Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  My mother resented the notion of anyone trying to tell her how to act or dress, let alone how to think. When she got her recruitment notice to attend a Baath Party meeting, she showed up in heels and her Nina Ricci mink—a combination (from what I could ascertain later) of the bold and the oblivious. When the leader said, “One Arab United Nation with a United Glorious Message,” she knew enough to stand in unison with her fellow teachers and respond, “Unity, Freedom, and Socialism.” But, in the process of delivering her one required line, she fainted dead away on the floor. She had a tendency to faint, which I saw as romantic, one of her many skills I never quite mastered. I remember when a group of aunts brought her home that night, and how they were teasing her.

  “Can’t stand the heat, can you?” teased her sister, my aunt Samer. Aunt Samer was a onetime political activist who felt her Baath revolution had been stolen by Saddam Hussein just as the Iranian revolution had been stolen by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

  “It’s not that,” insisted Mama, fanning herself. “It’s my allergies. I’m allergic to the Baath Party!”

  With the help of hindsight, I realize that sexism gave women a slight advantage over men when it came to political dissent. Slips of the tongue could be written off to ditziness. Once, when Aunt Samer answered her phone, a friendly voice greeted her with, “Hi, Samer, how’s the Baath Party?” and she quipped, “Oh God, what Baath Party?” Then she recognized the chuckle on the other end of the line: it was Saddam Hussein. No man could have gotten away with that. Early on in Saddam Hussein’s reign, a woman could occasionally express a contrary opinion as long as she joked, cried, or sounded like a bit of an airhead. My mother, I suspect, understood that game and played it occasionally, with utmost discretion, when it suited her needs. She was excused from future meetings on a technicality—my baby brother had just been born and was ill at the time—but she quit teaching not long afterward because, I suspect, of her allergies.

  As war revived up, anti-Iranian sentiment grew. In the name of patriotism, people even stopped listening to Iranian music and buying Iranian pistachios. Our family didn’t vilify Iran as many people did, but we stopped dying eggs for Norouz, or Persian New Year, on March 21. We had always decorated dyed eggs with faces of a mama, baba, and children, glued cotton on top for hair, and displayed our egg family on our dining room table along with yogurt, cardamom and other foods to bring baraka for the new year ahead. I didn’t understand. Norouz wasn’t just a Persian holiday. It was an ancient holiday marking the coming of spring. Kurds, a separate ethnic group in the north with their own language and culture, celebrated Norouz too. Why couldn’t we? “Things are different now,” Mama told me with an unsatisfying vagueness. “We can’t do that anymore.”

  Because our enemy’s government was run by Shia clerics, all things Shia began to feel suspect. Karbalā’ itself seemed to fall under suspicion, so my mother and her siblings moved Bibi to Baghdad and instructed me to erase from my mind the fact that Bibi had once known Khomeini. It was as if that look of disgust I had seen on Mohammed’s face in fourth grade was spreading nationwide, as if all Shia had cooties. I could feel the difference in school. Zainab is a common name across the Middle East, but Iraqis consider it classically Shia because it is the name of the daughter of the slain caliph Ali. Every time the teacher called on me, I felt she was labeling me. Zainab = Shia.

  “I want to change my name,” I told Mama one day when she picked me up from school.

  “Why, honey? Zainab is a beautiful name,” she said. “Zainab was one of the most courageous women in Islam. I thought you liked your name.”

  I had always admired that historical Zainab. It was because of her that we celebrated Ashura, the night Shia commemorate the massacre of Ali’s sons with public acts of charity and mournful ceremonies retelling the massacre. In some areas Shia men flog themselves in symbolic penance for their ancestors who failed to prevent the murder of the prophet’s heirs that night. Even the public displays of charity for Ashura ended when we went to war. I’m not sure to this day if they were formally banned, or if we just thought they were; either way, they were forbidden. That year, instead of going to Uncle Adel’s house for a ritual that ended with sharing pots of steaming food with hundreds of people, we stayed home. That day, Mama listened to a voice on a distant radio station wailing the traditional stories of mourning as she prepared a single special dish, rice pudding with saffron and cinnamon.

  Then, like generations of women before her, she recounted for her children how Ali’s sons and cousins were massacred on the Night of Ashura. She talked in particular that night about Zainab, who had witnessed a bloody battle in which her brothers and cousins were all beheaded. Zainab had already lost her mother, Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed and Islam’s earliest heroine, as well as her father, Ali. After the massacre, she and the other women and children were taken prisoner by the man who had led the uneven battle, and she dared to speak out against him to his face. So eloquent and powerful was she that he became afraid and sent her into exile. She spent the rest of her life spreading word about the atrocity and urging others to repeat the story so no oppressor could ever commit such an injustice again.

  I loved that story of Zainab. But I was a preteen. I didn’t want to stand out. I wanted to fit in. It had nothing to do with religion, I told myself. Zainab was an old lady’s name, and I just wanted to be called something cool, like Jasmine.

  Mama was right, you can’t freeze life, not even for war. In that first year after war broke out, my baby brother began to walk, I got my period, and I found out that my mother was keeping secrets that could take her away from me.

  I was the very last one of my friends to get my period. Every other girl I knew got hers before I got mine. This is an important rite of passage everywhere, but particularly in Islam, where a girl is treated as an adult and starts fasting at Ramadan. In some societies, she takes a veil. In our more liberal circle in Baghdad in the early 1980s, it meant that I was supposed to stop swimming with the boys and girls at the Hunting Club and start swimming with my aunts on days set aside for women, which as far as I could see was the only downside of being an adult. I learned about reproductive health, as we later called it in school, when Mama and I went to pick up my friend Wasen to spend the night with me. Her mother was in London at the time, and when I went inside her house to get her, she said something was wrong with her, that she was bleeding “down there.” Her grandmother was home, but she was uncomfortable talking to her about it.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her confidently. “My mother’s a teacher. You can ask her. Mama knows about everything.”

  When we went outside, I got into my normal seat in the front of the car next to Mama, and Wasen climbed in back. I started tuning in the radio, and when Wasen didn’t say anything, I finally turned to Mama and told her that Wasen had a secret question to ask her.

  Wasen leaned over, put her arms on the top of the front seat, and told her what had happened.

  “I don’t know what to do, Aunt Amel!” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Oh, honey, don’t worry!” she said. “You’re fine. You’re perfectly normal.”

  And, when we got home, Mama and Wasen and I sat down at the kitchen table, and Mama talked to her in such a gentle way, her eyes searching Wasen’s eyes, being a mother to her at that moment. She explained that what had happened was a wonderful thing, the thing that makes a girl a woman and allows us to have babies. As I listened, I felt proud that I had a mother who was so knowledgeable and gentle. Yet I felt left out. Wasen was an adult now, and I was still a child.

  Later, my friends teased me that I just a little girl playing with Barbies. I went into my room, packed up all my dolls except for Basma, and gave them to Radya to take home to her little sisters. Then I took the Quran down from the highest shelf in our house, where the holy book is supposed to be kept, and put it in my lap. I didn’t exactly pray to get my period, I just recited some phrases I remembered from Bibi and wi
shed. Not long afterward, I got my wish.

  I was the only girl I knew who was excited about getting her period, and certainly the only one who ran out of the bathroom upon discovering it and told her father. This sort of openness was unique to my family. A woman’s body is considered very private in Arab cultures and not to be discussed with men, even fathers.

  “Congratulations, you are a woman now, habibiti!” he said, using the arabic term for “my beloved” or “honey.”

  Mama was a biology teacher; she had an embryo in a jar in her high school classroom of a baby that had died in utero. She was also a natural artist. After I got my period that day, she took me into the kitchen and took out the pencil and white notebook she kept by the telephone. Mama always sketched when she was on the phone. She sketched on the margins of books as she read. Her hands were always drawing, always in motion. She drew graceful, lifelike nudes on the walls of her bathroom, then periodically painted over them over and drew more and painted over those. Curious, Haider left his Legos and followed us into the kitchen. She didn’t send him away. She began drawing sketches of men’s bodies and women’s bodies and explained how each worked. Art and science came together in her graceful diagrams with all the curving lines. There was an elegance inside me, inside all women, I never could have imagined. She drew a circle that was a woman’s egg and a small creature that was a man’s sperm, and said that when the sperm met the egg, a cell was formed. She drew pictures of cells dividing and of those cells dividing until finally a baby was created.

  “But how does the sperm find the egg?” I asked.

  “When a man and a woman love each other the way Baba and I do, they get married, and they start having sex, and the man puts the sperm into his wife,” she said, and she drew a diagram of this.

  I started giggling. My parents didn’t exactly talk about sex in front of us, but I somehow knew it was something secret that they did in private that made them feel good, a forbidden thrill that I would understand one day when I got married.

  “There’s no need to giggle about this word, Zainab,” Mama said. “Sex isn’t silly. It is a beautiful thing. It is a time when a man and a woman come very close to each other and produce beautiful children like you and Haider and your baby brother.”

  I remember Haider staring at her drawings through his long dark bangs. Haider was very smart for a second-grader. He was smart in the way my father was smart, in math and science. He didn’t say much unless he was arguing with me, but he didn’t just memorize new information, he processed it inside his brain until it made sense. I learned by observing and asking whatever questions popped into my mind until I was satisfied I had figured things out.

  Before we finished talking that afternoon, Mama put her physiology lesson into a spiritual context. God had arranged men’s and women’s bodies to complement each other perfectly, she said. The pleasure that came with sex was one of God’s gifts to each of us, like the gift of being able to have a baby. Men and women were equal in marriage and equally entitled to the gift of that pleasure, she said, but they had to wait until after they were married. So that was why only married women had babies, I thought to myself. It was haram to have sex before you were married.

  Three years later, when I was in ninth grade, they taught us these things in school. I was the only one who raised my hand to answer questions without shyness, the only one who didn’t giggle. “It should not be ayeb to talk about sex,” I said. “Sex is a natural thing. It is one of God’s gifts to us.”

  Like all Iraqi children, I was raised to obey my parents, tell the truth, respect my teachers and other adults, and do nothing to dishonor my family. These are complex concepts, but to break any of those rules was essentially ayeb, which means “rude” or “discourteous.” To whisper in front of anyone or to interrupt an adult or question their judgment was ayeb. To enter a room of adults without being invited was ayeb in a culture where adults and children usually socialized separately. Women in particular had to be careful not to do anything ayeb, because any behavior that was less than modest and courteous could draw shame or aar not only upon themselves, but on their whole family. Even in our home, the most liberal I knew, curiosity was encouraged, but questioning the judgment of adults was not. My parents were as secular as any I knew, but it was still haram to cause them even to sigh with concern, because that was written in the Quran. So I asked many questions, sometimes to the point of impertinence, but when I felt my world begin to turn upside down, I couldn’t ask what was wrong.

  Uncle Adel began spending the night at our home, and I assumed at first that he had had an argument with his wife. Then Aunt Samer, Uncle Adel, and my parents began gathering in our living room and closing the door nervously behind them so we wouldn’t hear what they were saying. I looked to Mama for an explanation, but the expression on her face told me I was not to ask. Something was clearly worrying them, yet every time I tried to approach anyone I would be asked if I had finished my homework, or told to please watch my baby brother. I spent so much time with Hassan during that time that when he began to speak, he sometimes called me “Mama.” My initial reaction to their rebuff was hurt. I was supposed to be an adult, and they were still treating me like a child, or maybe a ghost that everybody just looked straight through. One day, I lay down on the sofa and covered my head with a sofa pillow in hopes I could make myself faint so someone would pay attention to me the way they did to Mama when she fainted. But nobody noticed. I fell asleep and woke up an hour later, tired and sweaty. Didn’t adults realize a child doesn’t stop observing what’s going on around her? Didn’t my parents understand how lonely it was being inside my own brain with all these questions it was ayeb to ask?

  One night when I heard my parents talking in their bedroom downstairs, I tiptoed out of my room and sat down on the terrazzo tile staircase to listen to what they were saying. I had never eavesdropped on anyone before, and it was a sign of how scared and left out I felt that I would even consider it. But I learned something important that night as I stared down at my bare feet on the step: my mother’s cousin, Aunt Ishraq, and her family were no longer living in Iraq. Aunt Ishraq had an enormous house in Al-Mansour with girl cousins my age and older boy cousins I had kind of practiced flirting on.

  “Mama, why didn’t Aunt Ishraq and my cousins say good-bye to me before they moved away?” I asked Mama later. My feelings were hurt.

  “How did you know about this?” she demanded.

  “I just figured it out from what everybody was saying,” I said.

  “You must erase this from your memory, Zainab,” she instructed. Her voice was firm and clear. There was no room to play around here.

  “But, I can’t, Mama,” I confessed.

  “Well, don’t mention this subject again, not even to your cousins,” she said. “We’ll talk about it later. Not now. You must not say anything about this to anyone. Do you understand?”

  I knew all the looks on my mother’s face. When she was angry, her face grew very red, and drops of sweat appeared on her upper lip. When she was serious about something, her skin would pale noticeably, and her face would set, her lips taut. That day, I took her by surprise, and I saw her scared. Something about Aunt Ishraq’s move had scared her. She was more afraid because I knew about it, and that made me feel not only guilty, but sad. I adored my mother, and the last thing on earth I wanted to do was to cause her pain.

  It was cold and pouring rain in Baghdad when Baba asked me if I wanted to go with him over to Uncle Adel’s. We rarely spent time alone together, so I jumped at the chance. It had rained so long that our cul-de-sac had filled up with water. Baba always complained when that happened because the government had been promising to fix the drainage, but I loved it. If Baba happened to be home when this lake appeared in our front yard, he would make a fleet of boats out of newspaper and my brothers and I would set them sailing. But that was obviously far from his mind as we got in the car to drive to Uncle Adel’s. He put on a tape of the Egyptian singer
Abdul Haleem Hafez and tried to chat with me as we drove. I don’t remember what he talked about. I just remember feeling that he was trying to make a special effort to reach out to me and that he wasn’t comfortable chatting with me the way Mama was. Casual conversation didn’t come naturally to him. When he came home from a long trip, we would rush in, open his suitcase to see what he had brought us, jump all over him, get our hugs, and then let him alone. He was a little like a cat when it came to emotions. He needed his space.

  The short street leading to Uncle Adel’s house was muddy and empty and dreary. I noticed a large stack of crates half-covered with blue plastic tarps in front of the house of one of his neighbors. I was surprised to see them still there. There were only four houses on that street, and I knew the neighbors well enough to know that the crates contained valuable factory equipment.

  “Why did they leave the equipment out?” I asked Baba. “It’s going to rust in the rain.”

  He waited to answer until he had parked the car in front of my uncle’s house. Then he turned to me, and I realized this drive had been building to something. He was trying to find the right words, and I could see it wasn’t easy for him. I remember staring down at the floor and thinking I wasn’t actually an adult yet because I couldn’t drive. My legs weren’t long enough to reach the pedals.