Today’s Life and War by Gohar Dashti, Iran
The following day, I thought of those dreams that hung like laundry on the line as I contemplated the photos of the She Who Tells a Story exhibition, which included works by women from Iran and the Arab world. Today’s Life and War was a photo of an Iranian couple hanging their laundry on barbed wire — their pieces of clothing looked like white flags in a time of war, or like delayed dreams.
For eight years, we were busy killing them, and they were busy killing us. That was enough time for the dreams, theirs and ours, to dry on the ropes.
Another picture I paused in front of was Aerial I, from Shadow Sites II. It reminded me of the 1991 Gulf War, when the satellites took pictures of us from above, and we appeared merely as dots moving in various directions — you couldn’t see the fear that was the cause of our random movement. Being unable to go to the bathroom, for example, because we were walking in the open air — like everyone else who’d escaped the war — was not something shown in the images taken from above.
Delayed dreams on the fence of the Refugee Garden
Aerial I by Jananne Al-Ani, Iraq
The satellite images depicted us as rows of ants leaving their hills, leaving behind everything they had worked at for their entire lives. Every passage was an exodus for them. Our houses looked like dark holes, sometimes lit by the explosions.
My home was in that little spot right there. Can you see it?
From above, it isn’t possible to see inside the houses, to recognize the lives of the inhabitants, their struggles over the little things and the big things, their movements getting slower and slower all the time. From above, the burnt fields and bewildered animals look more like an abstraction.
From above, there are no souls, only bodies, but they are seen as hollow forms, moving the way atoms do in the universe — unseen. From above, it’s possible for bodies to disappear, to assimilate into water or earth or fire or air.
The signs on the paths reflect the loss of souls or bodies or both. From above, bodies intersect in lines and squares and circles — they look like scars on the face of the earth.
From above, forms are shadows of reality, like those in Plato’s Cave.
To see those intersecting dots and lines is to find myself back in Baghdad: here, we are moving out of our house. My mother seems concerned about the heavy stuff we can’t carry with us — the Persian carpet, the piano, the antique sewing machine.
The mirror on the wall
doesn’t show any of the faces
that used to pass
in front of it.
In action movies, fires are started, walls crumble down all at once, planets shake, birds fly off the trees. But we weren’t in a movie when we saw all that happen. This was our reality.
As if I can smell the hospital . . .
The fragments of my memory interact like fish swimming without running into one another. The scenes don’t necessarily proceed according to logical or chronological order, displaced as if they are clips spliced together from unrelated films. I don’t know, for example, how a memory of when I entered the men-only Hassan Ajmi Coffeehouse with some male poets is crammed in with the memory of my middle school history teacher’s table that had a broken leg. I never liked that book full of invasions or the pictures of “heroes,” but my teacher warned us not to complain — “Complaining is the Devil’s work.” The memory of a Friday trip to the amusement park is always linked with the song “You Are My Life,” but this makes sense because that song was playing while we were on the Ferris wheel, where the heartbeats rose as the wheel turned with the powerful voice of Umm Kulthum. I don’t know why I remember that dress I hated wearing because it was so fancy and uncomfortable. I was forced to wear it for my tenth birthday. The banned books wearing the covers of unbanned books in the Mutanabbi Street book market . . . the boiled chickpeas with bitter orange in the vendors’ carts . . .
I could never understand how the birds remembered their old songs!
I don’t know how to reconnect with that world that has receded fifty years behind me into the past: my father carries me on his shoulders through the streets of Baghdad. He stops every once in a while to buy me something, or to greet someone he knows, or to check the titles of the movies coming soon to the cinema. My father died due to a lack of treatment in the hospital. The hospital was only rooms filled with beds — it contained sick people but didn’t cure them. “Lives are in God’s hands,” they always say. But a drunk once said, “Lives used to be in God’s hands. Now they’re in the hands of whoever.”
The dead
act like the moon:
they leave the earth behind
and move away
The boy next door — who used to play in the street with my brothers, who greeted me with a wave but never said a word to me — left wearing khaki and boots, lifting his helmet slightly in a simple greeting, saying nothing. He is the one whose name was written in white letters on that black banner in front of their house, so his mother could be called the mother of the martyr instead of the mother of Tawfiq.
Forgotten
the faces of the dead
as if we met them once
through revolving doors
I was in a ship on the Tigris when I wrote my first poem. I gave it to my cousin and he made it into a paper boat. He tossed it into the river and we watched the boat-poem drift away down the river.
My paper boat that drifted into the river
with the world behind it
had a special note.
It may arrive one day
although late
all truths come late
One day, in the kitchen, my period came. I told my mother and she said, “All girls bleed!” Really? I wondered, It’s scary that we have to bleed every month.
Two years later, in that same setting, I heard my mother tell her friend, “Did you hear the news? They’re sending all the boys to the front to fight the Iranians.”
When her friend left, I asked my mother, “Are they going to send the girls, too?”
I thanked God for being born a girl. Who knows how much the boys were going to bleed over there — they could probably bleed anytime, any day of the month, unexpectedly, maybe without any treatment.
A siren went off and the lights went out. We were instructed to turn off the lights every time we heard the siren. That’s why I came to believe that the war was a button to turn off the lights.
Someone drew a circle in the air, but half of it disappeared. Each of us tried to complete the circle. We called it the moon, but it wasn’t. We called it the globe, but it wasn’t . . . Each of us brought a word to call the circle. Our words are half the story. Nobody knows the whole story.
Which side of the circle
is your story?
The war that was born with us is the same one that played hide-and-seek, the same one that survived alongside us, the same one that is growing older with us. I was supposed to postpone my plans to leave Iraq for a week so that I could attend my brother’s wedding, but he said, “Who knows what might happen tomorrow. We’ll send you the video later.”
Oh, little ants
how you move forward
without looking back.
If I could only borrow your steps
for five minutes.
Only a few friends knew I was leaving the country. “Where do you want to go? America?” one of them said. “But don’t forget, poetry only exists in the margins over there.” For that friend, nothing could be worse than marginalizing poetry! When you live for words, they may actually end up costing you your life. I wasn’t sure if my friend had been at that strange meeting at the Hall of Celebrations I attended a month before leaving the country. Maybe he wasn’t there. But he was a journalist like me and that meeting was obligatory for all journalists in
Baghdad. I don’t recall seeing him. But how would I have seen him? How would I see anybody? We were all turned into sheep with exactly the same horns. How should I be able to recognize any of us? There was no way to tell who had thrown trash at the editors on stage. No way to know who hit them with the butts of their guns. No way to know who shouted out the word “traitors.” No way to know whose blood was all over the stage. It was the same stage where Shakespeare’s plays had been performed by actors who killed one another in the same way, but the difference was that at the end of the play the actors would hold each other’s hands and take their bow for us, as we the audience would applaud for them. The curtain would be lowered in front of them, but we would know they were still there, and that their disappearance wasn’t forever.
All of us are autumn leaves
ready to fall at any time.
These days, people are leaving the homeland without suitcases. I was lucky because I left with one.
My suitcase was my time capsule: I filled it with handwritten letters, poems (including some that were unsuitable for publication), drafts of novels by my friend Lutfiya al-Dulaimi (she was about to throw them in the trash), a silver flower that was a gift from a friend in Tunis (he said its fragrance is eternal), another dried flower inside my copy of The Little Prince. I left behind hundreds of books with a relative who said he would store them in his warehouse until I came back. Two years later, when I arrived in Detroit, he called me to apologize because he had to tear up the books in order to wrap the sandwiches at his restaurant on al-Rasheed Street. The sanctions on Iraq made everything smaller: papers and bread and hopes. I don’t think he would’ve been able to use the little poetry book by my friend Abdul Ameer Jaras — that book was smaller than any sandwich. It was as small as a book of matches.
Because I had to leave in a hurry, I couldn’t find the book I wanted to take with me. It was called The Elephants Graveyard, which was about the habits of elephants, the way they live and die. It used to be my favorite book. When a group of elephants faces danger (usually when humans are hunting them for their ivory), the rest of the elephants will leave the area in protest. The elephants that live together also die together, so they go to the graveyard together and lie down there quietly, as if they had just finished some long and exhausting work.
We weren’t elephants, so we didn’t do any such thing when “the others” left the country. Every time they leave, and we stay.
During the Iraq–Iran war, the Iranians were forced to leave Iraq because they were “enemies.” My friend Amani was one of those “enemies.” She was studying with me at the University of Baghdad. She and I both loved to walk along al-Nahr Street, and sometimes she would stop by the vendors to buy turnip cooked with date syrup. Amani was going to marry a high-ranking officer in the military so that she could be exempted from the order to leave the country. She didn’t love or hate this man, but she loved Baghdad and wanted to stay even if her parents had to leave. In the end, the officer couldn’t marry Amani — the government didn’t give him permission to marry a woman who was “affiliated” with Iran. She told me this as we marched together in a student demonstration we attended without knowing why exactly. Deep down inside, I felt I was marching to protest Amani and her parents being forced to leave Iraq. I didn’t know what to tell her so I teased her, “Amani, my enemy friend.”
Thirty years before Amani’s departure, my grandmother’s best friend Salima was forced to leave the country with all the other Iraqi Jews, following the Farhud, when their houses were pillaged and some of them were murdered. “She used to come to all our weddings and funerals,” my grandmother said, “and we used to celebrate both of our holidays. I taught her how to make klecha dessert and she taught me how to make amba pickles.”
My Grandmother’s Grave
Pythagoras once said, “Beans have a soul,” and therefore we shouldn’t eat them. But my grandmother said the opposite — we must eat beans because “everyone who eats beans goes to heaven.” There’s another difference between Pythagoras and my grandmother: numbers for my grandmother had only one task, to count the days between the visits to see her daughters; numbers for Pythagoras meant the world. My grandmother had ten daughters and she would visit them in turn, leaving exactly the same number of days between each visit. If she was late to visit one of her daughters, she would delay the next visit to the other one. When she took me with her, she would sit me on her lap and wrap me up with the edges of her long and wide black robe. I never saw her wearing colors or any other style of clothing. She told me those were her clothes for mourning her daughter (my eldest aunt), and that it would have to accompany her to the grave.
Like a baby kangaroo inside her pouch, I would turn my head toward whoever was speaking, and when I got bored, I’d pull the edge of her robe to cover my head with it. She would pull it back, and I’d cover my eyes with my hands.
Covering my face with my hands
“When are we leaving?” I’d ask her. I couldn’t wait for the bedtime stories she would tell me when we went to sleep on the roof of our house. Every night she told me animal tales with a moral at the end of the story. I wanted to have that book, to read it by myself and look at the pictures, but she would always repeat, “There is no book. These are stories we pass down from generation to generation.” I would fall asleep to her voice, and the animals would come, sometimes in different roles — the ant might leave behind her grains that she should have stored for winter, and hang out with the grasshopper in the fields instead. In the morning I would be awoken by flies and the blaring sun; I would go downstairs to write the stories down in my notebook and draw them however I wished.
When I got a little older, my grandmother switched to real stories, about how she got married when she was fourteen, how she thought her parents had abandoned her, giving her so suddenly to a stranger: “He was a very kind man, but he barely talked to me,” she said, “and when he went to sleep, he covered his eyes with a handkerchief.”
The first time I noticed that my grandmother was losing her memory was when her relatives came to offer their condolences for the death of her brother. She seemed surprised by the news with every new guest — she was sad over and over again. Her memory loss started with the death of my grandfather. He died so quietly, as if he didn’t want to bother anybody. He appeared to be napping. But he was taking longer than usual to wake up that time. The same day we were busy with my brother’s accident. A car had hit him as he was on his way home from school. My grandfather first heard about it from an eyewitness, who said that my brother wasn’t moving after the accident. That news killed my grandfather, according to my grandmother. “I know him, he keeps it all in his heart,” she said, “he died from shock, nothing else.”
At times my grandmother talked to herself, in some kind of soliloquy, as if she were praying, repeating the same prayer over and over, something like those Sufi circles when they whirl and whirl until they give the bystanders a headache. I followed her gaze, and I saw a sparrow sitting on a branch. Was she talking to the bird or to God? Suddenly she noticed me there next to her, and she talked to me about the houses in our neighborhood, but she switched the names of our neighbors with people from her old village. She put her clothes in a bundle, saying she was going to her parents’ house. One time, she sleepwalked and almost fell off the roof of our house. My mother ran over and pulled her back at the last minute. After that incident, we stopped sleeping on the roof. Anyway, the war started around that time and most Iraqis stopped sleeping on their roofs as well — suddenly, sleeping without a ceiling seemed unsafe. The sky above seemed barren and blemished, now that it was dotted with missiles and airplanes that sometimes dropped spent bullets onto our roof. We would find the cartridges when we went up to hang our laundry. After all, our parents didn’t allow us to count the stars on our fingers because those stars we counted would appear in the morning on our fingers as boils. Who knew what would happen if we counted those
bullet cartridges, or if we went beyond that and dared to count the bones in the mass graves.
War for my grandmother was always “the world war.” I wasn’t sure whether she meant World War One or World War Two. She wouldn’t specify, and even though those two wars didn’t take place in Iraq, my grandmother knew a lot about them. The first took place early in her life, the second happened in the middle. But this new, local one, which happened late in her life, seemed to abolish the divisions of time in her memory, so that the events and the details got mixed up. Her speeches about food shortages, in which “people eat each other even as they extended their hands to help one another,” was straight out of World War One. But after the second Iranian bombardment, she would ask about her friend Salima, saying that she left her house empty-handed — and that’s from World War Two. I tried to arrive at an understanding of what she meant, as if I were holding onto the line of a kite being pushed farther and farther in another direction by the wind.
My kite finally settled down on a tree branch, on a meaning: war comes with various names but with only one face.
“Salima didn’t leave by choice,” my grandmother said. “She would never leave her home.”
“Who made her go?” I asked.
“I don’t know, the merciless ones,” she replied.
My grandmother could never imagine that the merciless ones would destroy her own grave. They did that in 2014 in the northern Iraqi cities and villages — they destroyed all the graves with Aramaic and Hebrew writings engraved on them:
When my grandmother died
I thought, “She can’t die again.”
Everything in her life
happened once and forever:
her bed on our roof,
the battles of good and evil in her tales,
The Beekeeper Page 9