Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  As I began traveling back and forth between America and Central Europe, I realized why Ajsa had been selected to be the first person to talk with us. She had had time to begin to come to terms with what had happened to her. Almost all of the other women I had met spoke with dead, dry eyes. Crying, I learned later, was the first sign of healing. I wasn’t a therapist, and I often just sat with women and held their hands and tried to bear witness to whatever individual grief they chose to share. If a woman talked about rape, I came to understand that she would rarely say it had happened to her. It had always happened to someone else, a neighbor perhaps, or even her whole village except for her. Were these women too embarrassed to talk about their bodies because their sexuality was tied to the honor of their families, as it was in Iraq? Was it ayeb for them to talk about it? I wasn’t sure, but I also knew that the pain of rape transcended mere cultural issues. I hated it when people suggested Muslim women somehow felt rape differently than other women. Why on earth should they? Except for on talk shows where women got money or seconds of celebrity in exchange for exclaiming about intimate things—a bizarre trend I found desensitizing to women—women in America were reluctant to talk about rape too.

  The refugees I met were so traumatized by so many things that I found many of them sitting in silence with dead eyes outside their tents for hours as small children jumped around them ignored. “I’m too helpless to be helped,” one woman told me when I tried to interview her. Every story I heard made me feel more grateful at my good fortune, yet every story also fed some pain deep inside me I knew came from the same place as these women’s. I was obsessed with my work, grateful to be working with women, as I had told my mother I wanted to on my fifteenth birthday. I spent days and evenings giving speeches everywhere I could, to women’s rights organization, churches, synagogues and mosques, schools and universities. I wanted to rally people to rise up and stop the atrocities that were happening in front of our eyes. I lambasted the United Nations peacekeepers for standing back and observing crime instead of preventing it. I demonstrated at the White House—the Bush administration had done nothing about Bosnia, and the Clinton administration had not acted on its promises in its first couple of years. Taking the bullhorn, I led chants to stop the genocide, stop the rape. For the first time in my life, I felt the thrill of being able to speak publicly about my own opinions.

  Saddam Hussein had publicly announced his support for Serbian leader Slobodan Milǒsević, and increasingly I began to see parallels between the two. From the back of my brain, I pulled out warnings from Ehab and rumors about women being raped by the Mukhabarat, and videotaped in the process, only to be told they had to become informers or the tapes would be released, subjecting some to rejection by their husbands and families and even to honor killings. The sister of Mohammed Bakr Al-Sadr, Iraq’s most respected Shia cleric, had been raped—I remembered Aunt Samer telling me in the Hunting Club pool about how they had raped her at the same time they were torturing him—then released her pregnant. I knew I couldn’t attack Saddam Hussein, so I attacked Slobodan Milǒsević. I couldn’t fight in Iraq, so I fought in Bosnia and Croatia. Milǒsević was a criminal and I publicly demanded he be tried for war crimes. I told no one in Iraq about my work for fear that Amo would punish them for my political activism.

  I did little else except go to classes, finish my homework, and go to the office. I remember walking across my college campus and seeing hundreds of students laughing, chatting, flirting, and reading around me, and wishing I had made more friends at school. But there was no time; I was always running from class to work. Nothing mattered as much as my work. I dreamed about it, breathed it, lived it. Haunted by that woman who said she was too helpless to be helped, I sometimes couldn’t force myself to walk out the office door. The organization began to grow, and the demands on me and Amjad grew with it. Every penny we raised went into the program, and it still wasn’t enough. We were behind on our bills, and every time the telephone rang, I was afraid it was a creditor. Bosnia was all either of us talked about, and I know some of our friends got bored with us. Even some of Amjad’s family told us, “You’ve done good work, but you have to grow up, get real pay-checks. Look what a toll this is taking on both of you.” We considered letting go, but every time we did, there was the memory of Ajsa and a check from a donor that I took as a sign we were meant to keep on going.

  One day, Mama called me at the home of a family with whom I was staying in Sarajevo. Amjad had to have given her my number.

  “What are you doing there?” she screamed, crying, when the phone rang at the family’s house. “Don’t you realize how hard I fought to get you out of the wars that captured our country? Why would you put yourself right back in another war? Why are you doing this to me? Why?”

  I only knew that I kept going back to war zones because I found comfort there. I was like the boy in The Jungle Book who kept escaping into the jungle whenever there was a problem in his own village. War zones were my jungle. I kept going back to the bullets. I kept going back to the pain of strangers. Meanwhile, I was growing more distant from my own family. Baba had immediately remarried, and I considered it a betrayal. I called my father and brothers on holidays. For the longest time, Mama kept calling me at 2 A.M. to complain about my father. Why did she have to keep calling me in the middle of the night? There was absolutely nothing I could do. I was so exhausted. I needed to sleep. The boxes I had buried away in Iraq were beginning to bob up to the surface, and sometimes I couldn’t keep them down.

  For the longest time after coming back from my trips to Bosnia, I stopped letting Amjad touch me. Every story I heard in Bosnia kept the pain of my own rape raw. I found myself unable to cry. I feared that I might get pregnant and have a child, and I wouldn’t know how not to hurt her. Opposite things are often true at the same time, I’ve found, and it is true that I loved Amjad and that I feared Amjad. Poor Amjad, the more loving he was, the more I panicked. I was afraid of being confined by him or betrayed by him, yet I was the one who struggled with commitment. I remember thinking that love was its own kind of cage. The more supportive and loving he was, the more vulnerable and trapped I felt.

  Sometimes I felt like an elastic band that was being stretched to the breaking point. Just when I was feeling strong, something would go snap inside me, and I could feel that elastic band bounce back into its old shape, into that child who was vulnerable. The happier I grew, the more intolerable was that awful inevitability of bouncing back with all the old feelings: the weakness, the fear, the sensation of being trapped. I was struggling hard to find peace in my heart, but it wasn’t there. Life had been a torment for me since I was little, I decided. I thought of it as one torturous stage of being, and I knew that death was what came after torture. It was the reward that provided release.

  One day when I returned from a trip, we got into an argument. I don’t even remember what it was about. It was about 5 P.M., still light outside, when chemical explosions started going off in my mind, like blasts of light. I couldn’t make sense of them. I just wanted to get out of my body. I couldn’t stand myself or the cage I was living in. I had to get out of my mind and body. I didn’t think twice when I went to the medicine drawer; I was on autopilot. The past and the present were coming together in my brain, the wires shorting out as the two crossed. Fear of the farmhouse walls, fear of being voiceless, fear of entrapment by Amjad’s love, fear of living in my mother’s cage, fear of living outside the cage. I had seen my mother doing it so many times, it was my turn to do it now. My turn to try the easy way out as she had done.

  I remember thinking that what I saw there probably wouldn’t be enough to kill me, mostly over-the-counter medicines, but I grabbed as many pills as I could find. I went to a corner of the apartment and poured them out onto the floor. The carpet was beige. I remember the twill. I remember they looked like the pills on Mama’s bedroom floor that first night and other nights that she tried to kill herself. I swallowed some, but I was too afraid to t
ake them all at once, so I took them in small portions, slowly and deliberately. I remember the struggle inside my brain more than what I was doing. I was a little girl imitating her mother, wanting to die to be free.

  Then Amjad was there with horror on his face. He dropped down in front of me and sat next to me on the floor.

  “Don’t do that, Zainab,” he begged me. “Please don’t do that. I love you. I will do anything to make you happy. Just don’t kill yourself. Please.”

  The scenario I was re-creating from my childhood was not re-enacting itself properly. He was supposed to be sitting on the sofa numbing himself with whiskey. Instead, he was crying with his beautiful eyes, and that confused me. When I saw the hurt in his eyes, I stopped taking the pills. I recognized that hurt. I knew what it felt like, exactly. I didn’t want to hurt him. I loved him.

  “Oh, Amjad, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I told him. “Please forgive me.”

  He tried to help me throw up the pills, but he didn’t know this routine. I was the one who told him I didn’t need to go to the hospital because I realized somehow that I hadn’t taken enough to really kill myself. I was the one who knew about the milk. I knew because I was the one who wanted to die and the child who saved her all at once. And I remember hugging him finally, as I tried to explain thoughts in my mind that not even I could understand, about allowing myself to feel the pain I had managed to hold inside since the day I left Iraq. I had let go of the guards surrounding my castle, but I couldn’t defend myself without them.

  I promised Amjad I would seek help, and the next day, he helped me find a therapist. I spoke with her for an hour, but I didn’t say a word about my life with Amo. I trusted no one except Amjad with the pilot’s daughter and the life she had lived. I talked to her only about what was safe and personal. She diagnosed a post-traumatic stress disorder caused by my work; strangers had been giving me their pain for safekeeping, she said, and I hadn’t yet learned how to deal with these stories. I had not taken any time off for myself; I had had no vacation and almost no rest since the time I arrived in the United States.

  “If you expect to continue your work, you have to learn to let their pain out,” the therapist said. “Breathe like a fish. Take oxygen in, then let whatever you don’t need out. Take in the stories you need for your work, and breathe everything else out.”

  I still hadn’t learned how to breathe.

  What she didn’t know was that I was afraid to let go of my mission even for one week because if I relaxed, more demons would pop out, and they would be my own. I was still dealing with the rape I had faced myself, but even that was hard for me to tell the therapist because that would open the door to the past I didn’t want to talk about. I was afraid of even being touched. Once, when a friend grabbed my shoulder to pull me to safety from a passing car, I almost hit him.

  The therapist asked about my past, and that is what opened up a whole new box I never thought I would open. When she asked about my mother, I told her about how she had tried to commit suicide when I was young, how I felt that she would go back and forth on the things that she told me, how I trusted her and then felt betrayed by that trust. I gave a few small examples, then I stopped. I sensed that the therapist was listening to me with a kind of curiosity, sort of like a reporter trying to dig out my story, and I was afraid of being fodder for some study or professional discussion. Seeing my hesitation, she finally asked me to write to my mother what I could not tell her.

  “But I don’t want to hurt her,” I protested. “She has her own pain to deal with. I don’t want to add on more pain.”

  “Then tear up the letters,” she told me. “Burn them, throw them away. Do whatever you want to do with them. Just write them to get your own pain out of your system.”

  I sat in the parking lot of her office for an hour and cried before I was able to drive to school. I put on my sunglasses as I headed to class, and felt like a ghost again as I walked across the beautiful green lawn. The whole world was moving around me without seeing me, and I was trapped in my lonely brain, held back by so many memories. Would I ever be like them? Carefree? Able to just enjoy life and learning? I took school so seriously; I had never skipped a single class until that day. I found a large empty spot on the lawn with no one around me and turned my back to the students who were walking to their classes so no one could see my face. It was a beautiful April day, and I was looking out on miles of trees that surrounded the school. I picked up the pen, and without knowing where to begin, I just started writing to my parents.

  Torrents of anger spilled out that I had never allowed myself to feel before. Torrents of angry questions for which I had no answers.

  Why didn’t you leave when Amo came into our lives? I trusted you! You are my parents. Parents are supposed to protect their children, not expose them to danger. Your choices changed not just your own lives, but mine and my brothers’. What were you thinking of? Didn’t you know how bad he was? Didn’t you read when you traveled abroad, didn’t people tell you? What was it, denial, surrender? Why did you bury your head in the sand, why did you close your mouth, your ears, and your eyes? Didn’t you know he was the Devil and that it wasn’t only about your lives, it was about mine too? How could you do this to me, your own child, raise me up in a prison with you in a relationship that I hated and I know you hated? Baba, why didn’t you help us fly away? You promised me once you would teach me to fly, Baba. Remember that? Instead, you abandoned me to a man you knew was a jerk? Why did you leave me all alone in a strange country with no means of support?

  And Mama, oh Mama, you are the love of my life. I loved you so much. I trusted you. You gave me a beautiful childhood, and I surrendered my life to you. Then you betrayed me and my trust in such a way that you left me being the very thing you hated in women: vulnerable. How could you do that to me? Of all the men who asked for my hand, why did you choose the cruelest one? He raped me, Mama. Did you know that? I trusted you, and look what you did to me! Then you and Baba left me here all alone with no money. Why did you just throw me and my dreams and my studies away after you raised me to care about them so much? Didn’t you ever stop to think that it was my life I was living, and not yours? I never asked to come to America, did I? That was your dream, not mine. Baba was right about that, you have been living vicariously through me since I was a teenager. Look how you’ve imprinted me. Look what I did with these pills. I almost killed myself, Mama. Just like you. I hurt someone I love very much, Mama. Just like you.

  Each letter I wrote was angrier than the one before it.

  Then one day I tore the letters up. The next time my mother called me at 2 A.M., I told her it was unfair to burden me with her problems, which I couldn’t do anything about; I was her child, not her mother. I still called on holidays, but I divorced them in my mind. I needed to focus on myself.

  A few months later, in December 1995, I got a call from the White House to let me know that ours was one of six organizations getting an award for working with women refugees. It had been over two years since that TIME story had come out, and we were going to receive an award for our work as part of President Clinton’s effort to show that Americans cared about people in Bosnia, the day prior to the signing of the Dayton Accords in France. I was excited. The war was over. Milǒsević eventually would be put on trial for war crimes.

  I had been living in black turtlenecks and jeans, and we had no money for nice clothes, so when I dressed for the White House that day, I pulled out my five-year-old wardrobe of designer clothes that we had bought on our European shopping trip with Amo’s money, a Mondi suit with an Escada shirt, the Dior coat, and a pair of leather dress shoes with a hole on one toe. I had never heard of an oval-shaped office, but I loved meeting President Clinton. It was 10 A.M., and he was relaxed, charming, and chewing on ice from his glass of Coke. I crossed my ankles to hide the hole in my shoe as we honorees talked to him and Hillary Clinton about refugees in Bosnia and Croatia. When I left, it was to television lights, as well as an
invitation—later cancelled because of a labor strike—to fly to Paris the next day with the president for the signing of the Dayton Accords. I was flattered by the attention until, out of the blue, came my father’s voice saying, “Don’t let this go to your head.”

  When Amjad and I left the White House that day in a media limo heading for a studio interview, we had exactly $5 between us. It made me think of Mama’s old saying, “Life is like a cucumber. One day it’s in your hand, the next day it’s in your ass.” In Baghdad, it was in my mouth financially and in my ass politically; I had everything I needed financially and no freedom. Here I had my freedom and I was broke. But I was in love and I was doing the work I was meant to do.

  A week later, when finals were over, I collapsed and let myself cry for the first time since coming back from Croatia. Once I started crying, I found I didn’t know how to stop. I started wailing uncontrollably. I went for so long that Amjad called an ambulance to ask someone to come over and sedate me. When the paramedics came, they started asking me questions and I sobbed through the answers.

  “Is your husband abusing you?” a female paramedic asked.

  “No,” I sobbed. “I love him very much.”

  “Are you sure he hasn’t hurt you?” she asked. She was ready to have Amjad taken away in a police car—where was she when I was married to Fakhri?