And the three girls, cousins by family tree, sisters by love, wander around the modern shopping malls, seeing all the different fashions, the clothes and shoes. Zara stares in wonder at all the ways she could show off her pretty legs, which have been publicly wrapped in cloth since her lesson with Roza four years ago. And women appear to have a much different definition of modesty in this city. Some do what she was taught, but others…
Nonetheless, Zara and her “sisters” keep their hijab, both the ones over their heads and the one for their comportment. And Zara has her first of many harsh lessons in bigotry. Curious as to the ways of city people, she watches boys talking with girls at one of these fast-food places. So she sits down next to them to learn how the genders relate outside of her village and mountains. And then it happens, the boys laugh at her.
They called me a stupid, ignorant Kurd. An ugly Kurd. Told me to leave their table, which was only for their beautiful and sexy Arab girls, who refused to talk with me.
Until that moment, I had not understood that anyone but the Saddam government hated Kurds. I never thought I was so different. I certainly was not ugly. I have beauty in me. And I am a very beautiful Kurd.
And during the days to come, the Arabs, who were the minority in Erbil, acted as if they owned the city and the Kurds existed merely as animals that grazed in the streets. Or so it seemed to me.
And Zara, determined to keep her respect, for modesty is all about respect, goes shopping. Her legs will be her weapons. No man, Arab or Kurd, would call her ugly; she has pretty legs—muscular, but pretty—and she will show them. So shorts and skirts and tight tops come back with her to Aunt Birca’s that night. And as it is with most things with Zara, she is right, sort of. She gets a different level of respect from the boys, a lot of respect, or at least they do not tell her to leave their table anymore. For she is as attractive, as beautiful as their non-Kurdish girls, and maybe more so. Sisters being sisters, Rona and Diyar go shopping with Zara and their suitcases are filled with the new style. And Rona and Zara turn heads in the malls, on the university campus, and they love every single second of it. And Auntie Birca, what does she have to say? Girls will be girls.
However, back in their villages, the reception is very different. While Zara has wonderful maternal cousins in Rona and Diyar, she has a mean paternal cousin, Rohat, who is three years her elder. His grandmother, Amina, is much more orthodox than Maryam, her husband’s brother, Olan, having married Amina’s daughter. They visit the week after Zara’s return from Erdil, and Rohat confronts her. She is in her house, where she feels it permissible to wear these modern fashions in private—the short skirt, the tight, breast-hugging top, and the heels that make her calves look so wonderful. He stares at her, then turns his eyes away and calls her clothing that of a harlot. He is outraged at her top and punches her in her breasts so hard that she falls to the ground, winded and in the greatest pain she has yet experienced in her life. He proceeds to recite so many Qur’an passages about women and their role that she flees to her room to cry, in utter fear she will one day be punished.
After a high-level discussion between the two grandmothers, Roza comes to have another refresher with her errant, but treasured granddaughter. Her tone is different this time, her definitions stricter. But she says she will be more understanding than Grandmother Amina, who is strictly orthodox.
Perhaps Zara has gone too far. Roza says that God created women and women created the hearth. That if she is to attract a good man, she needs to show she is a respectful woman who can be the hearth of their family. And Roza makes clear their traditions about the interactions between girls and boys. Outside of the blood family, the Mahram, there should be no interactions other than school or work or religious functions. Girlfriend-boyfriend relationships are not part of their tradition. Those relations come when one is married. And finally, she explains, Zara will feel one or more “crushes” one day, in her teen years, and she will need to control herself as these may lead her down the wrong path.
Roza goes on to clarify their culture and tradition’s guidelines for how respectful women should dress and what would be important for her to more closely respect. Then her grandmother, looking out for the best welfare of her blooming granddaughter, outlines several rules for Zara. Her clothing should not be similar to the dress of the kafirs, the non-Muslims, the nonbelievers. They should be not for fame, pride, or vanity. The dress should not be of the nature that attracts men’s attention to the woman’s beauty. The dress must be loose enough and thick enough so as not to show the color of the skin it covers, or the shape of the body which it is supposed to hide.
Clearly, Zara’s new clothes transgress each and every one of these points. Well, the shoes are an entirely different story. Zara comes to the conclusion herself that these pointed torture devices are not for the woman who respects herself, at least not for the woman who respects her feet. And her grandmother wants her to understand that her disrespect of herself, of her modesty, might one day lead to very unwanted male attention, the type that might lead to her harassment and even worse, violation.
Head down, Zara reflects on her grandmother’s words, a bit enraged deep inside. There is a double standard she wrestles with. Isn’t the problem that some bad men rape and not the wearing of the dress by the woman? Why is the woman at fault? Besides, why are boys not held accountable until their fifteenth birthday and yet she has been for the last five years? But Zara relents, for she respects and honors her grandmother.
Finally, with love, Roza quotes a Kurdish proverb: “A heart in love with beauty never grows old.” Zara leaves her room dressed much differently, although what she wears in the privacy of her room will be her business.
*
September, 2001. As one would have expected, Zara has excelled in her academic studies, already skipping a grade. A distant relative has arranged for her to spend a semester abroad in an exchange program for her sophomore year in high school. Her destination? London, so she can improve her English. She says to her mother than no one speaks English English anymore, except the English. Could she not go to America instead? Maryam, who has put her depression behind her with the help of her precious Zara’s rays of hope, explains to her that her distant relative believes a European exposure would be better for her future. In addition, Maryam has distant cousins who live in London, and Zara will live with them.
In London, her lessons in hate and bigotry continue. As she learned two years ago about some of the utterly racist Iraqi Arabs’ poor opinion of Kurds, now she learns about Islamophobia. She has taken her grandmother Roza’s discussion to heart and worn her head covering as she went to school in London. But now, just as the Frank Crusaders had lumped all Arabs into their term, Saracens, she is lumped in with all Arabs because of her head covering. Whereas the Arab boys in Hewler called her ugly and stupid, the boys here say much, much worse. And she learns discrimination, incrimination, and hate.
Then the twin towers fall in Manhattan. The world changes. A cloud of hate and recrimination emanates from the dust and ashes of the towers. And in the UK, she goes from being a Kurd hatefully mislabeled as an Arab, to being angrily and hatefully mislabeled a terrorist each time she wears her headscarf, each time she wears her Kurdish clothing. And one day, in her despondence, she wears her grandmother’s beautiful black lamb’s wool scarf, which she loves to touch and feel the fine red-and-gold embroidery, as she goes for a walk, trying to find somewhere, something that might bring her the peace of the mountains. She has begun to understand the true meaning of the saying, “Kurds have no friends, only the mountains.”
And there they are. Four boys with nothing better to do, just looking for the next trouble they can find. And like the others, they call her a terrorist whore and taunt her. She wraps her hijab more tightly around her to hide anything that might incite the wrong type of desires from these animals. And then it happens. They strip her of her hijab, raise her long dress to expose and fondle her inner thighs, grab her hair, and
rip open her dress, exposing her bra. The terrified five-year-old in her arises, with memories of Saddam’s soldiers’ rape of her mother. She screams and kicks, to no avail, for she is no match for four boys. Fortunately, the bobbies are not far away. And the boys run away with her respect, and worse, with her grandmother’s headscarf.
After the trauma of this attack, Maryam works with her sponsor to change her semester abroad to Paris, where she will live with other relatives, only to find discrimination and disrespect in a different language. This time, she is able to live within a small Kurdish community. She feels their pain as they face enormous barriers to integration into the society. Barriers beyond language, as you might speak perfect French, beyond culture, as you might be perfectly raised and educated, but you simply are not French. People whose family have lived for two generations in the country are no more French than the North African immigrants trying to reach the southern shores of France by boat.
And in her school, her respect is taken from her as she is forbidden from wearing her headscarf. Worse, one day the teacher chastises her and another girl over their long skirts. Citing Laïcité, a 1905 law proclaiming state religious neutrality, the school not only deprives her of covering her head with her favorite emotionally comforting headscarves, but forces her to show her calves so all the boys can ogle her pretty legs. The happy, beautiful Zara, who lived in utter beauty in her mountains, died in Paris, much as her loving, vibrant father died in the squalid pits of Saddam’s prison.
*
Tonight as I gazed on the stars, I realized that I had gotten out and seen the “real world.” And the real world was not one of beauty, one of love, but one of disharmony and hatred. To my mother, my grandparents, my change was striking upon my return to our village, our house, our life. Gone was the child who brought hope and love wherever she walked, to whomever she touched. Someone replaced her hope and love with bitterness, hatred, and pride.
Even with my newfound temper, anger, and distrust, Little Boy Soran, who was not so little anymore but still a tad shorter than me, still followed me around, because I was still his everything, changed or not changed. We still wrestled, but he was careful not to grab my girl parts. And I still won, as I was strong and muscular, as I am still today. When I am down on the world, he comes into my room and shows me pictures of us dancing and singing in our younger days of innocence and joy. As I reflect, he taught me unconditional love. It did not matter what I had done, how I had changed, only that I was still his big sister who called him Little Boy. I guess his little appellation was my way of showing love back.
My father’s parents, Grandfather Karza and Grandmother Amina, decided it was time for me to perform the Hajj. I was sixteen. Sixteen and spiritually lost in their eyes. As they did with my father, they took me and Rohat to Mecca.
And then I saw it. The sea of thousands upon thousands upon thousands. Millions of pilgrims, all like the four of us, all with the same purpose, all with the same manners, all with the same faith. Grandmother Amina tried to explain that here I could see we were the same, we were all showing submission to Xwedê, we were all Muslim. There always are and always will be those, such as the ones I met in Hewler, London, and Paris, who are mean and dishonorable. But most, the majority, the vast majority of Muslim and non-Muslims, are good people. She was half Arab, and no one on the Arab side of her family had poor words or disregard for the Kurds. I understood, sort of.
And for eight days, we performed the same rituals as millions had done each year for the last fifteen hundred years. I felt connected. Grandfather Karza, the mufti, accessed his contacts and gained special permission for his special granddaughter to kiss the black stone in the corner of the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the ancient stone building in the center of the Grand Mosque. And it was very special to have done so, just as the Prophet had done. And a little bit of the little Zara in me started to live again. At least to her immediate family.
But tragedy after tragedy befell the family. We have a saying, “The male was born to be slaughtered.” For at least the last century, this had rung so true. And it was true now in front of my eyes. Uncle Avan, father of my “sisters,” Rona and Diyar, and Uncle Olan, father of Rohat, both taken by the Iraqi special police for questioning, never to return or be heard of again, just as happened to Grandfather Baho years before. It seemed the very, very few who were mean, as Grandmother Amina described, affected in the worst way the majority who were not.
My only peace, my only respite, were the walks I would take into my father’s precious mountains. For only there could a little bit of his humanity return to echo in the shell that he had become. His warming smile would be back as we watched the tiny stream waterfalls along our trail, followed the falcons circling overhead, smelled the wildflowers, and saw scampering rabbits come by.
At home, it would be her mother’s and hers to hug him. But up here, something special would come to him, and he would hug me. In that way he always did. His strength seemingly magically returned as he kissed my forehead and gave me those big bear hugs. I would tell him I would always be with him, always take him up here, and we would forever share his love. And he promised me he would never leave me or Mama. We meant everything to him. And so he promised.
And then came my mother’s and my devastation—we found my father hanging from the ceiling. After eight years of suffering after his return from the torture camp, he could not live anymore. His note professed his love for Maryam and wished us the best life in bliss. And so the hatred crept back into my soul. It was those few Iraqi Arabs, the minority that hated the Kurds. Worse, it was the Americans who abandoned us in 1991, leading to the Kurdish uprising that so inflamed Saddam Hussein. And they together ultimately killed my father.
I was devastated for months. I would cry in my Mama’s lap. I could not understand how he could do this. He promised. He promised.
I so missed our hikes in his beautiful mountains, and his warm, wonderful hands on my cheeks, his kisses on my forehead, and his bear hugs. I was so despondent that the hikes no longer brought me joy. And I hiked less and less. That is, until I met him.
He appeared to be lost, or so he said. I had seen him in the village before. Tall, much taller than me, and I am tall for a woman. He was muscular like me, but of course at our first meeting, he was not able to discern this as I followed Roza’s modesty guidelines more strictly. And his eyes, so dark and piercing—I just knew they were looking into my soul. And he witnessed my darkness. I helped him that day to find his way through the maze of trails of the mountain. And then, as he made every possible excuse to see me on future days, he helped me find my way through the maze of trails in my soul.
But the final bits of the loving Zara of my childhood withered in my father’s absence. The innocent teen girl who kissed the black stone in the Kaaba was buried with her father. I cannot reconcile Xwedê and the fates of my family. The fates of those who loved me, and whom I loved. Today, I break with my past. I take destiny into my hands. I will sacrifice myself to avenge them.
And like me, the men in Zengo’s family were made for the slaughter. He had lost more male relatives than had I. And like me, he saw the disdain, the hatred of the Kurds, not only in our country, but in the surrounding countries. We shared the common desire to help establish a place, a country where we Kurds could unite, teach our children our language, tradition, and culture, free of persecution, free of the eternal fear of the roar of aircraft, the buzz of helicopters, or the whistle of incoming shells.
And I knew destiny meant for us to leave to fight together. For he and I would find the same joy in our hikes in the mountains together as I had with my father. And the same warmth and love I found in the bear hugs of my father, I found in his arms. I would be with Zengo for the rest of my life, as we either died in battle together, or if we lived, then maybe I would have a pretty little girl with him, like me, as Maryam always told me.
But yesterday, my cousin Rohat confronted me again. He had seen me with Zengo whe
n we thought we had privacy. As the male family members of the generation preceding us had died or disappeared, he had appointed himself the keeper of the family honor and the protector of the frail and feebleminded women, who needed the strong male to keep them on the correct path. He scolded me, saying I was destroying the honor of our family, of my parents, of our grandparents.
Then he claimed his traditional Kurdish right, as the son of my father’s brother, to have me as his wife, which he as the oldest in the patriarchal line was going to invoke with my mother. He said that our grandfathers had discussed this marriage for a number of years already. I told him I would rather be dead than marry him.
In rage, he tried to punch me again in my chest, but I had learned well in Paris how to handle the aggressions of a man and deflected his feeble attempts at hard contact. Frustrated, he called me a donkey slut. What was that? I asked. He said I was a donkey slut who would let any horse penetrate me, and the family would be shamed by my bastard mule children. I told him Zengo and I were to be married and we would be within the spirit of our traditions and faith. Rohat was always strict in his interpretations, and even more so after we came back from the Hajj. He said he was going to prevent us from seeing each other and would tell the family to seal me in a room until my wedding with him was finalized.
So on the roof under the witness of the heavens, I write my note for my dear Maryam and my grandmother Roza, explaining my future with Zengo in the Peshmerga and how we will be happy together fighting for the freedom and sovereignty of our children and their children. The Americans have returned and want the Peshmerga’s help, including that of our women, despite their abandonment of us twelve years ago. This time, we will learn from them, and like children who have grown, we will be independent of them and anyone else forever more.
The Matriarch Matrix Page 19