Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 - THE ABBASID COIN

  Chapter 2 - STRINGS

  Chapter 3 - AFTER PIG’S ISLAND

  Chapter 4 - THE PILOT’S DAUGHTER

  Chapter 5 - LEARNING TO CRY WITH DUCKS

  Chapter 6 - BOXES

  Chapter 7 - A WHITE HORSE

  Chapter 8 - COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  Chapter 9 - BECOMING ZAINAB

  Chapter 10 - SETTING ME FREE

  Chapter 11 - THE MIDDLE FISH

  AFTERWORD

  COLLABORATOR’S NOTE

  READING GROUP GUIDE TO Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund

  Praise for Between Two Worlds:

  “ . . . freshly poignant and newly galling. . . . a personal, intimate look at the soul-crushing impact of Hussein’s Iraq. . . . Salbi deploys a straightforward, easy prose that is powerful in its simplicity. . . . Now, with her chilling memoir, the lies end.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Salbi has direct personal knowledge of Hussein that is both insightful and disturbing. . . . There are secrets her mother never reveals, but [she] recognizes the importance of letting her mother’s generation decide how much of their own stories they are willing to tell.”—Ms. magazine

  “. . . a torrent of vividly recalled memories [that] reads with the sort of artless verve that can come only from one who’s been unshackled from a lifetime of repression.” —Vogue

  “[Between Two Worlds is] a stomach-churning memoir ... ”

  —Marie Claire

  “[S]ometimes a painful experience, this memoir ... is also [Salbi’s] hopeful vision, both for her own life and for the future of her native country. . . . a remarkable tale of emotional and mental resilience.” —Bookpage

  “ . . . engrossing . . . a unique insider perspective. . . . [A]n evocative and haunting memoir that proves that one courageous woman can rise above her own painful past in order to make a difference in the lives of others.”—bookreporter.com

  “ . . . provides very important observations about Saddam’s character and his ability to intimidate even close friends. [Salbi] vividly describers her late liberation from his ”charm“ . . . Through a journey colored with loss and hope, readers encounter a story of self-awakening and of realizing the will to live and survive.” —Library Journal

  “[A] steadfast visionary spirit prevails, rendered with remarkable literary skill and complex personalities.” —Bust

  [An] engrossing memoir . . . riveting. . . . This may be the most honest account of life within Saddam’s circle so far. . . . an enlightening revelation of how, by barely perceptible stages, decent people make accommodations in a horrific regime.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “ . . . a powerful portrait of an ordinary Iraqi family reluctantly entangled in Saddam Hussein’s world. . . . Zainab’s inspiring story is a gripping combination of fear, humanity, and personal strength.”—Jean Sasson, author of the #1 internationally bestselling Mayada, Daughter of Iraq

  Zainab Salbi is the founder and president of Women for Women International (www.womenforwomen.org), a nonprofit organization providing women survivors of war with resources to move from crisis to stability and build peace one woman at a time. She holds degrees from George Mason University and the London School of Economics. She is often interviewed in the media, including frequent appearances on Oprah. She lives in Washington, DC.

  Laurie Becklund is an award-winning Los Angeles journalist and author. This is her third collaboration. A former Los Angeles Times reporter, she wrote the first story about Salbi in 1991, when Zainab was a young woman stranded in America due to the Gulf War.

  To My Mother

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  Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First trade paperback printing, August 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund

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  PROLOGUE

  I STAND ON THE balcony of the old house with the courtyard on the Tigris where my mother spent her childhood. I take in the sea-gulls as their shadows scatter-fly the clay-colored water. I hear the overamplified call to prayer from a mosque near the ancient shrine of Elijah and think of the simpler voice at Pig’s Island. Across the river, near the place the boatmen can moor once again, is one of the world’s oldest universities. Downstream a wisp of smoke rises as the remains of another of Amo’s monuments falls in upon itself. How many cities on earth are so old, and yet still unborn?

  I keep returning to Rumi’s poem about the three fish.

  The first fish was wise. When he saw the men and their nets, he said, “I’m leaving.” He became a moving footprint and finally made it to the edgeless safety of the sea. The second fish, the semi-intelligent fish, said, “My guide has gone. I ought to have gone with him, but I didn’t, and now I’ve lost my chance to escape.” So he played dead, floating belly up to avoid being eaten. The third fish, the dumb one, thrashed about as the net closed around him. As he lay in the pan, he thought, “If I get out of this, I’ll never live again in the limits of a lake. Next time, the ocean! I’ll make the infinite my home.”

  Except for the bearded old haggi playing backgammon on the floodwall beneath me, I can see few faces from where I stand. Clearer are the faces in my mind, the faces of my mom and dad and our friends whose families Amo cracked neatly apart like pistachios. All of us faced an asynchronous choice: home or future. But Amo commanded fish to swim in his lakes and reduced the ancient Tigris to a trickle. When di
d our choosing time come?

  Baghdad

  May 2003

  1

  THE ABBASID COIN

  MY MOTHER GREW up in a house on the Tigris River that must have been grand then, with its courtyard and sixteen rooms. The house belonged to my grandfather, who died before I was born. Mama inherited from him a modest fortune—a share of the house and his factories, a quantity of gold, and a family name that means something still. But the one physical object of his that I ever really cared about was a gold coin forged a thousand years ago by Abbasid caliphs who moved the political and cultural center of the Islamic empire from Damascus eastward to Baghdad. Baghdad yields its secrets reluctantly, to those who dig, and a friend of my grandfather’s discovered a bag of the coins in the course of demolishing an old building. He gave three to my grandfather, who gave one to each of his three young daughters. Mama, the youngest, designed a frame for it in the shape of a small chain and wore it around her neck always. It had a dent on one edge I can still visualize because I so often wondered what sort of blow might have caused it.

  She was a teacher when I was little and when she came home from school she would take a nap on the sofa. She had the gift of being able to fall asleep almost instantly, and she radiated utter peace as she slept. I would squeeze in next to her, take in the slightly sweaty smell of the classroom she brought home with her, and try to make my breaths match hers exactly. Between her full breasts lay the Abbasid coin. I remember breathing to the rise and fall of that ancient coin against her skin, its worn symbols gleaming softly in the afternoon light. I assumed I would wear it when I grew up and became, hopefully, as smart and beautiful as she was. Of course, I also assumed back then that Iraq would always be my home.

  Though it is hard to imagine, given all that has happened since, growing up in Baghdad was for me probably not unlike growing up in an American suburb in the 1970s. I spent many hours driving around with my mother, running errands and shopping, driving to and from school, going to piano lessons, ballet lessons, swimming lessons, and just tagging along. She kept a busy social calendar then, and in the car was the place I got to spend time with her. She loved Baghdad—she was of Baghdad—and as we drove back and forth along the boulevards lined with palm trees heavy with dates, she would tell me a little about each neighborhood as we passed through it. I took in my city through the passenger-side window—old Baghdad with its dark arcaded souk where men hammered out copper and politics, and the new Baghdad with its cafes and Al-Mansour boutiques. What I learned of my heritage, as was true for almost everything else in the first nine years of my life, I learned through her.

  We happened to be driving down the Fourteenth of Ramadan Street one day with Aunt Layla in July 1979 when an announcement came on the car radio saying that Ahmad Hassan Al-Bakr, the gray-haired man whose portrait had hung in all of my elementary school classrooms, was stepping down from the presidency in favor of his cousin, Vice President Saddam Hussein. Aunt Layla and my mother were in the front seat talking about the news, which seemed to make them ecstatically happy. I think they were giggling.

  “That’s the last we’ll ever see of him!” Aunt Layla said.

  “No . . . more . . . Aaaahmmo!” Mama whooped.

  This puzzled me. Did they know the man who was going to be the new president? Was he an uncle—an amo? Was I related to him? If our uncle was the president, why would they be happy about not seeing him anymore? I didn’t understand. I asked about this puzzling new development and got a clear directive from my mother.

  “Some things aren’t meant for little ears, honey,” she said over her shoulder. “Some things that enter one ear need to fly straight out the other. They need to be erased from your memory.”

  I learned the concept of guided imagery at age nine and a half.

  Mama’s elliptical answer only made me more curious, of course, but I had a lot of time to myself in the backseat with two women as chatty as my mom and Aunt Layla in the front. So, as we drove, I practiced. I pictured this thought that they had just shot into my right ear as an arrow and tried to make it shoot straight out my left ear without leaving anything behind in my head. But each time I asked myself if the thought was still in my brain, it would pop right up again. I obviously didn’t master this skill because I remember the whole scene quite clearly today, down to the route we were taking through the Khadhimiya district past the old shops selling twenty-four-karat gold that led to the mosque with the turquoise and gold dome. But, I wondered even then, if I managed to erase that thought from my brain, how could I tell?

  Every instinct in me—survival, loyalty, anger, horror, resentment, guilt, and most of all, fear—conspires to prevent me from speaking Saddam Hussein’s name out loud. The fact that I use his name now, acknowledge a personal connection to him at all, is for me a watershed no matter how trivial that might seem. He wasn’t related to me or my family by blood, but some of my childhood and virtually all of my teenage weekends were merged with his nonetheless. I was taught to call him Amo and he treated me like a niece. Though it disturbs me, I can still reach back and conjure up a few fond memories of him. I would convict him of crimes against humanity without a second thought, but not because he singled me out for unkindness.

  Technically, he was just my father’s employer. My father was his pilot, a commercial airlines captain Saddam drafted to serve as his personal pilot in the early 1980s. When I was growing up in Iraq, people used to refer to me as the “pilot’s daughter.” I hated that term. I still do. It stole from me my very identity, everything I wanted to be. It defined me in terms of my father and defined him, in turn, by his most infamous passenger: a despot millions of Iraqis feared. Had I stayed in Iraq, there are people who no doubt would be calling me that still, though my father stopped being his pilot many years ago and no longer flies. Instead, because of a chain of events Saddam Hussein set in motion, though I did not know it then, I found myself stranded in America by the Gulf War. That was the most painful time of my life. For very good reasons, I had come to trust no one, not even my mother. I had just turned twenty-one, and I found myself all alone for the first time as fresh new fears were heaped on all the old ones. I did what I needed to do in order to survive, though it was not nearly as simple as I make it sound: I erased the pilot’s daughter and started over. I creased my life down the middle like the spine of a book when you bend the pages back very hard. You could read the first half of the book of my life, then read the second half, and not know they were lived by the same person. I wanted it that way. I needed it that way.

  I created a whole new identity for myself as the founder and president of a nonprofit women’s organization called Women for Women International, which supports women survivors of war. For over a decade now, I have gone around the world, meeting with victims of war and the awful mass rape the world seems to accept as an inevitable consequence of war. Seeing the criminal patterns behind such violence, I began encouraging women to break their silence and speak out so their oppressors could be punished. Yet, I have been unable to break my own. It’s remarkable, really. I appear on television and give speeches around the world, but I still can’t say the words Saddam Hussein on my front porch. The many reporters who have interviewed me never asked if I knew Saddam Hussein personally—why would they? So, I was permitted to remain silent, telling other people’s stories and never my own, hiding in plain sight, ever fearful someone would recognize me someday and say hey, there she is, the pilot’s daughter, the friend of Saddam.

  When Saddam Hussein was finally captured in 2003 in that hole he had dug in the dirt, I found myself fighting tears. I didn’t want to enjoy another person’s humiliation, even if it was my enemy’s. I think my tears were more for me than for him, to protect my own humanity against feelings of vengeance and hatred. I happened to be at a conference in Jordan that day, and everyone erupted in cheers. One of my friends cheered in the name of her father, an official who had been publicly executed by Saddam. Another vowed to charge him with geno
cide to avenge Kurdish relatives who were among thousands he had gassed. I yearned to seek redress on behalf of my mother. But who would charge Saddam with crushing human souls? I thought of all my beloved aunts, the spunky ones, the stylish and determined ones the West still gives him credit for liberating, and I wondered, who would remember, given the countless people he killed, the seemingly trivial wounds of those he allowed to live? Would women once again fall beneath the radar screen of history, which preferred to measure war in terms of incident reports and expenditures and kilotons and battles and casualties? How long would women continue to be complicit in their suffering by remaining silent?

  For the first time in years, I could feel the girl that I had been nagging at me, bringing back memories I had struggled, at great personal cost, to suppress. I wanted to make myself whole again. I wanted to come clean. I wanted to do my job without feeling like a hypocrite. But I had been afraid for so long I didn’t know how to get rid of the layers of fear inside me. Because I had survived by hiding my past, even from myself, I had never really pieced together the story of my own life. Which of the things that had happened to me were causes and which were effects? Which were common to all Iraqis, and which were unique to my family? Certainly, I had never come to terms with the big questions, like how Saddam Hussein had managed to stay in power for a quarter century when most Iraqis hated him and there were ongoing plots to kill him. Certainly there were guns. Certainly there was funding early on from the U.S., European, and Soviet governments, each pushing its own geopolitical agenda. But not even he had enough bullets to kill twenty-five million people. How did he manage to dictate the way virtually every Iraqi spoke, loved, married, prayed, played, smiled, learned, dressed, ate, deceived, despaired, celebrated, and died? Make decent people like my parents complicit in their own oppression? Turn my mother from a free spirit into a premature matron who managed to fit in at palace parties? Keep me scared to death of him long after he had no power to hurt me?