And it’s a truism in the family that, if we play long enough, eventually I will win everybody’s money.
But my dad, Jidu, was still in China working with the auto parts manufacturer. He enjoyed his time there, as well as his second career, post-retirement, making the most of his metallurgy expertise and his engineer’s fascination for problem solving. At sixty-nine, like my mom, he showed no interest in slowing down. Alloys and metals aside, he has lots of passions—for languages, international affairs, and history. He loves research most of all—digging into archives and making new discoveries.
He spent untold hours obsessing over a Persian carpet that had been passed down in my mom’s family, an early 1900s Kerman rug depicting the great leaders of the world. Even when Haji was a boy, the carpet was never on the floor but was hung on a wall, in a place of honor, and featured in family portraits.
HAJI (MIDDLE) AND THE RUG (FAR LEFT), CIRCA 1920
The rug was a puzzle. Not only did my dad decipher the Farsi key on the border of the rug to identify the historic figures (all men, of course), he worked with art historians and textile scholars to unravel the rug’s origin and secrets. There even was a connection between the rug and Freemasonry and the Knights Templar. It was like The Da Vinci Code for carpets.
Next, my dad focused on unlocking our family’s ancestral puzzle—and that became his most successful side project to date. After a lot of persistence, he was able to prove that two family clans from two different villages in northern Iraq—Alqosh and Tel Keppe—had been separated three hundred years ago when one branch left its ancestral home to escape a plague. Over time they lost touch. Any awareness of a relationship vanished. But now, because of my dad’s discovery—which he has given many PowerPoint presentations about—the descendants of the Shekwana and the Kas Shamoun families, literally hundreds of people who have since scattered to every corner of the globe, have connected with cousins they didn’t know they had, including us.
What we never knew, until my dad’s work, was our family’s direct connection to a Nestorian priest named Israel Raba of the Shekwana family. He was born in 1541—my grandfather, twelve generations removed. Israel Raba and his family were famous scribes, known for their poetry and mystical literary work. They lived in an ancient monastery, Rabban Hormizd, just outside Alqosh, where they produced and guarded a library of intricately beautiful and painstakingly illustrated manuscripts.
MANUSCRIPTS CREATED BY THE SCRIBE GIWARGIS, MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER, CIRCA 1700
These manuscripts were used in church services, and some were also a form of rebellion. Five hundred years ago, my family, like many Chaldeans and Assyrians—ethnically the same people—were members of the Nestorian Church, or “Church of the East,” once the dominant Christian sect from the Mediterranean to India and China. As the Roman Catholic Church grew in power by converting people to its faith in the 1800s, the Nestorian liturgy and traditions were threatened. But some monasteries hid the scrolls in secret libraries—and priests transported them to safe places—so that around two hundred of the Shekwana manuscripts are still in existence today in private collections, libraries, museums, and churches around the world.
The Christian manuscripts remaining in Alqosh and elsewhere had to be rescued again recently, in 2015, when ISIS encroached on the region. In nearby Mosul, ancient churches and shrines were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of invaluable artifacts and religious books and manuscripts were incinerated—cultural cleansing meant to weaken the soul of the Iraqi people.
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MY DAD’S SUCCESS WITH this Nestorian puzzle led him to other remarkable discoveries. He stumbled onto the haunting story of Dr. Paul Shekwana, the public health pioneer who came to the United States at the turn of the last century and mysteriously died outside Iowa City. Next, he became fascinated with the life story of a relative on my mom’s side, my great-uncle Nuri Rufail Koutani, who was a revolutionary in the 1930s.
Haji told my dad about his first cousin Nuri and how much he had admired him as a boy in Baghdad. Nuri was a bit older than Haji, and after attending American University in Beirut from 1928 to 1930, he studied railway engineering at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He became politically active there, in the ferment of the Great Depression, and neglected his studies, lost his scholarship, and was kicked out of school.
He returned to Iraq afterward, which he found “bleak” after his time in Cambridge—and continued his radical organizing. Nuri’s nom de guerre, a useful device to thwart the secret police, was Anwar. He spoke four languages and was plugged into international liberation causes, including activism against the British Mandate in Palestine.
In Iraq, in 1935, he founded a leftist organization with a really kickass name, the Association Against Imperialism and Fascism. Nuri signed its manifesto, which called for independence from colonialism, and it became the starting point for the Iraqi independence movement. For an Iraqi, this is a little like an American having a relative who signed the Declaration of Independence—but Nuri’s activism came with a price. He was a target of the Iraqi monarchy, which imprisoned, tortured, and killed many of his comrades. Sought by the king’s secret police, he lost his job and was forced to go into deep hiding for months.
Nuri hid in a spare room of Haji’s family home for many weeks, until a safer location could be found. Then Haji’s mother dressed him in a woman’s abaya and transported him to safety. He fled to Paris in 1937 and became involved in pre-war activism that led to the French resistance.
Then he moved on, joining 35,000 other freedom-loving idealists in the International Brigades that were fighting the fascists in Catalonia on behalf of the Spanish Republic. He served with the American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, was promoted to officer, and fought in the pivotal Battle of the Ebro, often called the first battle of the Second World War. Nuri was one of only two Iraqis in the International Brigades. The other was his friend, an Iraqi Jew named Setti Abraham Horresh.
What I love most about his story is Nuri’s bravery, persistence, and unfailing loyalty to a borderless progressive cause. He fought for something bigger than a country or a religion, a tribe or an ethnic group. He fought for all people, for humanity, with a hope that there was another way to live. As a young woman, when I heard the stories that Haji told about Nuri, I couldn’t help but imagine my great-uncle fighting with Spanish Republicans. And I thought of him hanging with Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Langston Hughes, and other idealists from far and wide who came together for this quintessentially romantic progressive fight of the twentieth century.
But alas, the defense of the Spanish Republic was a losing battle. With Hitler’s help, fascist dictator Francisco Franco took control of Spain in 1939. It sure didn’t help the cause of freedom that General Motors and other U.S. auto companies sent 12,000 trucks to help Franco, basically on credit.
Even so, Nuri continued to fight fascism and imperialism. We know that because—in a wild coincidence—my father’s father, Dawood Hanna, the railroad station manager, had a memorable meeting with him in 1956. Along with thousands of leftists and political dissidents, Nuri was rounded up—on the order of the King of Iraq—and sent by train to a prison fortress in the remote desert of Samawah. The trains were known as quatar al moat, or trains of death, because most of the political prisoners did not survive. But my grandfather Dawood, who sympathized with the activists, happened to be in charge of the Samawah station. When he heard that Nuri Rufail Koutani, a well-known resistance fighter, was arriving on the train and was bound for prison, my grandfather found him and quietly offered him water and words of comfort.
NURI “ANWAR” RUFAIL, WHEN HE FOUGHT WITH THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES
It was a risky thing to do. My dad, a young boy at the time, recalls being scared that his father would be caught. Luckily he wa
sn’t, and luckily Nuri survived imprisonment and was freed two years later, around the time of the Iraqi Revolution—and was appointed the railway minister in the Qasim regime. But not for long: a counterrevolution rose up in 1963, and imprisoning leftists was in vogue again. Thousands more were sent off to Samawah. By the time Nuri died in 1980, he had spent half of his life in hiding or in jail.
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MY DAD’S CHILDHOOD WAS shadowed by the decline of his homeland. As a boy, he had been a firsthand witness to the abduction and gruesome death of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Said, as he fled through the Baghdad streets on the day after the July 14, 1958, revolution to overthrow King Faisal II. A brief window of peace and prosperity for Iraq followed. And to some degree, this is the Iraq that both my parents remember fondly—a moment in their youth when their country was open, progressive, and diverse. People weren’t persecuted for their religion or politics. Women dressed as they pleased. Photographs from my mom’s college years in the 1960s, when she studied chemistry, look like images from UC Berkeley. She wore fashionable short skirts and held liberal values.
MY MOM (SECOND FROM LEFT) ON A COLLEGE TRIP TO BABYLONIAN RUINS, 1968
But unlike France, where the eighteenth-century Reign of Terror—its counterrevolution—had lasted only a few years, Iraq’s terror, the Ba’athist years, lasted decades. Some of the very best people of Iraq were imprisoned and killed—writers and poets, scientists, freethinkers, intellectuals, academics, teachers, and political organizers. The mass murder and purging of “communists” throughout the Cold War in the Middle East uprooted the left wing, stifled secular voices, and led to the brain drain that was one of many causes of fundamentalism. The people who were dismissed and ignored, imprisoned and killed—or who fled—could have kept Iraq a great country, both rich and diverse. But now, after decades of tumult, war, sanctions, occupation, and civil war, their lives and work—and the ideals they fought for—are all but forgotten.
As for my dad, he had never planned to leave Iraq. But things conspired to change his mind. First, his father was arrested during the first Ba’ath revolution. Along with tens of thousands who were suspected of political opposition, Dawood was imprisoned near Basra. Worried that the police would come looking for evidence of his political views, my grandmother Mama Evelyn gathered all his books with red covers, wrapped them with a blanket, and buried them in their yard. Dawood was released from prison a couple of months later and returned home but was never completely whole again.
This pushed my dad to make something of himself. He worked hard in high school, but the slots for Christian students in Iraqi universities were limited. So he applied for a scholarship to study in Yugoslavia and was accepted.
At sixteen, he traveled alone from Baghdad to Zagreb by train, almost two thousand miles, to attend a language boot camp to learn Serbo-Croatian. He went on to the University of Zagreb to study mechanical engineering using old-school German methods, learning to draft perfect letters and becoming a master of the slide rule.
MY DAD STUDYING IN ZAGREB, 1970
On a trip home to Baghdad, he met my mom, and they stayed in Baghdad long enough to marry and have my brother. Then they moved to Sheffield, my birthplace—a steel town in England that Margaret Thatcher’s union-busting policies had destroyed, much like Flint—so my dad could finish his studies. The plan was to go back home to Baghdad after that. But returning to Iraq would have meant working at a government job he’d been assigned—at the Osirak nuclear power plant—and possibly dying there. It was bombed by Israel in 1981. Instead, they moved to Houghton for my dad’s postdoc work, then on to Royal Oak, when he got the job with GM.
Meanwhile the homeland my father knew and loved was quickly disappearing behind him. Almost nothing was written about Saddam Hussein in the U.S. media in the 1980s. Saddam was considered a friend of the Reagan administration, even though his brutalities and murders were well-known abroad. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), the United States actively supported Saddam with intelligence and food credits—and also allowed Iraq to buy high-tech equipment for chemical weapons.
The truth is oil made Iraq a prosperous ally in the Middle East, and Saddam’s anti-communist zeal blinded Europe and the United States to his true nature. This outraged my dad and fed the fire in him. He never gave up trying to right the wrongs and spread word of the horrors of the Ba’athist regime. Connecting with a community of dissidents, he increasingly spoke out against Saddam and the Ba’athists, even though my mom worried that his actions could hurt family members still in Baghdad, including her brother, who was conscripted to fight in the Iran-Iraq War. Saddam had spies and agents in the United States, people who could hurt us, but that never stopped my dad either.
My dad published opposition newsletters and newspapers, which he sent to other Iraqis abroad, and to U.S. government leaders, politicians, and other activists. He laid out the articles and photographs by hand, in his office at home. And this is where I always picture him, in my mind, when I think back on those years: holed up in his office with a cigarette in hand, listening to the crackling shortwave radio, desperately reading the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports that came in the mail, hoping to keep up with the latest news of Iraq. And it was always bad news. Always depressing, troubling, even traumatizing.
I was eleven or twelve when he showed me photos from the genocide of Halabja, in southern Kurdistan. I stared at the shocking images—and he explained. The Kurdish resistance, with their brave peshmerga soldiers, both men and women, had been fighting Saddam for years. It wasn’t enough that the downtrodden and persecuted Kurds were bombed with napalm and rockets. Saddam ramped up his attack to chemical weapons. Seven or eight Iraqi warplanes dropped bombs of poison on residential areas of Halabja.
Later, eyewitnesses gave accounts of clouds of white and yellow rising, twisting upward, and columns of smoke in the sky. The chemicals were a mix of things—different toxic gases that killed some people immediately. Others were burned and died slowly and painfully. As many as five thousand civilians were killed and another seven to ten thousand were horribly injured. The genocidal massacre is the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian population in history. An entire city was poisoned.
That was the first time I saw a dead child—an infant wrapped in a pink blanket being held by her father. They had died in each other’s arms. I have never forgotten it, or gotten over it. And I never will.
PHOTO: © AHMAD NATEGHI
THE HALABJA PHOTOGRAPH I SAW WHEN I WAS A GIRL
Mark and I grew up quickly that way. We understood that leaders could be dangerous, that civilizations sat on the delicate edge of a precipice, and that injustice must be challenged. We were taught not to look away. That made it hard, in the ensuing years, to watch the continuing losses, the pain and suffering. Baghdad, once the pride of the Arab world—once modern, prosperous, and on the verge of freedom—quickly became a lost city in a broken country, adrift from its past.
Nightmares of Halabja persisted throughout my childhood, the trauma of the images I saw still searing and strong, but eventually this atrocity was dwarfed by our two wars in Iraq and the sanctions in between. The wars we saw on CNN. The sanctions were a quieter but more deadly affair. They hurt innocent people and never touched the heart of Saddam’s operations. Overall the 1990s were a time of pointless misery, when tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children may have died. It left me wondering, throughout my teenage years and young adulthood, if the leaders of my adopted home cared about kids at all.
We knew how lucky we were. And we knew how bad things could be. Challenging injustice means standing up for the weak, the vulnerable, the abused, and the forgotten—be it in health, employment, education, or the environment. It means being vigilant on behalf of people who are treated as pariahs and scapegoats, po
pulations that are dehumanized, displaced, and treated as disposable. It means fighting oppression at every opportunity—no matter the place or country. Mark and I have reacted to our childhoods by involving ourselves in making things better.
Elliott and I haven’t raised Nina and Layla in exactly the same way. We aren’t showing them pictures of murdered children but try, instead, to encourage empathy and service and a sense of belonging and identity. We tell them family stories so they know where they came from, so they know there are strong people behind them, ones who overcame struggles, even persecution, and made sacrifices to fight the good fight.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21. A SIMPLE PLAN: to meet the mayor at 1 P.M., show him my study results, reveal the proof of elevated blood-lead levels, and have him issue a health advisory that would finally alert the residents of Flint to stop drinking the water.
I had high expectations for how it would go, and not just because I’m an eternal optimist. First, I was presenting numbers. It’s hard to argue with numbers. Second, our mayor, Dayne Walling, was born in Flint, still lived in Flint, and was raising two kids in Flint. I felt like no matter what the political calculations were, he had a personal and intimate stake in Flint’s drinking water. On top of that, I knew Walling was a smart guy with larger ambitions. He had served as mayor for six years, and while he was popular, the next election was only six weeks away. The seriousness of this sort of public health crisis on his watch—and its political implications—wouldn’t be lost on him. This was a chance for him to take the water issue head-on and own it.
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