by Elly Fishman
Mariah has picked one of her favorite pairings for dress-down Friday: light blue jeans ripped at the knees, of course, plus a plain T-shirt, and a zip-up hoodie, open to reveal her straightened hair. The sophomore knows her mother would kill her if she caught her daughter in this outfit, and so she hides the jeans in her school locker.
Mariah settles into a chair toward the center of the library. She continues to eye the group of Arabic-speaking boys. One of them, a smaller Syrian boy with bright green eyes and a confident, impish edge, notices. He saunters over to her.
“I swear to God you are Arab,” he says to her in English.
Mariah stares back at him. She does not respond.
The boy looks over his shoulder and repeats the sentiment to his friends in Arabic. “I know she is Arab.”
Mariah holds her ground. She says nothing. This isn’t the first time this group of boys has approached her. Earlier this winter, one of the boys overheard a cafeteria line cook ask Mariah in Arabic what she’d like for lunch. The boy turned to Mariah then and asked, with shock and delight, if she was Arab. Mariah ignored him. She had eavesdropped on the boys and heard them making lewd comments about classmates and school staff. They’d call girls and bare-shouldered teachers waqiha, a crass, derogatory term for women. For Mariah, the group represents the worst of Muslim men. Judgmental, sexist, and rude. She thinks of her cousin, who dropped out at seventeen, and would be a senior at Sullivan if she hadn’t had an arranged marriage and two babies. The too real possibility that Mariah’s parents might eventually arrange for her to marry such a man depresses the sophomore.
At home, Mariah’s life is ruled by strict expectations. The apartment seems to be always full with the comings and goings of Mariah’s siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, and neighbors. The living room at the front of the apartment is lined with big, overstuffed couches that form a horseshoe around a large flat-screen television. When Mariah’s father, brothers, and uncles are home, usually between shifts at work, they tend to congregate there. Gray stains dot the cream-colored carpet, remnants of long nights the men spend over the hookah. Mariah’s mother, Fatmeh, and her sisters often squeeze altogether in the small kitchen, where a stove butts up against a sink and an ever-growing pile of dishes and Tupperware. Fatmeh churns out massive spreads of halal dishes. One favorite is margat albamiya, a mixture of baked okra and tender lamb that she lays over spiced rice or sometimes over dolma, finger-length rolls of minced meat, rice, and nuts wrapped in chard and dusted with lemon zest. She fries falafel and makes spinach and feta pies. As far as Mariah is concerned, her mother’s cooking is second to none. When they can escape their chores, the girls retreat to their room where they watch How to Get Away with Murder on their school-issued laptops. When Fatmeh does enlist Mariah to help cook and clean, Mariah often shirks the tasks. She resents not only the chores but also that her brothers don’t have to do them. When Mariah complains, however, Fatmeh offers the same response.
“This is not confidence, this is rudeness,” Fatmeh tells her daughter. “When you get married, how will you deal with your husband? He will want to leave you because you will not respect him.”
The idea infuriates Mariah. We live in America, she thinks to herself. We should just get used to it here because we’re never going back to Iraq. That’s a fact.
Mariah, who left Iraq at age ten, has very few memories of Basra, the coastal, port city where she was born. When she is not locked in a familial battle, she likes to revisit the parts of her life that she does recall and talk about them with her mother. Such reminiscences can happen any time, such as when they’re relaxed together on the big red couch.
“I remember that someone would come around with gas tanks, and you’d have to give them an empty one to get a new one,” Mariah says to Fatmeh in a typical exchange, speaking of the liquid natural gas the family used to heat its stove and oven. “I would roll the tanks because I couldn’t carry them.”
The scene makes Fatmeh laugh.
“Even water,” Fatmeh adds. “We had to buy water to drink.”
“’Cause there was salt in the water that came out of the sink.”
“Salt, yes.”
“And then for the water, there was this big red thing that water goes in and it’s like for the whole house.”
“Yes, a tank.”
“It got to be on top of the bathroom. We had to buy one. Remember?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I was always scared to go inside the bathroom because it was outside the house. The roof was broken and I was always scared that it was going to fall on top of my head.”
Mariah and Fatmeh’s conversations can go on like this for over an hour. Mariah recalling small details, Fatmeh confirming them. For Mariah, revisiting the images is more like reviewing a plot of a movie she saw long ago. For Fatmeh such conversations can leave her longing for Iraq.
But the nostalgia comes to an end for Mariah when her mother holds her to old-world expectations. Mariah knows the steps of an arranged marriage; she’s seen several of her siblings and cousins follow them. First, Fatmeh will invite Mariah’s potential future mother-in-law over to the apartment. The two mothers will sit in the family living room to talk and Mariah will be reluctantly glued to the red pleather sofa to observe. Fatmeh will offer a plate of dried and fresh fruits. She’ll brew tea and serve it in their best pot and cups. Fatmeh will watch Mariah closely, sending her invisible signals to sit up and smile; she will encourage her daughter to be polite and demure. If Mariah behaves—no mentions of Snapchat, or steamy Riverdale stars, and certainly not her decision to remove her hijab—the mothers will plan to introduce their children.
Mariah can’t help but fantasize about another kind of courtship, one that might start in the bleachers at a Sullivan Tigers basketball game. There, Mariah would sit and watch a player she’s dated for several months. The boy, who is funny and athletic, celebrates her independence. Mariah could sit with her mother and introduce her to classmates and their parents. They could cheer on the Tigers and laugh about prom and their favorite Auntie Anne’s dipping sauce. But Mariah knows such wishful thinking will remain exactly that, so she tries not to let herself disappear into such fantasies. Instead, every time her older sister Farha, now several months pregnant with her first child, calls to speak with Fatmeh, Mariah peppers her with the same set of questions, perhaps hoping to one day get an answer that will give her reasons to look forward to the married life their mother almost certainly has planned for her.
“What do you think of marriage?” Mariah asks Farha.
“It’s not the best decision to make,” her sister answers. “But it’s not the wrong one. There’s good stuff about it and there’s bad stuff.”
“Well, at least you’re happy,” Mariah will say, unsure how to digest her sister’s response.
“Yeah.”
FATMEH
•
Mariah was born in Basra, Iraq, on the eve of the Iraq War, a war propelled by President George W. Bush’s announcement of his “global war on terrorism” and the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Fatmeh was living with six children, when in 2003, the British military took Basra by force in a storm of shells and tank fire. On nights when Fatmeh heard bombs overhead, she’d tell her children to hide beneath the stairs while she gathered the few sacks of flour she had and arranged the bags into a small barrier around them. Every time the blast cracked in the hot desert air her children would scream. Fatmeh prayed. Allah, please look after us, she would say. Keep us all safe.
Basra was no longer the city it once was. It had long stood as one of the country’s most handsome, verdant urban centers, a lush cityscape dotted with towering date palms, pastel-painted buildings and wood-carved balconies, lime orchards, and a central waterway that carried water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the Persian Gulf.
Fatmeh, herself Kuwaiti, arrived in Basra with her husband, Khalil, in 1991. Khalil’s family was from the region, though Khalil himself had
grown up in Kuwait. Khalil and Fatmeh, then just twenty, had imagined raising their children in Kuwait, but the Persian Gulf War, which ignited when Iraq, under Saddam Hussein’s rule, invaded the smaller neighboring country in hopes of seizing its oil wells, eroded their hopes for such a future. The invasion left much of Kuwait in shambles. By the time Fatmeh, Khalil, and their four young children crossed the border into Iraq, nearly half of Kuwait’s population had fled the country. In Basra, Fatmeh, who felt like an outsider, found herself trying to build a life in a broken city.
The once-opulent Basra landscape had been decimated by the near decade-long war between Iran and Iraq. A failed uprising against Saddam Hussein had also left tens of thousands dead. But Basra wasn’t just plagued by war and political upheaval. Like the rest of Iraq, the city had also been throttled by sanctions, which the United Nations Security Council imposed to punish Iraq for invading Kuwait. The embargo prevented countries from trading with Iraq except for limited amounts of food, medicine, and other relief aids. For Basra, a place that depended almost entirely on imported food, the sanctions could be felt in every facet of life.
Like so many mothers, Fatmeh fought every day to defend her children against the hunger that afflicted the country. By 1995, more than three hundred thousand Iraqi children had died due to steeply rising malnutrition and shortages in medical supplies. Deaths related to diarrheal disease had more than tripled across the country as water sanitation systems deteriorated and hospitals functioned with limited staff. Every morning Fatmeh, not yet thirty with five young children, would wake up in her apartment, a crowded place that she shared with her in-laws, and ask herself the same question: How will I get bread today?
Piece by piece, Fatmeh sold nearly every bit of gold jewelry she had received as wedding gifts ten years earlier. When she ran out of bracelets and necklaces, she began to sell her own clothes. Several small markets had sprung up around Basra where residents would sell pieces of their lives. Fatmeh sold her shoes and dresses until she had only one tunic remaining. She never bought herself a second one—whatever money she made from her sales she’d spend on her children.
Between the money she made from selling her belongings and some pocket money her family in Kuwait sent on occasion, Fatmeh managed to keep her children healthy. But she was haunted by the deaths of other young people. There was one girl in particular she could not forget: While visiting a neighbor in the hospital, Fatmeh passed a hospital room where a young girl lay on a proppedup hospital bed. A yellow IV was attached to her arm. The girl’s eyes were shut, but Fatmeh could tell she was beautiful. The room smelled of death, but Fatmeh watched as the doctors and nurses wrote down notes in their charts as calmly as if they were writing a grocery list. We are used to death, Fatmeh thought to herself.
After Saddam Hussein was removed from power in 2003, Khalil took a job with the U.S. military working as a security guard at a base that had been set up in As-Salam Palace, a former home of the fallen Iraqi president. Not long after he started the job, a neighbor knocked on the door. When Fatmeh answered, he told her that he had been approached by four men looking for her husband. Fatmeh did not know who the men were. They could have been Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein or from the Mahdi Army, the anti-U.S. Shia militia who sought to restore Iraqi sovereignty. Or perhaps it was a local gang. No matter who the men were, they had delivered a clear warning: Was Khalil afraid to die? He was told to quit his job with the U.S. military or be killed.
Fatmeh heard rumors of kill lists that named Iraqi citizens who worked for the United States. One of Khalil’s colleagues was kidnapped and murdered for his work on the U.S. base. She feared her husband was next. At night, she would bring her children to the roof where they would sleep while she and Khalil watched the street below. They will come, she thought to herself. They will come and they will kill us.
When Khalil eventually resigned from his post, he used what little savings he had to buy a taxi. Every time he left the house, however, Fatmeh feared her husband would not return. Khalil was often trailed by men on motorbikes and Fatmeh spotted cars parked outside their home. In 2007, they sold the taxi. Driving wasn’t safe.
Life in Basra was no longer tenable. Khalil and his two eldest sons fled for Jordan on a tourist visa and applied for refugee status with the United Nations. He described to a U.N. representative a life of fear. Only one percent of refugees are selected for resettlement in new countries and once approved, refugees have no say in where they end up. By 2010, there were nearly two million Iraqi refugees alone. But Khalil got lucky. He was approved in 2010 and resettled in Chicago that same year.
Khalil told Fatmeh to wait in Basra until he saved enough money to care for his family in Chicago. It took three years. By the time she left Iraq, Fatmeh had spent two decades scrambling through the rubble of a country ripped apart by war. When Fatmeh stepped through the doorframe of her Basra home for the last time, her house stood empty. Tears filled her eyes. Chicago would eventually be a place where her children, and grandchildren, would grow up. In Chicago, her children would graduate from high school, and some would even go on to college. It would be a place where she’d find Iraqi traditions pitted against American teenage life. She’d learn to speak English, come to love Snapchat, and eventually apply for and be granted American citizenship. But there, in her entranceway, Fatmeh considered how she hadn’t chosen America. She hadn’t chosen Basra, either. Home was a notion scattered over time, and a place long faded. But soon, she hoped, America would feel something like it.
9
APRIL
Shahina
“We need to figure out what the hell is going on with Shahina,” says Sarah, looking up from her laptop. Several teachers have reported that the Burmese sophomore is close to failing their classes. While much of Sarah’s fight to keep Sullivan’s ELL program afloat rests on recruiting new students, she also needs to keep those already enrolled engaged in school. Some students who graduate from the ELL program do so with impressive scholarships to institutions such as University of Illinois–Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University. Others leave and find jobs to support their families. For Sarah, what matters most is ensuring students earn their diploma.
Sarah and the others also know that for some of the girls in the program, a sudden dip in their performance signals that they are being overwhelmed by pressures at home, sometimes so intense that they eventually disappear from school altogether. By now, Sarah knows the signals well and it’s one of the struggles she takes most to heart. Add to that the practical consideration that with only two months left to the school year, it’s a race against the clock. For Shahina’s sake, certainly. Also, for the health of the ELL program and its funding. Its overseers at CPS look closely at whether students show up. “Her attendance is hovering at thirty percent,” Sarah reports.
“I think she wants us to call her Serena,” says Fatima Peters, looking up at Sarah. This is Fatima’s first year as one of Sullivan’s full-time ELL tutors. “She told me last week. I think she’s trying to be more American. Did you see her at Report Card Pick-Up? She came without her hijab. It seems like she’s going through some kind of identity crisis.”
“I’ve heard rumors about an arranged marriage,” Sarah tells Fatima. “Sometimes girls show up less and less until one day you find out they’re married and living in Phoenix, with a forty-year-old guy and his dad.”
“Arizona? For real?” asks Fatima.
“I bet the nuns never prepared you for anything like that,” says Sarah, getting up from her chair. Fatima came to Sullivan after a decade at a private Catholic school. “Not that anything can prepare you for these conversations.”
Sarah, in search mode, first checks for Shahina in the first-floor girls’ bathroom. Nassim, camera around his neck, stands a few feet away in a stairwell. He’s huddled with a Black American boy, a classmate with whom he has grown inseparable. They travel the halls together, snapping photos of classmates. They’ve also developed their own signatur
e handshakes, each of which includes intricate patterns of snaps and dabs. Nassim waves enthusiastically to Sarah. He hasn’t been to the “womb” recently. These days, he spends more time in the digital media room, a third-floor space that attracts a tight-knit tribe of outsiders including Lauren. In the years following, Nassim will go on to sing Mariah Carey karaoke and inspire a short film loosely based on his life. He’ll count The Steve Harvey Show among his favorite television programs and share once deeply buried stories about the tragedies he witnessed in the Syrian war. By sophomore year, Nassim will enjoy playing the role of seasoned student and will offer guidance to Sullivan newcomers. He’ll continue to fall in and out of love, too. But for now, on the school stairs, heartbreak doesn’t seem to weigh on the freshman today.
Shahina is not in the bathroom, so Sarah returns to the library. There, she finds the girl hidden beneath a table in the back corner of the room. Seeing Shahina hidden in shadow is a reminder of the library’s many purposes: while Belenge came to these tables to confront his distress, Shahina now uses the same surfaces for cover.
Shahina’s naturally round face is sharpened by thick, painted eyebrows, and narrowed by the poly-blend pashmina she fashions into a hijab. She’s tucked in a tiny ball under the computer desks, her knees pulled into her chest. She seems relaxed. Beside her sits her closest friend, Aishah. The two are inseparable, gossiping and giggling everywhere they go. Like many refugee girls who find themselves alienated from their parents, Shahina and Aishah have become each other’s chosen family.