To protect the privacy and dignity of the children in Flint, the names and identities of my patients and their families have been modified or, in some cases, composites have been created.
Copyright © 2018 by Mona Hanna-Attisha, M.D.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
ONE WORLD is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Liveright Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint nine lines from “A Worker’s Speech to a Doctor,” translated by Thomas Mark Kuhn (originally published in German in 1939 as “Rede eines Arbeiters an einen Arzt”), from Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Thomas Mark Kuhn and David J. Constantine, copyright 1939, 1961, 1976 by Bertolt-Brecht-Erben/Suhrkamp Verlag, copyright © 2016 by Thomas Mark Kuhn and David J. Constantine. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Image credits appear on this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hanna-Attisha, Mona, author.
Title: What the eyes don’t see : a story of crisis, resistance, and hope in an American city / Mona Hanna-Attisha.
Description: New York : One World, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018002721| ISBN 9780399590832 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399590849 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Lead poisoning—Michigan—Flint. | Drinking water—Lead content—Michigan—Flint. | Water quality management—Michigan—Flint. | Hanna-Attisha, Mona. | Physicians—Michigan—Flint—Biography. | Flint (Mich.)—Environmental conditions. | BISAC: SCIENCE / Environmental Science. | MEDICAL / Public Health. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban.
Classification: LCC RA1231.L4 H34 2018 | DDC 615.9/256880977437—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002721
Ebook ISBN 9780399590849
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover illustration: Debra Lill
v5.3.1
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue: How I Got My Name
Chapter 1: What the Eyes Don’t See
Chapter 2: The Barbecue
Chapter 3: The Valedictorian
Chapter 4: Haji
Chapter 5: Red Flags
Chapter 6: First Encounter
Chapter 7: Miasma
Chapter 8: No Response
Chapter 9: Sit Down
Chapter 10: Jenny + the Data
Chapter 11: Public Health Enemy #1
Chapter 12: What Field Are You On?
Chapter 13: The Man in the Panda Tie
Chapter 14: Environmental Injustice
Chapter 15: Poisoned by Policy
Chapter 16: Shortwave Radio Crackling
Chapter 17: Meeting the Mayor
Chapter 18: Aeb
Chapter 19: The Press Conference
Chapter 20: Splice and Dice
Chapter 21: Numbers War
Chapter 22: Demonstration of Proof
Chapter 23: All the Things We Found Out Later
Chapter 24: Fire Ant
Chapter 25: Truth and Reconciliation
Chapter 26: Prescription for Hope
Epilogue: Haji and the Birds
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Flint Child Health and Development Fund
Notes
Image Credits
About the Author
Unless someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.
—DR. SEUSS, The Lorax
I AM IRAQI, AN IMMIGRANT, BORN SOMEWHERE else—but not in Baghdad like my older brother, who was named Muaked, which means “certain, confident.” He fits that name, always did. He was just one year old when my family moved to Sheffield, England, and Muaked’s name proved difficult for English speakers to pronounce—just as they had trouble with my dad’s name, Muafak, which sounds like a profanity even if you say it correctly.
In England, my family stayed for a time with my mom’s cousin Bertha, who was born in Iraq but over the years had become British to her core. In a display of her extraordinary strength of personality, she renamed my brother “Mark,” and it stuck.
* * *
—
MY GRANDFATHER HAJI CAME up with my name. Haji was idolized for his charm, intelligence, and humanity. He was a businessman who lived in Baghdad and had a large, soulful view of the world, an iconoclastic wisdom. People in our family always wanted him to name their babies, probably for that reason.
He named me Mona because he thought it would be an easy name for both English and Arabic speakers to pronounce. My family was still living in England at the time but was planning to return to Iraq when my dad’s studies at the University of Sheffield ended. He was getting a doctorate in metallurgy, which is what you study if you are going to work on nuclear power plants—or nuclear weapons. But my dad was a progressive, a pacifist, and didn’t want his work to go toward making weapons for the repressive Ba’athist regime that dominated Iraq. He was interested in working with metals like zinc and aluminum and in creating new alloys. He has an engineer’s passion for making things work better—sometimes stronger, sometimes lighter, sometimes more durable.
In Arabic, my name is traditionally spelled and pronounced Muna. But Haji believed that, for me, the anglophone version, with a long o, was better. Haji was magical enough that maybe he foresaw that a Western name would work to my advantage. Either way, Mona means “hope, wish, or desire.”
I was a chubby baby, born with a mark, a capillary hemangioma, on my forehead. It wasn’t pretty or fascinating, like Harry Potter’s lightning bolt. My mark was dark red, the size of a golf ball, and near my hairline. Sometimes it would bleed when I fell. When my mom, Talia, carried me in public, the women of Sheffield looked at me with horror and pity and sometimes got up their nerve to ask: What’s that growing on your baby’s forehead? Can it be removed?
The hemangioma regressed—went away on its own—as I grew older. Now it is just a spot where my hair never grows. Your eyes wouldn’t see it unless I told you where it was.
My brother’s real name also vanished over time. My mom is the only one who calls him Muaked anymore. I don’t think his own kids even know it.
The road behind my family disappeared too. The Iraq they knew was lost, replaced by war and ruins. In my mind, this lost Iraq is a land of enchantment and despair. But its lessons endure. They may be unseen, but they are not forgotten, just as Mark is still Muaked—and will always be certain and confident. And when I touch my forehead, my birthmark is still there.
* * *
—
THE HIGHWAY WAS DARK, and snow was falling but not much. My mom drove for a few hours and th
en stopped and switched places with my dad. It was an endless drive, close to twelve hours, but we’d made the trip once before and had our routines. We were going back up north, to Houghton, after spending Christmas with Mama Evelyn, my paternal grandmother, in Southfield, just outside Detroit.
My dad put the silver Monte Carlo into cruise control at sixty-five. My mom resumed her knitting and turned on the radio. Mark and I were sitting in the deep sofalike backseat. Nobody was wearing seat belts. We’d long ago tucked them underneath the seats to keep them out of the way.
We passed Flint, where the Monte Carlo had probably been built. We passed Saginaw and the landscape soon became wilder and more pristine. My brother played with the Legos he had gotten for Christmas. I had a soft stuffed bear on my lap, a present from Santa, the only one I’d wanted.
My dad opened the window to flick the ash of his cigarette into the frozen air. When he rolled it back up, I could hear the clacking of my mom’s knitting needles again. On the way down to Mama Evelyn’s, she’d made a cozy oversize sweater for me. Now on the way back, she was finishing one for Mark.
My mother was perpetually busy—frying kibbee on the stove, pulling baklava trays out of the oven, rolling a new batch of dolma. She sewed most of our clothes. At night, she was always reading a book. In Iraq, she had been trained as a chemist—one of only two women in her chemistry classes at Baghdad University—but her foreign degree was all but meaningless in America. Never mind that, though. We would go back to Iraq someday soon, she always said, her voice thick with emotion and defiance. Back to Baghdad.
She was raised in the multicultural Al-Jadriya Karrada district, along a gentle bend of the Tigris River, and never stopped dreaming of the river’s masgoof, the carp that were butterflied, then grilled upright in riverside parks—the Iraqi national dish. She dreamed about the flavors and spices of home, the gardens of citrus and date trees and sweet-smelling honeysuckle and gardenia, the soft, mesmerizing music and dry heat. She missed her parents, her brothers and sisters, and the fragile beauty of her Baghdad.
At bedtime, she regaled us with stories of the ancient capital, once the most advanced, prosperous, and progressive civilization in the world—the center of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Baghdad was where algebra was invented, where The Canon of Medicine was written, a medical textbook that was taught throughout the known world for six centuries. She would weave her recounting of Mesopotamia’s history with strands of mysticism and fable, the romantic tales of Sinbad, Ali Baba, and Aladdin as told by Shahrazad, which was also her youngest sister’s name.
In that pantheon of magicians and heroes, she included Haji—her father, who gave me my name. Haji sent presents at Christmas. He called to speak to us on the phone in his throaty voice, deepened by years of cigar smoking and scotch drinking. He spoke colloquial Baghdadi—and his words and intonations and accent all felt like a secret language, as if we were the only family on earth who understood it.
Someday soon, my mom said, we’d see Haji again, and our grandmother Mama Latifa, an elementary school teacher and, according to family lore, the best cook who ever lived. Her voice on the phone was the sound of deep love. She wanted to hug us, to cuddle us, and couldn’t wait to have us with her. But my dad said it wasn’t safe to go back, even for a visit.
As soon as I was old enough to understand the conversation passing between my parents, I heard things that were hard to process, things that haunted my nightmares. It was in these early years that I first discovered the concept of evil—not from cartoon monsters or Hollywood villains but from hearing about the right-wing fascist who had risen to power in Baghdad, a political ascension by way of thuggery and corruption, torture and murder.
Every night my father listened to his Grundig shortwave radio, which crackled with static and delivered news of Saddam Hussein’s brutality and violence. My dad was always fine-tuning the knobs of the radio, trying to pick up a faraway station, desperate to hear something through the static. Friends and relatives, fellow dissidents, told him about people who had disappeared from their homes and later were released from prison with broken bones, crooked limbs, and burn marks. Sometimes a mutilated body was found on a doorstep. Sometimes the disappeared never came back at all.
Something new, something terrible, was always keeping us from returning to Iraq. Saddam’s reign became more extreme every year. My parents knew their letters home were opened by the Mukhabarat, the secret police, and we assumed that all phone calls to my mom’s parents were monitored. Iraq was called a “Republic of Fear,” a place where neighbors feared one another and parents feared even their own children: a haphazard comment made to a schoolteacher could lead to torture and prison. So we were waiting it out. Waiting for Saddam’s evil cult of personality to be brought down. Waiting for our home to be restored to a just and peaceful country, a republic in more than name. We weren’t the only ones; Mama Evelyn and three of my dad’s siblings moved to Metro Detroit along with thousands of displaced Iraqi immigrants who were settling there. It was only the beginning of the Iraqi diaspora.
From six thousand miles away, my dad grew more vigilant and outspoken. Injustice gnawed at him, changed him. He was gruff, hard to hug, and undemonstrative with us. He holed up at his desk for hours, listening to the shortwave, smoking cigarette after cigarette, channeling his anger into opposition. Sometimes when my mom put us to bed at night, the loneliest look came over her face and she turned away, not wanting us to see her cry.
* * *
—
THAT CHRISTMAS, MAMA EVELYN had taught me how to play Konkan, an Iraqi variant of gin rummy that covertly doubles as a way to teach kids arithmetic. I picked up the game quickly. Mama Evelyn was pleased about that. She liked having more Konkan players and having quick and curious kids in the family. Mark and I sat for hours on the floor of her tiny apartment, shuffling and dealing out fourteen cards to start, then were sometimes joined by my uncles Muthefur and Munathel or the stray relative who was, like us, in exile from Iraq. Our hands were still too small to hold all fourteen cards.
Nobody had money for a hotel or for much in the way of Christmas presents. We camped together at Mama Evelyn’s, sleeping in the living room, piling our suitcases and clothes and toys in the corner, next to the grocery bags full of Arabic grains and spices that my mom had bought in Detroit to take back up north.
Mama Evelyn was a tough competitor, which always made Konkan more compelling. She was scary-smart and strong-willed—a force of nature—and for a grandmother, pretty young. She’d married at fifteen, or around then, no one really knows. She had my father, her oldest child, not long after.
Her late husband, my dad’s dad, Dawood Hanna, was a railroad station manager who moved his family ten times between 1940 and 1963. He followed his government job, always living in houses next to the railroad stations. When they lived in Basra—the historic port city of southern Iraq, along the Shatt-al-Arab, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers merge—my dad had a pet monkey named Maimun. I loved hearing about Maimun and begged Mama Evelyn for the details. And next door to the Basra train station, there was a house filled with exotic birds, an aviary of some kind. They were brightly colored and had strange squawks and screams. I asked Mama Evelyn why anybody would have a house of birds. What was it for? It was a mystery, she said, a nonsensical moment of beauty, a colonial creation from the days when the Kingdom of Iraq was a puppet state run by the British.
Mama Evelyn was confident, never too troubled by small or large setbacks, and always positive, even when her beloved Detroit Pistons lost. She never talked at all about her biggest life tragedy—when my grandfather was fired from the railroad job he loved and sent to prison by the Ba’athists during a political purge of leftist civil servants. He came home again but was never the same—and he died just a few months before I was born. Mama Evelyn wore only black, in mourning, for the next ten years—including that Christmas.
&nbs
p; * * *
—
MY DAD WAS SILENT as he drove. The road became darker and narrower as the night descended. There wasn’t much traffic. The radio signal grew fainter, and my mom switched over to the eight-track player and we listened together to the soulful voice of Fairuz. My mom began singing along with the legendary Lebanese singer, their delicate voices blending into a duet.
I was hoping to stay awake until we crossed the Mackinac Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere. But I began to drift off, feeling cozy and secure inside the Monte Carlo, our lumbering tank, heavy, with a smooth ride. It was marketed as high-end and named to make people think of Monaco and Princess Grace, but it was basically a tank with a big V8 engine, built to go fast and take some damage.
My dad bought the used 1975 Monte Carlo himself. We weren’t a General Motors family yet—it wouldn’t be until later that we got a free loaner car every three months that my dad was technically supposed to test-drive and “rate.” That year he was still a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan Tech University, continuing his metallurgical research in Houghton, in the Upper Peninsula, or “Copper Country,” and struggling to raise a family on a small stipend.
Our first winter, almost three hundred inches of snow fell in Houghton. It’s a testament to human adaptability that my parents acclimated from the dry heat and palm trees of the Middle East to the dreary days of England to the frozen winters of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The north wind chilled our tiny rented house on Portage Lake, and the Monte Carlo sported a permanent layer of snow on the roof. But we were warmed by the kindness of Upper Peninsula Michiganders—who cheerfully called themselves “Yoopers”—and the tight-knit international graduate student community.
What the Eyes Don't See_A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City Page 1
