At my father’s sisters’ home, we are greeted by the spicy smells of curry simmering on the stove, and at the door Amal, Siham and Ibtisam all crowd around to kiss us and welcome us. Despite everything, they are smiling, happy to see us, but very emotional. Immediately, we start talking about the invasion, about the rumours that the Americans will soon seize Baghdad.
“How are you?” we ask them.
I take Amal’s hands in mine. Amal is the youngest, warm and expressive.
“It’s so terrible,” Amal says. “I feel like someone has come into my house, raped me, and stolen everything and burned down my house.” Then she says something to Siham in Arabic. They have developed a way of talking to me; they speak in Arabic to each other, translate a bit, speak to me in English for a while, because they can all understand, and in mid-sentence, one of them switches back to Arabic and they consult about whatever they are saying. I wait patiently, and they get back to me in English with the rest of the story.
Siham adds, “Lina is all alone in the house. We spoke to her before it started. We told her to forget the house and go and stay with Karim and the family. But she wouldn’t go. She said she wasn’t afraid. She wants to protect our house from looters.”
It seems incredible to me that the house they are talking about is the house my father, standing beside me, grew up in with his sisters.
“It was all right at the beginning,” Ibtisam adds. “We could speak to her every night and make sure she was okay, but now the telephones aren’t working. Electricity was cut off a few days after the war started. We’re so worried. She must be terrified. Last time we spoke, she said she was sick with fear.”
Usually, my aunts fuss over me when they first see me. I am like a daughter to them since none of them have children. They joke as they touch my hair and tell me it’s too long or too short or not stylish enough, that I’ve lost or gained weight, that I am wearing too little or too much make-up. They aren’t afraid to hug me or stroke my head or sit close to me. This time they are distracted, and they flit around, not focusing on me long enough to comment upon my appearance.
Dinners with my father and his sisters are a revelation to me. I am in the minority, so my aunts speak in Arabic to my father. The conversations at the table are unlike the ones we have at home in Canada. Suddenly, my father is talking Middle Eastern politics in earnest and discussing relatives in Iraq and people they both know. I see another side of my father, the elder brother who feels responsible for his sisters.
Over the years I had heard conversations about visas, endless paperwork and bureaucracy, lawyers, bank accounts being frozen, the sanctions in Iraq and how they were affecting Iraqis, and all the anxieties of normal people whose lives are suddenly turned upside down by war. It had taken ten years for Amal and Ibtisam to get British citizenship, and with it passports and the right to travel without fear that they may somehow lose their residency claim. They could have obtained temporary visas to travel, but they never wanted to; they didn’t feel secure until they had their citizenship.
The television is on in the background and the six o’clock BBC news comes on. We all stand close to the set as if we’ll learn more by our proximity to the screen. My aunts have satellite television, so we watch Arabic news as well, flicking back and forth between the different channels trying to piece together the truth through the fog of political biases. Iraq plays across the screen, the bombing lighting up the sky, the tanks rolling along dusty rubbled roads, “embedded” journalists chatting up soldiers, hooded men sitting handcuffed on roadsides. It feels like 1991 all over again. None of us can believe that our embattled homeland is suffering war for the third time in two decades.
Amal and Ibtisam lived through the Iran–Iraq War, and I ask what that was like.
“These two wars, the Gulf War and this one, are—were—much much worse for Baghdad than the Iran–Iraq War,” Amal says, bitterly. “They never bombarded Baghdad every single day in the Iran–Iraq War. Only once every one or two weeks.”
Amal came to England to study for her Ph.D. in 1975, and then returned to Iraq to work in the early 1980s. Despite the war with Iran, she’d decided to go home. She didn’t realize then that she could have applied to stay in England because of the war. Saddam Hussein was in power, and I ask her if she knew about the political repression in Iraq before she went back. She hesitates, not wanting to talk about Saddam even now, when she lives in another country, when Iraq has been invaded and his regime is toppling.
“You see, when I went back, there was always fear that someone would write a report about you to the party. So you don’t talk about politics when you are working at your job. You never talk about politics ever. I still don’t like talking about it,” she admits.
“Was that frightening?” I ask.
She raises her eyebrows. “Yes, but you get used to it. We couldn’t complain with our colleagues about not being able to travel, for example. You couldn’t complain about the war, or government policies, you just had to ignore it all.”
“It must have been hard to go back to Iraq, after living in freedom in England,” I say.
“Yes, it was hard, but I adapted.” She shrugs. “I was back at home where I belonged. Remember, it was nice for me to be with my parents and sister. Iraq was modernized by then, and Saddam liked to build new roads and make the country clean and tidy, and he built many new buildings. At the time, Baghdad was a relatively nice city to live in, especially compared to now. I mean, you had shortages of things, the government imported everything, so there wasn’t selection on the shelves, but there was health care, education, and the country was prospering because of oil. Daily life was stable. And if you wanted a car, you put your name on a list and waited. When I came back I was allowed to buy a car without waiting, which was a privilege of having a foreign degree. It was encouragement for people to return. So I went back and lived in the house that I was born in with Ibtisam and my parents.”
Amal is the social one of the three. She has never learned to cook and doesn’t like cleaning, but she loves chatting to dinner guests. She toasts the pita bread and brings it to the table; that is her job. But the cooking is left to Siham and Ibtisam. Siham is lively and likes telling stories as well, and she is an excellent cook. Ibtisam is the quiet homemaker and loves looking after the house; she is happiest when she is active, and hates sitting around.
As I set the table, Siham and Ibtisam come in and out of the room, bringing in different dishes heaped with food. When their brother comes to dinner, his sisters always make his favourite meals, providing him with the home cooking that his mother gave him only sporadically on her trips to London. Amal sits with Ibrahim, and I continue the conversation with Amal and Ibtisam about the Iran–Iraq War. They have never spoken about it, but now, in the context of an even more ferocious bombardment of their country, I want to know more about their pasts.
“First of all,” Amal says, wringing her hands, “we never thought the war with Iran would end. It went on and on and on. At the beginning, we thought it might take two weeks. But by the end, after years and years of war, people were in despair. They thought they’d never see the end of the war in their lifetimes. When it ended, when it was announced on the radio that there was a ceasefire, we were so happy! We thought we’d won! The people went out spontaneously in the street to celebrate.”
“I thought Iraqis didn’t believe the news?” I had been given to understand that they were attuned to government propaganda and quick to interpret it cynically.
“I think we thought we had won because Khomeini said that he had to ‘drink from the poisoned cup.’ It means admitting defeat. We hadn’t known all along if we were winning or losing during the war. So everyone went into the streets, some with their cars, honking, dancing, shooting guns in the air and celebrating. It was like when your team wins the World Cup!” Amal says.
“Did you go out as well?” I ask her.
“Yes, Ibtisam and I went out into the street. Our father was
still alive, but he was old so he didn’t go. We thought there would be no more war, ever.” She sighs. “It reminds me of the revolution in 1958. Yes, we were very little, but I remember the same thing the following year, going out into the streets and celebrating. Qasim organized it for the first anniversary of the 1958 revolution, when they erected the Unknown Soldier monument.”
“Don’t they usually do that when there is a war?” I say.
“Well, it was for the people that died in the revolution.”
“What did Iraqis think the Iran–Iraq War was all about?” I ask.
“Well, we thought it was about the Shatt al-Arab waterway [the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and a fluid border between Iraq and Iran]. We thought it was about access to those waters. We’ve always had problems with Iran about this. There was a treaty, and either we broke the treaty or they did. The war started officially on September 25, 1980, but even before that Iran was attacking our border,” Amal states.
“So Iraqis thought you were defending Iraq not invading Iran?”
“We thought we were fighting over this waterway,” she repeats.
“How did the people feel about going to war then?”
“No one wanted to go to war.”
I tell Amal that I’d read that Saddam had invaded first, but that Iraqis had been told that the Iranians started the conflict, and that America supported Iraq because the US was against the Islamic revolution.
Amal says, “Yes, maybe that is what happened. But not what we knew at the time.”
“Did you know anyone who went to war?”
My father says, “Our family is so full of women that we didn’t have many male relatives of the right age at the time.”
“But our first cousin, Nusrat, was a soldier who was taken prisoner in the first year of the war,” Amal adds. “And we have a friend whose husband went to war when she was just newly married and pregnant, and he was, how do you say, MIA, missing in action. She didn’t hear anything from him until one year after the war ended, it was almost ten years later. He had been in prison in Iran and finally was released. I never saw him, though, as we were in England by the time he got home, just before the Gulf War.”
“What about Nusrat?” I ask.
“He was away for eight years. He left when he was twenty-five but he wasn’t married, luckily. He was very very thin when he came back, and he had rheumatism. He is disabled now and in a wheelchair. He had been with many others in an Iranian cell, and they were hardly given any food and were forced to do hard labour. The war ruined his life,” Amal says matter-of-factly.
“We couldn’t travel,” she continues, “which was hard on my father because he loved travelling. But we couldn’t do anything about it; you have to just get on with your life. Without a passport, you can’t travel . . . that’s it. Unless you want to do it illegally . . . if you are smuggled out.”
“Did it feel like you were being held captive?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Yes, you try and put it in the back of your mind, but it is always there. You are in a situation where you can’t do anything. So you complain about it, you talk about it secretly at home, but so, what else can you do?”
“And it was always hard to talk to you from Canada,” my father says. “We didn’t really know what was happening in Iraq then.”
“In Iraq we had to go through the operator to call you, but then we’d be in a queue for an international line, sometimes for hours. You couldn’t dial direct. The technology wasn’t very advanced. Anyway, the phones were tapped. You never knew if you were being listened to or not, so you had to be careful. For very important things, you would send a telegram. Or letters . . . the post was working. Canada seemed so remote to us. Another world that we never thought it would be possible to see. The isolation was suffocating,” Amal says.
I remembered being a student at McGill University in Montreal in 1988, and being a member of Amnesty International and sending my grandfather one of their Christmas cards. For a while, my father was worried that if the authorities opened it, the card’s contents might be construed as political. Yet I had written nothing more than Christmas wishes.
Amal continues, “Iraq was like a prison and then I was suddenly sent to work in Cairo in 1987. I just couldn’t believe I was on a plane, leaving the city and going to another country. Siham came to visit me there; it was so good to see her, I so wished I didn’t have to go back to Baghdad. But, of course, my father was still alive and Ibtisam was still there.”
Siham and Ibtisam finally stop bustling around us and sit down at the feast they’ve prepared. They say grace in Arabic, and then Ibtisam insists that my father and I start serving ourselves from the mountainous dishes: chicken and potato curry, rice with almonds and pine nuts, kibbeh cut into triangles, and salad. I look at them all sitting around the table, four Iraqis who have the good fortune not to live in Iraq anymore, and wonder how much of it was luck and how much design, their father’s foresight. They escaped their fate. The Arabic dictum “It is written” means that your fate is already decided; you cannot alter it. But it was hard to know what was written: that they should escape this war or that they should never return home.
“Did our family suffer in the Iran–Iraq War then?” Every question I ask seems to lead to another and then another, and it feels that no matter how many things I ask I will never really know or understand what happened.
“We didn’t suffer like they are now,” Amal says, clucking her tongue, shaking her head.
Ibtisam interrupts. “We always had food shortages, even before the war. Because it was the government that imported everything, we didn’t have choices. One day there would be no chicken or no meat. We had vegetables because they weren’t imported. And rice and sugar and bread. But nothing extra.”
“The air raids were hard,” Amal says.
“A siren would go off?”
“Yes,” Amal replies. “At the beginning my parents and Ibtisam and Lina used to go down to the shelter, but then they decided not to bother. I never went; we couldn’t be bothered by then. Then at the end, we didn’t hear air raid sirens anymore, the government stopped sounding them.”
“Did the Iranians target government buildings?” I ask.
“No, I think their approach was random,” Amal says. “They just fired. Many many many people died. It was sad to see so many people wearing black in the streets; other families had husbands, sons, fathers in the war. We were so lucky.”
“Yes, remember that story you told me?” Siham says. I’d forgotten she hadn’t lived through the war herself either, as she’d moved to England in 1980. “The one about—”
“Yes, our neighbour’s son was in the war,” Amal says. “Usually when soldiers were killed, the army brought back the body to the house in a coffin. One day this woman saw a coffin coming down her street and she thought that it contained her son. She had a heart attack instantly and died. But the coffin didn’t contain her son.” My aunt pauses. “It was someone else.”
We are all silent.
Then the evening news comes on again, and we get up from the table to stand in front of the television and hear the latest dispatch. It seems that the Americans are confident that they will take Baghdad in a few days. We all stand motionless, staring at the screen. We aren’t surprised because we knew that the US army could easily beat the Iraqi army. I try to imagine what it will mean for Baghdad to be taken over by the Americans. I draw a blank; none of us can imagine what will come next. The idea of Saddam’s regime being precarious and possibly destroyed is unfathomable. The prospect doesn’t feel real. Saddam Hussein has dominated the waking lives of Iraqis for more than three decades. He was powerful, too, as vice-president for years before he took over in 1979. It is impossible to overstate the impact of his personality on every Iraqi. Even I, who have never lived there, feel his shadow upon the family.
“I wonder what Lina is doing now?” Amal asks.
But we know. The bombs are falling. Ba
ghdad is three hours later and so it is midnight there, and we know that the bombing goes on all night. We clear the table in silence, and Ibtisam goes to make the tea and get the fruit bowl. We sit on the couches with the television on mute, Siham’s hand hovering on the remote in case we see anything new about the war.
“So then one day the Iran–Iraq War ended,” Amal says. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“Me neither,” says Ibtisam.
“It took a year before we were even allowed to travel,” Amal explains. “And, of course, many Iraqis have family abroad, so everyone wanted to travel at the same time. But before we could even book our tickets to London we had to do so many things. I had to get written permission from my employer to say that I was allowed to take a holiday. I had to show the letter at the airport. Then we had to apply and get passports, and then an exit visa from the Iraqi government and then a British visa to travel to England. The British embassy was only open from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. every day, and if you didn’t get in the door, you had to wait until the next day. Auntie Lina stayed overnight, even sleeping in the street for two nights to get access to the embassy. Ibtisam and I couldn’t wait overnight because we were working all day. Lina still didn’t gain admittance and so one of my colleagues managed to enter the embassy and put in our application for us. I needed an invitation from someone in Britain, I think, so we must have got that from Siham. This all took a few months. Then I had to book a flight, but the flights were packed because everyone wanted to leave. Even though I had a seat booked, I had to get to the airport really early because they’d overbook every flight and I had to be ready to fight for my seat. By the time I was on the Iraqi Airlines flight, I tell you, I couldn’t believe it. And only four or five hours later I was in England, with Siham waiting at the airport. After almost ten years. Ibtisam was already here, Lina had gone back. When you think of it, if I had come with them in March, I would have been home by the time Saddam invaded Kuwait in August. I would have been stuck in Iraq until now. Like Lina. Siham and Ibtisam begged her to stay until I arrived, but she wanted to go home and then, a few weeks later, it all happened. Another war.”
The Orange Trees of Baghdad Page 9