by Zainab Salbi
Saddam Hussein had institutionalized rape just as he had institutionalized the hatred of Persians and Shia—I was sure of it. He was using the same tactics as Milǒsević, and Stalin before him, using women to send political messages to men to consolidate his own power. The more I thought about it, the more I felt the evil, the horror, of the man I had been trained to call Amo, and the more certain I was that he had used sex to glue together his network of fear, insinuating himself into every human relationship he touched, including marriage. Except for Kuwait and part of Iran, Amo had simply taken everything he ever wanted, from gold to pomegranates. Why not women?
“Mama, what did you mean when you told me I didn’t know how Amo could be?” I asked her one day. She looked at me with her huge open eyes and I knew what she was asking: are you sure you want to hear this, Zainab?
Yes.
She talked about the gypsy women and women bused in for parties from villages. Sometimes women were simply stopped on the street and pulled over by secret police because Amo or his brothers or sons, apparently, had seen them and wanted them. There was a woman who would call up women and invite them to her apartment for “tea,” who was apparently his madam. One woman my mother knew who got an invitation for tea was afraid to reject her invitation. So she dressed in very tight jeans and a big belt and extra clothing in hopes that if Amo did arrive, the clothes might deter him. Instead, he only treated her more roughly and forced himself on her.
“She was raped,” I stated with horror.
“You can call it rape or you can call it really bad sex,” she wrote, and I thought that was the saddest thing I had ever heard from a woman who had once described sex to her daughter as beautiful.
That night, when I went to bed, I lay there, unable to sleep. I started questioning my own judgment of Fakhri’s violation of me. Was that rape, or was it just “bad sex”? Had I been wrong in my judgment? I hated it when I doubted myself. I remembered the bed, the flowered pillowcase I still kept in my closet even now as a reminder. I remembered how I felt, violated in every way. Not one part of my body, not one ounce of my soul, was a participant in that act. He might as well have been raping a piece of wood. It was forced. It caused pain. I hated it. I fought it. It wasn’t bad sex. It was rape, and that was why I left him.
When I got home from the bus stop after work and opened the door, Mama looked proud and happy in her armchair. It was amazing, really, how much emotion she could convey through her eyes. She was all alone. Amjad was preparing for his bar exam. Her caregiver had gone.
“Where is Fatima, mother?” I asked, chiding her as I gave her a light embrace, drinking in the smell of her and allowing her, I think, to drink in mine.
“I let her go,” she wrote, clearly proud of herself. “We cooked bamya for you. Serve yourself and come sit with me.” Bamya was my favorite dish, okra cooked with garlic, tomato sauce and tamarind, lemony in the Iraqi style. I got my dinner and sat down with her to watch Xena: Warrior Princess, our nightly routine. Xena was a kind of female Hercules inspired by Greek mythology, a latter-day version of the Women’s Village fantasy my aunts used to talk about. Xena had a dedicated following among women prisoners, lesbians, teenaged girls, and one Iraqi mother living for the time being in Alexandria, Virginia.
“The hardest part of this disease is not being able to laugh,” she wrote.
We played backgammon for a while, the familiar sound of dice clicking away our limited time together. I was alone in my own home with my own mother. There was no one to scare us. No listening walls. No man at all at that moment in our Women’s Village. I knew that the opportunity had finally come, after so many years, to ask the questions I couldn’t as a child. It wasn’t Zainab Salbi who worked with women war victims, it was me, her daughter. I needed to know the price we had paid for his friendship.
“Remember when you called me in Sarajevo and you were crying over the phone asking me why would I bring myself to a war when you risked everything to take me out of Iraq? I have thought a lot about that, Mama. Here’s what think. I think I have been going from one war to another asking other women questions to find answers to questions that only you know, Mama, and you are sitting in front of me now. I have this pain inside me that won’t go away, Mama. You have had this pain inside you. And I wonder if it’s the same. I have to ask you, Mama, why were you so tormented all the time? Did he hurt you, Mama?”
She had her notebook in her lap and her knitting at her side. She tried to write, but her hands began shaking. She struggled for breath, and drops of sweat appeared on her face. Her face turned a deep red. I was afraid I was going to lose her. I ran to her bedroom to get her ventilator and oxygen to save her life, if only for a few more weeks or days. I cared about nothing else but keeping my mother alive in that moment. If I have to make choices, I choose you, Mama. And I never asked her again.
It was May 1999, and refugees were fleeing war in Kosovo in massive numbers, to Albania and Macedonia, most of them women and children. Mama, remote control in hand, kept watching this news. Women were being found half-naked and dazed in the middle of the street after being raped and released, and we talked about how vulnerable women were to rape in the midst of the chaos of war. If not for my mother, I would have gone to Kosovo in a heartbeat to start a new program there, but I couldn’t leave. Mama was the most important thing in my life.
“You need to go to Kosovo, Zainab,” she said. “Help those women, habibiti.”
“No, Mama. I need to stay with you. You are the most important person to me.”
“You need to go, Zainab—don’t worry about me,” she said. “I will wait for you.”
“But I want to be with you before you leave me, Mama,” I said. “I don’t want to risk being away.”
“I will not die before you come back, Zainab,” she said. “I promise.”
I came back a week later, exhausted from travel and work and sharing the pain of shattered strangers. Mama had kept her promise, and she looked through the photographs of the women I had met, asking me about them and staring at some of the pictures for so long I felt she was trying to learn the life story behind each face. She had painted a series of watercolors while I was gone, of determined young women, in colors so vivid no one would imagine they had been applied by a dying woman. She had painted them on cards, like greeting cards. The last one she made was for me.
Shortly after I returned, Mama’s caregiver told me she was going on vacation. I couldn’t trust Mama with a replacement when I knew she was so close to death, so I began caring for her almost around the clock. By the time the hospice nurse came for her weekly visit five days later, I was an emotional and physical wreck, surviving on coffee and exhausted by the physical and emotional demands of keeping Mama alive. The nurse suggested Mama go into the hospice for a few days, to allow me to rest so I could resume her care, and Mama reluctantly agreed.
Haider came and stayed with her in the hospice. But two days later, when Amjad and I went to bring her home, it was too late. I saw her try to pick up a pencil, but her hand faltered and I couldn’t read what she wrote. Haider and I each held one of her hands as Amjad read the Quran for her. I saw her try to catch just one more breath, and she was gone. I couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t be dead. I had to bring her home to die. I had promised her she would die at home. That was the one thing she had asked of me. I kept on telling the doctor over and over again to check her pulse because she had come so close to death before.
“Your mother is dead,” he told me finally, softly, a kind man. “But she will always be with you, and there will be times in which you will feel her touch. I know about this. My mother died ten years ago and there are still times in which I would be driving or something and there would be her touch on my hands. She will always be there for you.”
I washed her body with the help of local Muslim women, feeling not only grief as tears streamed down my face into the white shroud we wrapped around her body, but an overwhelming guilt as well. As I read the
Surah she had selected, I kept thinking that in the one thing she had asked of me, to die at home, I had failed. I had failed her.
She had asked to be buried next to Bibi in Najaf, but it took me almost a week to arrange the paperwork to take her back to Iraq. Because of sanctions, there were still no direct flights, so after twelve hours of flying to Jordan, we had another twelve-hour drive to Baghdad. My father met me at the airport and had hired a driver to take us to Baghdad. I hadn’t seen my father for nine years. He looked much older and carried prayer beads in his hand like so many other Iraqis who’d been encouraged by Amo to turn to God for relief from the hardship of sanctions. I had been running nonstop for a week trying to make the arrangements, and I was exhausted and grieving and just wanted to fall into his arms and have him comfort me and tell me he would take care of everything from then on. Instead, he was the one who collapsed in my arms, sobbing. “I loved your mother very much, Zainab,” he kept saying. He expected me to be there for him to pick up the pieces, and I felt once again like the adult, the parent, rather than the child. It felt unfair to me after all I’d been through. Baba slept through the night on that long desert road, and it was during that long night that I bid my farewell to Mama and felt her soul leave me.
“Don’t you recognize our neighborhood?” Baba asked as we drove toward our house.
I didn’t. I had been away nine years. During that time, nearly a decade of sanctions had taken its toll. Iraqis had paid the price of Saddam’s tyranny. Everything had aged and been drained of color. The streets were painted with resignation. Our cul-de-sac was filled with family members waiting for me in front of our home, all in black. I looked for my baby brother, Hassan, who was eleven years old when I last saw him, and found myself hugging a twenty-year-old man in a full beard of mourning. There were people crowding around me, cousins I was trying to recognize, everyone kissing me and crying. In the middle of it all, a stranger introduced himself as the head of our tribe. What tribe? I thought, distractedly, as we prepared to take my mother’s body immediately to Najaf for the long-delayed burial. Aunt Samer sat with me in the car as she directed me to read the passages of the Quran to bless my mother in the final leg of her journey.
For centuries, Shia families have sent their dead to be buried in that holy place in the middle of the vast yellow sand desert of southern Iraq, until it has become one of the largest cemeteries in the world. When we had gone for Bibi’s funeral, I remembered walking for perhaps fifteen minutes through the eerie city of the dead, past young men reciting the Quran and women sprinkling rose water on the graves of their loved ones, until we finally arrived at the mausoleum of my mother’s family. The cemetery was so jammed with war dead then that it was difficult to walk without bumping into small white stones in front of the tombs. Now we drove straight up to the mausoleum. The cemetery seemed half the size it used to be, yet surely more people had been buried here in nine years. Where were the rest of the graves? When I was little, I had been afraid of this place the way children are afraid of vampires and zombies. Now I felt a different fear, as if even the dead were too scared to talk.
“What happened here?” I asked Aunt Samer. She looked around, the familiar look of worry and fear on her face.
“Saddam ordered that the cemetery be paved over to punish the Shia for rising up against him back in 1991,” she told me quietly. “But, as the bulldozer came, a guard ran up and said, ‘Stop, that mausoleum belongs to friends of the president’s.’ And that is how our dead were spared.”
Saddam Hussein had spared our dead, but not our living.
Hot and exhausted, feeling someone had twisted my heart out of my chest, I watched my mother’s body being lowered into the yellow sand next to Bibi: the hardest thing I had ever done. My mother’s life was finally over. You never were afraid of death, Mama, were you? I asked her. Was it rest you were seeking, Mama? Is it rest you have now? Are you at peace now, Mama?
Throughout the three-day mourning period, our home was filled with people. Women gathered separately from men, and our house was filled with women wearing black, reading the Quran for my mother and crying. Some brought hired “mourners” as offerings, whose job it is to recite religious stories and eulogize the dead, inducing everyone to cry to purge their sorrow. We emptied all the furniture from the main part of our house and filled it with cushions so there would be enough space for the visitors, setting only a few chairs aside for VIPs, like Amo’s sisters, who came to give their condolences.
No one expected me to be polite to anyone. “Cry as much as you can, honey,” my aunts told me. And for three days I did. All the women seemed so bereft, I remember wondering if they were crying for Mama or for themselves. It was as if the entire country were in mourning for what had been lost.
It is traditional for the family of the person who has died to provide a feast for mourners on the third evening. Hundreds of women came that night, many of them aunts I hadn’t seen since Mama’s potluck dinners and my school years. They had organized the feast for us, and when I was asked to lead the women into our garden, I found it full of lights and my mother’s favorite foods—stuffed lamb, fesenjoon, tourshana, dolma. The garden was decorated so beautifully it felt like a wedding, and the moment I stepped outside and saw what the women had done, I stopped crying. I felt the beauty of the Iraqi night and a gentle desert breeze on my face, like the back of Mama’s fingers against my cheek.
“Your mother’s soul is so clearly here, Zainab,” Aunt Samer said, kissing me. “She is all around us. This is a blessed night. I can feel it.”
Amo sent a driver to our house during the mourning period. He asked for my father, but he wasn’t there, so the driver handed me Amo’s condolences along with an envelope containing the equivalent of $500 to cover burial costs. I stiffened, and without thinking, my old fear returned, unsummoned and utterly intact. I smiled my plastic smile, thanked him, and left Iraq a few days later with no plans to return.
The wait was long at the Jordanian border. Throngs of people were trying to leave the country, and there were full body inspections. It turned out that it was forbidden to leave Iraq with any art or more than fifty dollars. Everything of any value was confiscated, including a small sketch my mother had done. It was there, at the Iraqi-Jordanian border, that my mother made her last gold donation: a small box of necklaces she had entrusted to my aunt to give to me in case of her death. Inside was a small sapphire pendant that had been given to her by Saddam Hussein.
Alia’s Last Letter
To the light of my eyes, Zanooba,
The day you were born was the happiest of my life. You were the most beautiful child and I loved you every second of my life. You were my friend since you were three years old. I planted in you strength because I hate women’s weakness. And now, I can see my beloved Zainab with her strong personality, nice manners, and her success in her humanitarian work. If you only knew how proud I feel. You have accomplished all my dreams for you. I am grateful for God bringing you into my life. I am happy to see you happy and successful and I will always pray for God to protect you from any evil and from human evil and pain. May you always be happy with Amjad and may you always be blessed.
Your mother who loves you.
11
THE MIDDLE FISH
I PUT MAMA’S NOTEBOOK into the white carry-on bag I used to sit on in crowded airports and I put the bag away. I took time to mourn her and to spend time with Amjad. I realized after her death that Amjad and I needed to take care of ourselves, and we went on vacations together as she had made us promise we would. I began to heed the advice she had been giving me ever since I was small: to enjoy life, to sing, to dance, to live in the moment and to see the beauty around me. In time, I began to think of myself as the “free spirit” she had always wanted me to be. “Who is this woman?” Amjad asked me one night as we were dancing. “Where had you hidden her before?” It was almost as if Mama had passed on to me the spirit of her youth and the gift of laughter that had been locked
inside her for years. A year after her death, I decided to work on my master’s degree. I may not have accomplished my dream of a doctorate, but I got my master’s degree from the London School of Economics while Amjad went to the Middle East to begin work involving the Palestianian-Israeli peace talks. When we moved back to Washington, D.C., after a year of living abroad, I was looking at the future, not the past.
Women for Women International was growing rapidly amid what sometimes felt to me like a global epidemic of violence and genocide. Everywhere I went to assess the need for our services—Nigeria, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and other violence-ravaged countries where we set up offices—I heard women speaking in different languages about the same stories of sexual violence. So often when brutal armies invaded, it didn’t matter whether they called themselves rebels or soldiers, they claimed women along with disputed territories. It wasn’t a matter of politics, but of patriarchy. Yes, it had been happening since the beginning of time, but it outraged me that this violence against women was still somehow expected. Rape was practiced even at times by armies representing the United Nations. It was as if mankind had conditioned itself to expect such violence. Instead of recognizing violence against women as a reflection of the society in which it occurred, and often as an early indicator of genocide, the world seemed to respond with indifference and passivity.