Somewhere in the Unknown World

by Kao Kalia Yang

  Our mother and father, the whole of our small but growing community, faced a backlash from the Minnesotans around us who believed that our being Muslim equated to us being terrorists. In 2003, because there was no more chance of a return to Iraq and because of the pressures of living in America without citizenship, my mother and father made the decision to become citizens. My brothers and sisters and I were not yet eighteen, so we all got our citizenship with them. We went to the swearing-in ceremony just days before Saddam Hussein’s government collapsed.

  It was early spring. The snow had melted off the ground because of the rains. Green grass was surfacing among the yellow neighboring lawns. The spring skies were blue and filled with warm sunlight. The early dandelions were growing fiercely along the cracks in the concrete though not yet blooming. The small-flowered crocus with its light petals of soft purple stood up in patches that made people happy winter was over. That morning, I got up like usual and prepared for a regular day, but when I went into the family room I found that everyone was standing or sitting, staring at the television. They were watching a news network and a blond woman with a strong voice said, “Saddam Hussein’s government has been toppled. The phone lines all over the country have been cut.”

  We looked at each other. Was our family there alive? My mother’s whole family was there. Her father had died a long time ago but her elderly mother, one brother, and three sisters were all still in Al Fahood. Were they safe? My aunt who had been married, who had helped us escape after Grandfather was killed, and afterward had found a way to reach us in America, who had made sure that Grandfather’s body had received a proper burial and secured a plot for him at the most sought after of the Shia cemeteries, Wadi-us-Salaam, was she still alive? The day we’d all been waiting for had come and all we felt was worry about the people we’d left behind. The sunshine and warmth we’d been waiting for all winter, all those crocuses to be found among the grass, could not lure us away from the television that day and in the days to come.

  On April 9, 2003, my family and I huddled around our television as we watched the statue of Saddam fall. My mother, telephone to her ear, called and called a line of numbers she’d written in a notebook, until she was able to get hold of a neighbor of the family’s and was assured that everyone we loved had survived. Then we celebrated. We had finally won. The uprising that had killed Grandfather had not been for naught. We would one day be able to return to the orchard Grandfather had planted after all, and we children would finally taste the mythical fruits from its trees.

  For my youngest uncle, the return was much closer than any of us had imagined. He secretly bought himself a plane ticket in June 2003. Al Qaeda had entered the country. All the news outlets were talking about terrorism and extremists. The country was not safe. We all thought that my uncle was working hard at school in Chicago. None of us knew what he’d planned and what he’d done. That summer, my young uncle returned to Minnesota to visit us. He sat his mother down before the television. He played a video for her. In the video, we saw our family in Iraq sitting together, talking. We saw our very own uncle, sitting in that very same living room, eating food, having a reunion with family members from Iraq. Grandmother could not believe her eyes, looking from him to the screen as if he were a ghostly apparition of her son, not made of flesh and blood.

  My young uncle told her softly, “Mother, you can safely return now.”

  That winter, Grandmother and my father returned. They visited Grandfather’s final resting place. They came back saying that the family home had stood waiting empty in Al Fahood for us all.

  That next year, my sisters and I made the decision to return to Fridley High School. We had seen history correct itself. We wanted to show the students who had made us afraid that we were brave like the Iraqi people who’d overthrown Saddam. We entered the familiar doors of Fridley High School with our heads high, one behind the other. We all worked hard, and I was the oldest, so I graduated first. I enrolled at North Hennepin Community College. In college, I was surrounded by other refugees from around the world, from all these wars I had not known, all these places I could not have imagined. For a final project, I chose to do a presentation titled “Life in a Refugee Camp.” It was the first time I could tell my story. Standing before twenty students, I stopped being embarrassed. The faces of my classmates showed me that they were interested and engaged. The professor gave me an A.

  That A has given me the courage to live in my story fully and fearlessly, to say to anyone who wants to judge me or any other refugee in the world, “Judge me, judge us, only after you have heard our stories.”

  My own return to Iraq did not happen until 2009. I had become a woman—not just any woman, but a woman who had married a Saudi Arabian, a people my family had feared in the refugee camps, a man who was able to show them and me that we shouldn’t be afraid of each other anymore.

  Together, my husband and I returned to a part of the world I knew only via news outlets and the stories from my family. In Saudi Arabia, I fell in love with Riyadh all over again, my first free city, the city of lights, that first hotel I slept in on that faraway night. Ensconced in his family, my new family, I discovered the beauty of the country that had hosted us refugees from across its borders. I saw clearly the limits of my experiences as a refugee child in Saudi Arabia.

  I was eager to return to Iraq. When we did, I discovered a country that was chaotic and poor. Its streets were filled with trash. The remnants of the wars of the last quarter of a century were everywhere, from the buildings still shattered from the missile strikes that had hit into the beating hearts of the cities, to the broken bridges that once crossed rivers flowing with life, now full of debris, to the men and women on the streets who looked upon me as foreigner, to the children who laughed and raced down hard-baked roads with their dark eyes full of curiosity and the fire of loss I see in my young uncle. Nothing was as I had imagined or hoped for.

  I discovered that while the family home was standing, Grandfather’s beloved orchard was long gone. There had been no one to tend to the trees in all the fighting and the haunted years that followed. They’d grown old, and diseased, and died. The house had no electricity. There was no running water. It was uninhabitable. Our fields were empty. During my time in Iraq, I was filled with a sadness for my country and my people, a feeling of my own short-lived story, our tragic history.

  I visited Grandfather’s grave in the hopes of meeting, if only in memories, something of the man he had been, the handsome young suitor, the farmer and the fearless revolutionary, the dreamer and the man whose death ended so many of our dreams.

  As I journeyed, blinded by the unforgiving sun, toward his final resting place, I saw all around me in Wadi-us-Salaam, Arabic for “Valley of Peace,” tokens of war and the layering of history. I saw the statues that we’ve built for those we loved, memorials for men and women who had lived and died. I was overcome by the knowledge, with each step over a gravestone or as I caught my breath beside one, of how valuable our lives are. I realized how each person who had died and been buried in this cemetery had lived loving and protecting the essence of who we are as the Shia people so that I and my children of tomorrow can live.

  —HAWRA ALNABI

  8

  Certificate of Humanity

  I WAS AN OBEDIENT son who wanted to follow my heart, so I defied my mother and my father and returned to our beloved Kandahar.

  * * *

  Kandahar of my heart, of my country, of my blood, and my skin. Kandahar, with her dry sand and her stretches of desert along the edge of the Arghandab River. Kandahar, known throughout Afghanistan for its pomegranates and its grapes, known by others for its marijuana and hashish. Kandahar, the land of my birth, the birthplace of my ancestors.

  * * *

  I was nineteen years old. I had just finished a degree in business administration at Iqra University in Quetta, in Pakistan, and was working on a nonprofit initiative to help people start businesses in local economies, to
model how men and women could work together effectively in the Muslim world. The war on the other side of the border was still going on, but there were humane organizations trying to help the war-stricken people. I applied to work as a bookkeeper for the United States Agency for International Development believing that I could do some good for my people.

  I’d left Kandahar in the arms of my mother when I was just a few months old. I was born on November 30, 1988. It was in early 1989 when the Russians were defeated. The warlords, funded by the United States of America on one side and the Russians on the other, came to Kandahar to wage their battles. One of my uncles was killed in a skirmish. In fear, my family and millions of others left our villages and our cities behind in the hopes of finding refuge.

  We found our way to a refugee camp on the border with Pakistan. We lived there for several years hoping for peace in our country so that we could return, but one war shifted into another. When the twin towers went down and a war against terrorism was declared, when Osama bin Laden, who was not Afghani, set up the Taliban in my hometown, my mother and father grew despondent that we would ever be able to return. They applied for permission to leave the refugee camp and move to the nearby city of Quetta in Pakistan. There, they raised us.

  Quetta is a beautiful town in the mountains, and for nineteen years it was all I knew, but it was never my home. I watched CNN and BBC on television and I learned English and the politics of a bigger world. In the community, I listened to the elders talk and the young men ponder; I knew of the politics of my people. We all knew that it was US dollars funding Pakistani training that resulted in Afghan bloodletting. I heard the stories from my elders about the homeland. I dreamed of the hot desert sun on my skin, yearned for the scent of the sand, and the feeling of belonging. All around us, despite the millions of Afghans in Quetta, people could see from the food we ate, the way we lived, the clothes we wore that we were not Pakistani.

  * * *

  I returned to Kandahar with the initial protection of USAID. After a year, I was able to call my mother and my father and my younger siblings home—despite the bombs that continued to fall and the suicide bombings that we were reading about in the newspapers. It was not long after their return to our family home that the conditions in Afghanistan forced me out.

  At first I received letters from the Taliban. The notes were threatening: we know who you are and what you’re doing for the Americans, and if you don’t stop, bad things will happen. When the notes did not get a response from me, I started receiving phone calls. They came throughout the day, early in the morning, late in the afternoon, during family meals in the evenings. I could be standing at the local grocery waiting to pay. My phone would ring. I would pick up. A man—each time a different man, but always it was a man’s voice—would say to me in Pashto or Dari, “You’re wearing a black shalwar right now. You’re standing at your grocer’s waiting to pay. If you don’t stop your activities with the Americans, I will hurt you or your parents, or maybe your sisters, or that little brother of yours.”

  Sometimes I just listened, and other times I tried to deny the charges. I’d lie and say, “No, no, no. You’re mistaking me for someone else. I’m just the son of a small merchant.” One or two laughed. The others got angry and talked to me of their witnesses and the documents they had showing my daily schedule, the people I went to see, the places I visited. Each day I grew more afraid, more distrustful of those around me, until the time came when I believed that staying in Kandahar would kill me and my family.

  * * *

  I went first to my supervisor at USAID, an American woman for whom I had a lot of respect. She listened to my story with her head down, her hands in front of her, clasped on her desk. It was a familiar story to her. She’d worked with enough Afghans who had been threatened by the Taliban, and knew of the disappearances and deaths. She told me about the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) offered through the State Department and told me to apply. She said that as a bookkeeper for USAID I would qualify. However, the government only issued up to fifty such visas each year for both Iraqis and Afghans who had worked with the US Armed Forces or under Chief of Mission authority. She spoke with some reservation, because there was a three-year wait period for security screening and clearance. Neither of us spoke the question in the room: Could I wait for three years?

  At home, my mother and father and I decided that the only way I could survive was if I hid in the house and stopped going out. I sent a message to my workplace to tell them I would not be coming in anymore. I sat deep in the bowels of our house, surrounded by the mud walls of my ancestors, knowing that if the Taliban wanted to find me they could simply march through our front door and unleash their bullets. If they wanted, they could drop a bomb on all of us. I couldn’t sleep or eat, despite the people I loved gathered around me, despite my mother and father assuring me of their love for me. They told me that hiding in our house was not an act of cowardice but the actions of a reasonable human being. I felt young under their protection, and yet I was too old and had seen too much to believe that their love could protect me. Every minute that I was home that month, I felt keenly that everyone I loved was in danger because of my living presence.

  I made the decision to leave Afghanistan. I made arrangements with a human trafficker and was able to pay the price he demanded for taking me out of the country: $25,000. I tried to find a reputable trafficker, one who brought a contract for us to sign. The first line of the contract was a waiver: the trafficker was not responsible for my life or death; they had no responsibility to return my body—alive or dead; everything that happened to me on the road to probable survival depended on my following all their instructions. Even then, they could not guarantee that I would make it out of Afghanistan. Other clauses in the contract said things like, they would divulge information only when it was necessary and the less I knew, the safer I would be. I signed the contract with a black pen. My mother and my father hovered behind me. The trafficker averted his gaze sympathetically.

  * * *

  On a bright day that I saw only through the filtered doorway of my home, a middle-aged man arrived at our house.

  He said, “Your son has fifteen minutes before we go.”

  He brought me a change of clothes: a pair of blue jeans, walking shoes, and a T-shirt. He said to take nothing. I changed out of my shalwar as fast as I could. I wanted every last minute to be with my family. They all cried. It was not until we were in the car, on our way to the airport, that I could let my own tears fall. Outside the car window, I saw the broken walls of my city. I saw the war-stricken poverty of my people. I felt our fear.

  * * *

  At the airport, the man handed me a plane ticket and three passports and a backpack with nothing inside other than a second pair of walking shoes. The first passport was a green Pakistani one. The second was a maroon Spanish passport. The third was blue, my own Afghani passport. He told me I would be flying to Dubai. He pointed to two men, already through security, standing together.

  Once I cleared security, I joined the two men. We each wore a backpack, a pair of jeans, and a T-shirt. We talked in whispers. We had each paid $25,000 to leave Afghanistan. We had all worked for one American agency or another. I was the youngest and the only one unmarried. One man’s wife was pregnant. The other had three young daughters, ages two to four. We would be traveling together.

  * * *

  We made it out of Afghanistan without any problem. It was at the airport in Dubai that my bag containing the three passports alerted the officials. The two other men had cleared security. I was the third in line. I could see the image of my bag’s contents on a screen. There were the walking shoes. Then there were the three passports. The man behind the screen talked to his coworker. They motioned for me to leave the line. In a separate alcove, an elderly man with fierce eyebrows and dark, penetrating eyes, said, “Open your bag.” I nodded because I could not speak. My throat was tight. My arms were tight. I unzipped the bag stiffly. Inside, my han
ds reached for the passports and fumbled around. To my surprise, I felt that the bag had a false bottom. I tucked the passports inside as quickly as I could. I pulled out the shoes like they were heavy and held them up to the man. I gestured for him to look inside my empty bag.

  He shrugged his round shoulders and waved me off. That was it. As I walked away, I reminded myself to unclench the muscles in my arms and my back. My fellow travelers had waited for me at a nearby column. We exchanged glances but no one said a thing.

  People walked around us in the bright airport. It was a big shiny place. The ceilings were high. The escalators had lights along the rails that were blue and white. The second floor had colorful wall panels. Merchants sold goods in beautiful stores along the walkways. It was clear that we were in a country of prosperity and peace. People talked among themselves casually. There was no mood of panic, no smell of hot sweat in the air-conditioned terminal.

  We didn’t have to wait long. A Pakistani man approached us and said we should follow him. He was a connection. Outside, the heat was sweltering. He took us to a car. He drove us into the heart of Dubai. Buildings, like spacecrafts, rose up from the earth toward the high skies. Surrounded by blue water, the place smelled of money. Palm trees waved from the sidewalks, but none of us was in the mood to wave back. We were shocked. We had gotten used to war. So much wealth, so much peace was blinding and deafening, and it was a relief when the man checked us into a hotel. In our room, he gave us the things we needed: toiletries, changes of clothes, and said, “I will come by and pick you up for meals.”