The American
Granddaughter
Inaam Kachachi
Translated by Nariman Youssef
For Talal
Beware the beautiful woman of dubious descent.
An unauthenticated Hadith
Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
Glossary
A Note on the Translator
I
If sorrow were a man I would not kill him. I would pray for his long life.
For it has honed me and smoothed over the edges of my reckless nature.
It has turned the world and everything in it a strange colour with unfamiliar hues that my words stutter to describe and my eyes fail to register.
Maybe I was colour-blind before. Or was my eyesight perfect then, and is the colour that I now see the wrong one?
Even my laughter has changed. I no longer laugh from the depths of my heart like I used to, unashamedly showing the crooked line of my lower teeth that Calvin once likened to a popular café in the wake of a brawl. Calvin meant to be flirty that day. But flirting no longer suits me now. Who would flirt with a woman who bears a cemetery inside her chest?
Miserable, that’s what I’ve become. A dressing table turned upside down, its mirror cracked. I laugh joylessly from the outer shell of my heart. A fat-free laugh, low-cal, like a tasteless fizzy drink. I don’t even really laugh, but just struggle for the briefest smile. It’s as if I have to repress any possible joys or fleeting delights. I have to keep my inner feelings well covered for fear they’ll boil over and reveal the state I’ve been in since Baghdad. I came back feeling like a squeezed rag, one that we use to mop the floor.
A floor cloth. That’s how I returned.
I have left behind many of the habits I’ve had since childhood. I no longer look at what happens around me as a sequence of raw footage, every chapter of my life a movie tempting me to find a suitable title. Now my hardest-hitting movie is running before my very eyes and I can’t find a title that would possibly fit. I see myself on the screen, a disillusioned saint carrying her belongings in a khaki backpack, wearing a hard helmet and dusty boots and walking behind soldiers who raise the victory sign despite their defeat. Where have I come across this scene before? Was it not also there in Iraq, in a past age, in another life? Are defeated armies bred on the fertile land between those two rivers?
I confess that I returned defeated, laden with the gravel of sorrow and two sweet limes that I craved on my mother’s behalf. My mother, who it seems discovered the saving grace of disappointment long before I did, particularly on that day in Detroit when she pledged allegiance to the United States and attained the boon of its citizenship.
Her eyes welled with tears when I presented her with the green fruit picked from the garden of the big house in which she spent her youth. She took the limes in both hands and inhaled deeply like she was smelling her father’s prayer beads and her mother’s milk and her past life. A betrayed life encapsulated in two limes.
Yet, I like this sorrow of mine. I feel the softness of its gravel as I wade with bared soul into its fountain, and I have no desire to shake off its burden. My beautiful sorrow, which makes me feel that I am no longer an ordinary American but a woman from a faraway and ancient place, her hand clutching the burning coal of a story like no other.
II
Dil dil dilani,
To Baashika and Bahzani.
Baba went to the old town stall,
Brought us chickpeas and raisins.
He gave them to our nanny
And she ate them all . . .
My grandmother rahma rocks me back and forth, after settling me on her warm lap with my face towards her. My fragile chest meets her bounteous breasts. They spill out of her white cotton bra, which she boils in water and grated soap whenever it turns yellow with sweat. I look at her, spellbound by the pale rosiness of her face, and cling to her arms. My legs dangle on either side of her, not reaching the sofa on which she’s sitting with her knees elegantly touching, in the way she learned from Eve magazine. My educated grandmother, who could read and write and follow the press, who seemed a marvel among women of her generation.
She leans forward with me until the world starts to spin in my eyes, then she snatches me back, repeating all the while the old rhymes that engraved their message forever upon my still-soft memory. Rhymes inherited from the days of Mosul and the old stone house that sits on a cliff overlooking the river. The house of Girgis Saour, my great-grandfather whose surname Saour – the churchwarden – he acquired from taking care of Al-Tahira Church, together with its saints’ icons and its candlesticks that every Saturday had to be cleaned of the wax that had hardened on the shafts and polished with a slice of lemon.
They took me to Mosul one day when I was little. It was the Easter holidays, early April, and the valleys were ablaze with camomile flowers. The sprawling yellow vastness bewitched me, the scent of nature made me dizzy. The wild poppies growing out of the cracks in the rocks were an astonishing sight, as red as the cheeks of my cousins when they walked out of the bathroom with water dripping from their long hair. How could I not love Mosul, when everyone there spoke with my grandmother’s accent?
I liked my Mosul relatives, with their shiny backcombed hair and pale rosy faces. They would visit us at Christmas or when they came down to Baghdad to attend to business at a government office or to see a good doctor. They sat silent and worried on the edge of the wooden Thonet-style chairs that were common at the time. They sat as if ever ready to stand up, be it to receive a tea tray, welcome a new arrival or give the seat up to an elder, supporting small paunches with the right hand and running through the beads of a rosary with the left. When they spoke it was as if the kitchen cupboards had collapsed and a cacophony of pots and pans were spilling out. Words rolled out of my relatives’ mouths in a burst of qafs and gheins, with the elongated alef at the end making everything sound like the finale of a musical mawwal. Ammaaa . . . Khalaaa . . . They sounded like they had just stepped out of a period drama in classical Arabic extolling the chivalry of Seif Al-Dawla. Even though I loved my Mosul relatives, I never felt fully at home in that big humid house with the stairs that led up to more than one attic and down to several cellars. The steps were too big for my short skinny legs, and the single skylight at the top of the staircase wasn’t enough to banish the darkness.
My grandmother’s lullaby came back to me as I rode in the convoy along the road from Mosul to its surrounding villages. In Baashika the girls stood in front of their houses adjusting the white scarves on their heads as they watched us pass by. My movie about them would be called Doves and Handkerchiefs. The blank expressions on their faces gave nothing away. None of them were smiling or waving their handkerchiefs like in the scenes in my head from American World War II movies of girls in Paris and Naples waving to US Army convoys and climbing onto the armoured vehicles to steal a kiss from the lips of a handsomely tanned soldier.
I told the guys that Baashika was prob
ably an old corruption of ‘beit al-ashika’, the lover’s house, while Bahzani, the neighbouring village, derived from ‘beit al-hazina’, the sad woman’s house. They applauded these pieces of trivia, but quickly returned to their mood of anxiety as we passed men with thick moustaches, dressed in white with bright scarves, who stepped out from behind the cypresses and threw fiery looks in the direction of our convoy. I wanted to jump off the truck, shout something like ‘Allah yusa’edhum!’ and make small talk with them. Maybe ask about the wheat season or about the nearest store to buy a loofah for the bath, or simply invite myself in for a glass of cold water in one of their houses. I wanted to flaunt my kinship in front of them, show them that I was a daughter of the same part of the country, that I spoke their language with the same accent, I wanted to tell them that Colonel Youssef Fatouhy, assistant to the chief of army recruitment in Mosul in the 1940s, was my grandfather. But all that would have been against orders, unnecessary chatter that could endanger me and my colleagues. Orders demanded I be mute. And so, for the first time, I resented my army uniform that was cutting me off from my people. It made me feel we were crouching in opposing trenches. We were in fact crouching in opposing trenches. Like any skilled actor, I felt I had the ability to adopt a role and change character, to be simultaneously their daughter and their enemy, while they could be my kin as well as my enemy.
From that day on, I became aware of the malady of grief that afflicted me, to which I adapted and for which I sought no cure.
For how do I fight a malady that brought about my
rebirth,
that fed me and let me grow
and rocked me to sleep,
that honed and educated me,
and disciplined me so well?
III
‘Ninety-seven thousand dollars a year. All expenses paid.’ That was the mantra that started it all. It spread among Iraqis and other Arabs in Detroit, setting suns alight underneath heavy quilts and making palm leaves sway above the snow that still covered front yards.
Sahira came over, tossed the words like a burning coal into my hands and left in a hurry without drinking her coffee. I heard the wheels of her old Toyota screech as she sped away to carry the good tidings to the rest of her friends and relatives.
This wasn’t the kind of thing you could chat about on your mobile. A national lottery to be won only by the most fortunate Arabic-speaking Americans like me and Sahira, who, when I asked her how she could go and leave her two teenage sons, simply said, ‘The boys? They didn’t sleep a wink all night, they were so excited. They stayed in my bed and were begging me to hurry up and register my name before the opportunity gets lost to someone else.’ Ninety-seven thousand dollars was enough for children to drive their parents into the battlefield. Add to that 35 percent danger-money, a similar percentage for hardship and professional welfare, plus a little bit spare here and a little bit there, and the amount could reach one hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars a year. Enough to say goodbye for ever to the miserable neighbourhood of Seven Mile, enough to make a down payment on a grand house in the heart of leafy Southfield and purchase a brand new car. Enough also to send my brother Yazan, whose name was now Jason, to drug rehab, and then support him through college.
One or two years. Then things would settle down. I would cleanse my mother’s lungs of the cheap cigarette smoke she’d been inhaling every night, year after year, while she sobbed in her room. I could hear her through the wooden walls. Sometimes she sobbed soundlessly, like a broken TV, but later I would see her wet cheeks and learn that women didn’t cry from loneliness alone, but also from want. Money was another happiness. And I would bring happiness to my mother. I wouldn’t let this opportunity pass me by.
In the days that followed Sahira’s visit, private companies contracted by the Department of Defence started spreading the news in immigrant communities, on the internet, on local TV, and through word of mouth after Sunday mass in the churches of Detroit and Chicago and even in the Shia mosques of Dearborn.
As if at the touch of a magic wand, an endless emporium of bid and counterbid, tips, schemes and three-card tricks laid out its wares. There were those who offered encouragement, applauding and embellishing the experience, and those who looked away, spitting warnings against the betrayal of the land from whose Tigris and Euphrates we had drunk, even if it was for the good of our new land that poured us Coca-Cola morning and night.
The war was about to begin, and there was talk of nothing else. We heard the drums of war beating in newspaper headlines and Congressional speeches, on the flags popping up on front lawns, in the planes passing overhead and the ships assembling their crews to carry them to warmer waters.
So, on one of my identical mornings, instead of starting my automatic round of tidying the house, I sat down, dialled the number of one of the companies recruiting Arabic-speaking translators and left the details required. I wasn’t afraid of the war or of dying or returning with a disability. There was no time to think about such real things in the midst of the raucous carnival of excitement. I repeated after Fox News that I was going on a patriotic mission. I was a soldier stepping forward to help my government, my people and my army, our American army that would bring down Saddam and liberate a nation from its suffering.
I pulled into the spacious parking lot in front of Wal-Mart, but instead of getting out of the car, I sat still and watched the snowflakes on the windshield. I no longer needed to buy a blouse or a new pair of shoes. From now on my clothes would be different. Resting my arms on the steering wheel, I saw a soldier in army uniform walking across the parking lot under the falling snow, heading towards the honour that awaited her only a dream or two away, there, in the country of my birth.
The poor people of Iraq. They won’t believe their eyes when they finally open onto freedom. Even old men will become boys again when they sup from the milk of democracy and taste of the life I lead here. These were the kind of thoughts glowing in my head and almost lighting up my car. The glow intensified in unison with the idea of the one hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars, the price of my precious language, the price of my blood.
What did patriotism feel like? A load of nonsense that never meant much to me, neither during my Iraqi childhood nor during my American youth. Then came 9/11 and it was like an electric shock sending its energy through the bodies of all my friends and neighbours. We turned into creatures that shook and trembled, emitting sounds of panic and indignation, clasping hands above heads or using them to cover mouths. ‘Oh my God ... Oh my God,’ ceaselessly repeated, as if the rest of the language had been forgotten and these three words were all that remained.
I had woken up that morning, as usual, to the sound of my mother coughing in her bedroom. It wasn’t yet nine. Like a robot executing its pre-programmed morning routine, I headed for the kitchen to put water in the electric coffee machine; then to the living room to tidy the newspapers and cushions; then to Yazan’s room to wake him up; then back to the kitchen to prepare his school lunch, before finally settling with my coffee – cradling the mug with both hands – in front of the TV to watch the news. Things that I did half-asleep, my hands moving without the need to engage my brain. But on that day I went straight from my bed to the TV and reached for the remote while I was still standing. I don’t know what impulse diverted me from my usual routine. Perhaps someone had put a bug in the robot’s programme the night before.
I watched a plane crashing into a tower. There was another tower burning right next to it on the screen.
I froze where I stood. I knew these two buildings. I knew New York. Every American did. Whether or not she’d ever been there. I had visited New York, stood in front of her twin towers and had a bite to eat on the plaza that led to one of them. Yes, there used to be an Iranian selling kebabs from a cart at the foot of the World Trade Center.
I remained frozen, not blinking, not breathing, not registering what I was seeing. The only thing moving was my finger pressing the remote. I turned
up the volume to find out if this was a movie or a special effects scene being shot, but my eyes fell immediately on the phrase ‘breaking news’ at the bottom of the screen. America was on fire before my eyes, and I could smell the ash. The name of this movie would have to be The Towering Inferno.
A week later, the FBI was recruiting Arabic translators and advertising a web address for applications. I read the advert and felt a mixture of vulnerability and enthusiasm. What could I do to help my country in its adversity? How could a powerless immigrant like me serve the great United States of America? It was impossible to remain indifferent after witnessing that inferno, impossible to be content with my small hopes and to carry on living with my mother’s coughing and my brother’s drugged stupor. Quickly, without thinking too much – which would have changed little, anyway – I filled out an online application. But it wasn’t a rash decision. I knew exactly what I was getting into.
After a week I received a phone call from Washington DC to go and take the assessment. Now, one thing I was confident about was the flawlessness of my Arabic. I’d caught the language like a contagion from my Assyrian father. He never used to buy me toys suitable for my age, because our favourite game was Poetry Pursuit. He would recite a verse of poetry that ended, say, on the letter nun, and I would have to reply with a line starting with the same letter. Sometimes when I got stuck I would make something up, and he would pinch my earlobe and repeat the religious saying, ‘Those who cheat are not of us,’ then add, ‘but exceptions can be made for little poetesses.’
The American Granddaughter Page 1