she was pregnant with Hassan, laughing as she ran around the court, her belly as big as the ball, calling out coaching instructions in a mix of Baghdad-accented Arabic and the occasional “go, go, GO!” in English. One of the players came over to me after the recess game and complimented me on my playing. We started talking. I liked her, she liked me, and we exchanged telephone numbers.
“I have a new friend!” I announced over lunch that afternoon.
“That’s nice, honey,” Mama said.
“Where does she live?” Baba asked.
“In the Al Iskaan neighborhood near school,” I answered. Al Iskaan was a neighborhood known for its public housing projects.
“What does her father do?” Baba asked.
“I don’t know, Baba,” I said. “I haven’t asked. Why would I?”
“I need to
know,” he said tersely. “Did you give her your phone number?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re friends, Baba.”
“You need to get it back,” he said.
“Why, Baba?” I protested. I didn’t understand this whole conversation. Just when I had found a friend, Baba was trying to take her away from me.
“Because I am telling you to,” he said.
“But, Baba, I like her!” I said. “Why are you asking me this? You’re putting me in an embarrassing position with a girl I just met. It is ayeb.”
“Just do it, Zainab. I have my reasons. Just do it, okay? No more arguments.”
I looked at Mama for help.
“Your father knows what he’s doing, honey,” she said. “Do what he says. Trust him. He’s your father.”
Feeling embarrassed and resentful, the next day I walked up to the girl I wanted to be my friend knowing that I was about to hurt both of us.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I told her, “but my father said I cannot share my phone number with you.”
She looked me in the eye and brought out her notebook and a pencil. She had written my phone number on the cover of her notebook, and I watched as she scratched out my name hard, over and over again, until all that remained was a swath of shiny black graphite.
“Just to show you that I will never, ever, be able to see your number again,” she said.
Then she walked away.
I didn’t even have an explanation for her. I had no idea that my father had made me take back her telephone number because of Saddam Hussein. I didn’t understand at the time how well my parents knew him. To me, he was a face on television, a man we were taught to sing to and march for and pray for the health of: the President of Iraq.
All children in Iraq were taught to call him “Amo Saddam,” which means “Uncle Saddam.” (That is the traditional form of address that Iraqi children use to address male adults. My friends didn’t call my father Mr. Salbi, for example, they called him Amo Salbi.) Loyalty to Amo Saddam was so instilled in every student in school that it became almost indistinguishable from loyalty to family and to Iraq itself. Boys and girls joined the Vanguards, the tala’a, and wore camouflage uniforms of blue and white with matching hats as they practiced marching and singing at school to songs like “Amo Saddam will break the teeth of the coward Khomeini!” Teenagers were taught to address him as adults did—Al Sayed or Al Ra’aees, the sire or the president—and we competed against one another to show our love for him through poetry contests, art contests, and endless marching contests. I was selected to help raise the flag at the ceremony that took place every Thursday, the last day of the working week in the Muslim calendar. That was an honor, and I remember how intent I was standing before the class in my Girl Scout uniform: raising the flag properly, tying the knot, and saluting my flag. After we sang the national anthem—which he changed in favor of a new one that sounded to me like a militaristic march—we had to stand at absolute attention listening to speeches by the principal, poems by students, and songs played by the school band—every one a devotion to president and country.
Everyone was expected to join in an extracurricular activity showing our patriotism. I joined the school’s marching band. We practiced hour after hour, in four straight lines, holding flags or pictures of Saddam Hussein, shouting “May God protect the president! and “May God prolong his life!” We were taught not just how to move our feet, but how to look—focused and determined—and how to sound—loud and sharp. “Yes, yum! Yes, yum!” we shouted in response to every command the teacher gave us. The “yes” was presumably left over from our days as part of the British Empire. I don’t know what “yum” meant; no one explained. The sheer monotony and repetition took something out of us. Later, I realized it was our own individualism. After a while I could hear no single voice, not even my own. I was part of a united whole, doing what our leader wanted us to do: march and shout. I turned my brain off and shifted to automatic pilot, one of the thousands upon thousands of young Iraqis marching for Saddam Hussein. Sometimes our whole school would empty out and join others for massive demonstrations through the streets of Baghdad, and I would slip away in the confusion. I never felt like jumping up and down as many did, shouting slogans like “With our blood, with our soul, we will protect you, oh, Saddam!” Even if he had helped spare my mother with our “special file,” I was old enough to comprehend that he was ultimately in charge of the system that had initiated the deportations in the first place and made my cousins suffer.
On television he came across as a handsome, friendly man who liked to drop in on ordinary citizens for tea. A housewife would open the door, gasp in shock and astonishment at being selected by the president for one of his frequent home visits, and invite him in. He seemed homey and respectful as the camera followed him. “How’s your family?” he would ask. “How are your children doing? Are you eating well?” And he would follow the housewife into her kitchen, take a look at whatever she had cooking on the stove, and open her refrigerator. I remember him looking into lots of refrigerators and always commenting at how well stocked they were—I’m sure there were women who kept their refrigerators tidy just in case he dropped in. In all the televised visits, the families were happy and thankful to see him, though through Aunt Samer I later learned that there was one woman who, when he asked if there was anything he could do for her, said, “Yes: I’m so worried about my only son, could you bring him home from the war?” The episode was never televised, and the woman had sought out Aunt Samer in hopes she could somehow convey her apologies so her son would not pay for her mistake.
Saddam Hussein’s birthday was a national holiday. Streets were closed, stages were set up, and bands played for him as people danced and marched in the streets. In the evening, everyone would gather around their television sets and watch him walk down past long banquet tables and survey his presents. Each had a card with the name of the giver on it, which the camera showed, and everyone wanted to see who had given what and what Amo’s response was. I always had my doubts that the day we celebrated his birthday, April 28, was the real day he was born. Many people his age who grew up in rural areas had parents who were illiterate or did not bother to register their children’s birthdates, so they were assigned birthdates of July 1. I remember my father telling us a funny story once about a time he and his crew were laid over in Bangkok on July 1 and a hotel manager was so struck by the fact that so many of them were born that day that he gave them a little birthday party.
Our schools were free—we were given notebooks, books, coloring pens, and anything else we needed for studying—but we were expected to “give back” to patriotic causes, contributing to buy the president a cake for his birthday on April 28. I remember students scrambling to come up with enough coins, but never questioning why. Yet they must have wondered, as I did, why our little brothers and sisters were also donating money for birthday cakes. How many cakes could he eat? How would they be delivered? One day after school, I saw the teachers eating his cake at a meeting, like a Baath Party meeting, and I felt stung by the hypocrisy. My mother and I happened to visit a former teacher friend of hers that night, and as we walked up to her house, we saw a picture of Saddam Hussein taped to her front window and two candles burning on her front porch. I remember taking in the look that Mama and this teacher gave each other. I don’t believe any words passed between them, but this was the conversation I remember they managed to exchange through their eyes and their gestures—it would have been too dangerous to say these things out loud:
Mama: “Gee, you’ve really gone all out with this Baath Party stuff, Kawbob. Don’t you think you’re going a little overboard with the candles?”
Aunt Kawbob: “Ah, Alia, it’s getting worse every day. It’s degrading, but one does what one has to. Baath Party members have been stopping by the house lately. If you’re not excited about celebrating Saddam’s birthday, they’ll think you don’t like the president.”
Mama: “I’m sorr
y. I’m lucky I got out of teaching when I did, I guess. But then, none of us can be too careful these days. Do you have any birthday cake?”
And, we went inside to eat cake with her. Mama already knew what I was coming to understand. Lighting those candles, chanting for Amo Saddam, and even eating that cake were shields we used to ward off danger, and those who were the most vulnerable needed them most. Everyone had to prove their loyalty, just in case. When we got home that night, Mama told me, “Zainab honey, go bring some candles. I think we should also put them in front of our house. Aunt Kawbob has a point.”
I was just falling asleep one night when I heard the unfamiliar sound of my parents arguing downstairs. I had heard them argue before, mostly when I was little, mostly over small things, and mostly in English because they figured we didn’t understand it yet. This was very different. My parents were fighting, and I could hear my father’s voice raised. He was very upset. I got out of bed and sat down on the terrazzo tile step. Baba was angry, and Mama was trying to sound reasonable.
“What are you thinking of, Alia?”
“You wouldn’t be the only one. Lots of men are volunteering; maybe you should do the same.”
