The price of peace was a country run by religious radicals, and a prison for women. Nunu hugged the baby. “No matter what happens,” she swore, “I will help you be strong, even if you can only be strong in your mind.” Nunu promised to encourage her to have dreams.
“You’re not less than a boy,” she whispered as the baby gurgled. “Don’t ever feel ashamed of yourself because you’re a girl.”
FOR ALMOST TWO years, Nunu had lived like a prisoner in her own home. She refused to do so any longer. She began walking outside more often, to buy bread or run small errands. She didn’t drive and she never went alone, but for the first time in more than a year, she went outside with Mamina, even if only for a few minutes, every day.
Then proposals came raining in.
The first suitor, the brother of Usama’s widow, had seen Nunu from his window. He asked his aunt to approach the family. She stopped Mamina on the street. “My nephew wants to marry your daughter. He was born in the seventies, and is very handsome.”
Mamina agreed to set up a meeting. She knew only that his name was Husam and his mother was Christian. Baba, who sat with his friends on the street for most of the day, knew him.
“Husam? But have you seen this man?” he asked his wife.
“No …”
“The man prefers not to look at himself in the mirror. He looks like a genie. Nunu will be scared of him.”
Mamina chose to ignore him. Lately, Baba had bristled at the idea of Nunu marrying, and she worried that, as Baba aged, he was eyeing Nunu as his caretaker—a responsibility that often fell on the youngest daughter. Mamina refused to let this happen.
The day Husam was due to arrive, there was no water, gas, or electricity, and the temperature climbed to 120 degrees. With no way to prepare herself, Nunu struggled to look presentable, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter. When the man arrived, they saw he was bald, with a huge chest. Baba gave Mamina a look, I told you so, and left the house. The next day, Mamina politely declined.
The proposals continued to arrive. An old woman spotted Nunu one afternoon and approached Mamina.
“I know this boy that is so handsome. He should marry your daughter. He has recently moved to the neighborhood. Come to his house tomorrow night to welcome the family and you can meet him. He looks like Redha al-Abdullah, the famous singer. Tall, dark hair, hazel eyes. He wants to travel right away.”
Mamina received this news as a blessing. “You will leave Iraq immediately,” she told Nunu excitedly. But the next day, Baba refused to let them go. He wouldn’t say why. Normally, Mamina would never defy him, but she did this time. She quickly called her brother, and he came over to take them to the house.
The old woman greeted them at the entrance and whispered, “Oh, now you will meet Casanova!”
Nunu laughed nervously. But when she went into the house, she saw he was nothing like Redha al-Abdullah. The man was as wide as his chair, with the thickest eyebrows she had ever seen. As he stood up to greet her, his cellphone rang. He abruptly swiveled on his heel to take the call in the other room. As he waddled away, he bent back, grabbed his pants, and hiked them up over his enormous behind. Mamina and Nunu tried to suppress their laughter. When he returned, he sat next to Nunu. For a painful thirty minutes, he breathed down her neck, telling her how she would live after she married him, and how grateful she would be for what he could give her. The closer he inched his chair, the farther away Nunu inched hers. Soon, they had moved halfway across the room.
“I want an answer right away,” he said.
Nunu hesitated. “I need three days to think.”
“Three days is too long. Take two days. But after that, I would like to marry within the week. I have a room in my parents’ house, and my mom has gotten it all ready to be moved into.”
Nunu nodded noncommittally.
His mother interrupted. “We will have the wedding in Syria because it is cheaper. But don’t worry, dear. His hand will be open when it comes to what you need.”
Yeah, sure, Nunu thought.
Finally, Nunu and Mamina escaped. As soon as they got into the car, they burst into laughter. For the rest of the evening, Nunu did imitations of the man hiking up his pants. They called Zia and told her the whole story. It was the first time the sisters had exchanged more than a few words in months, and certainly the first time they’d laughed. As much as Mamina wanted to help her daughter escape Iraq, her pride prevented her from accepting the proposal. Her Nunu was beautiful, full figured, well mannered, and a college graduate. War or no war, she wasn’t going to marry that man.
THE NEXT SUITOR to court Nunu was even stranger. One afternoon, one of her aunts called to say that the following day there would be guests coming to visit them. They had a man who wanted to make a proposal. He lived in Australia, and his parents were friends of Mamina’s. This man had already proposed to Nunu when she was fifteen, and Baba had turned him down. Now, seven years later, he was back. Nunu learned that the family had been discussing this for weeks without telling her, and that the suitor was already on his way to Baghdad to propose. Maybe in the past Nunu wouldn’t have minded, but now she felt bothered by the family’s lack of consideration for her wishes. Besides, didn’t this man know how dangerous Iraq was to visit these days?
“What man comes into this country now to take a wife?” Nunu asked Zia on the phone. “There are no girls in Australia?”
When he arrived, his entire family filled the living room. The potential bride and groom sat at opposite ends, and Nunu avoided eye contact except to sneak a glance at him when he walked in. He was not horrible, but not handsome. He looked about forty.
The first thing the man did was demand of Nunu, “Have you had a relationship with any man before?”
“If you are curious about my reputation,” Nunu said boldly, waving her arm, “ask the neighborhood. Ask people at my college. Don’t ask me.”
As he proceeded to explain about getting her a visa to live with him, and to describe all the things he would give to Nunu once they were married, she thought about how much she disliked his authoritative tone. She didn’t care for his money or his fancy country. For the man to presume she had already accepted was an insult to her. This was the male attitude she detested. He thinks he is worth more than me because I’m a woman, she thought. From this tone would spring a lifetime of orders, missives, and bossiness, and what could Nunu do if she was in Australia? She could tell that he presumed she was desperate to get out of Iraq, and would do anything to go to a place as wonderful as Sydney. Nunu wanted to tell him: I am not a naïve schoolgirl. I have traveled to Syria and Jordan.
“I would like to speak with her alone,” he said, gesturing toward Nunu.
This was unusual, and Nunu shook her head.
“Okay, I understand. It is good you refuse. However, I have some questions for you and I will write them down,” he said. “These are regular questions, and they are in order for me to see how you speak English and how you write.”
Nunu agreed. After a minute of awkward silence as he scribbled away, Nunu accepted the piece of paper. She agreed to stand in the hallway with him and answer them verbally.
In the alcove, Nunu looked down at the paper. There were three questions:
Are you a virgin or not?
Do you want to have sex according to the Arabic style or European?
What do you know and what do you think of sex?
Nunu gasped. What was this? She knew nothing about sex, and even if she did, she wouldn’t dream of answering these horrible questions. She was so shocked she looked him straight in the eye.
“I respect your mother, and because you are in my home, I will respect you. But you don’t dare ask me this. These questions belittle me. If there are women who accept this, I am not one of those women.”
“No, no. It’s normal,” he said. “In Australia and even in Europe people ask such questions.”
“I don’t care where it’s normal. I am Arab and I am Muslim
and I refuse such questions.”
Nunu stormed back to the sitting room to see Mamina’s astonished face. She explained the questions. The man trailed behind, still saying, “That’s normal. It’s not the first time I have asked such questions.”
“Go to those women, then,” Nunu said.
The suitor and his mother left.
AFTER THE SUITOR’S family was gone, Nunu’s little cousin Lara skipped around the room as Nunu cleared the plates.
“Nunu, I will cut off my arm before you marry that man!”
“Don’t go to the trouble,” Nunu said.
Nunu longed to call Zia but there was an eleven-hour time difference. Zia had started a job with the local government and started work at 8:00 a.m., California time. Finally, Nunu reached her while she was having breakfast and relayed the story.
“Zuzu, please, you can spare me the details, but I must know if there is a difference between the Arab and European style.”
The sisters laughed so hard.
“No, Nunu, I have no idea!”
At the end of the conversation, Zia told her sister, “It’s good you turned him down, Nunu. He wasn’t going to let you do anything, and you were wise to reject him.”
“I’d rather be a spinster than marry him,” Nunu said. “And I’d rather be barren than raise a daughter in this country.”
Zia was speechless. “Wowww, Nunu.” She whistled. “I can’t believe you just said that.” Zia had never heard her sister speak with such a strong opinion.
Later that evening, Nunu took out her journal.
It is not a shame if someone cleans or cooks. But men in our community now think that this is the only thing that a woman should do. Women have no rights. Even if you hear or see men talk about women’s rights, deep inside they refuse to let a woman have opportunities in life. Each man in our society is an egocentric person and thinks that everything in this life should be about him, and everything should be done as he likes. That is why I refuse many proposals. Many suitors ask for my hand but I refuse them because I refuse to be treated as a slave or belittled. No, I refuse such a reality. I am a woman, yes, and I am proud of being a woman, and I don’t have anything to be ashamed of.
If I get married, I need a man who will believe in me and is convinced that I am equal to him. If I get married and have children, I want my children to be proud of me, just as I am proud of my mother. I will not give up. I will not. I am not a person who accepts defeat. I will struggle till my dreams come true and make my mother and sister proud of me. May God help me.
Nunu closed her notebook. This time she didn’t burn the pages.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
IN EARLY 2006, Heather finally left Iraq. She had spent three years on the ground, longer than almost any other American in that period. She left behind a devastated country. It was worse than it had been under Saddam, she felt, and she hated the idea that she hadn’t been able to do more.
She moved to Washington, D.C., into a bright, two-bedroom apartment in the eclectic neighborhood of Adams Morgan. She had a small porch, hanging plants, shiny wooden floors, stacked bookshelves, and windows that let in lots of sunlight. She kept her bike downstairs, and could come and go as she pleased. On her hallway walls, she hung photos of what she considered her only three happy days in Iraq: the transfer of control of the warehouses to the Ministry of Trade, the Hindiya Club elections, and the opening of the Mansour Women’s Center. By her couch, a collection of recently released books about Iraq grew taller and taller: The Politics of Insurgent Violence and a number of other Iraq-related “lessons learned” books.
Each morning, she rode her bicycle to her job at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where she became a senior program officer in the Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution. Heather felt signs of posttraumatic stress disorder—she was short-tempered, nervous, anxious, frustrated—but she never sought counseling. Why should she, when so many soldiers and Iraqis had been through so much worse? She was lucky to have come home at all, when women such as Fern Holland, Margaret Hassan, Marla Ruzicka, and countless other Westerners and Iraqis had lost their lives. There were nights when she couldn’t sleep very well. For a while, she had such vivid nightmares that she woke up exhausted. In one, she dreamed she was supposed to be guarding Saddam Hussein, and she got into such an intense discussion with him that she didn’t notice he’d slipped out of the room and escaped. The theme was always the same: letting Iraqis down.
She worked to bring some of her Iraqi staff to the USA or to other safe havens, but the State Department was still refusing Iraqi applications. For a while she had held out hope for Iraq, writing an op-ed for the Christian Science Monitor arguing: “Those who wait for the headline ‘Iraq completes constitution’ or ‘Iraq misses constitution deadline’ will have missed all the intervening steps that really mattered.” The violence would have to taper off eventually, she argued, and if the process and policies could just be put in place to guarantee democracy and protections for the minority, then as soon as there was a window of calm, women’s and other civic groups could reemerge. Perhaps this would take ten years, but it could be possible if everyone laid the right groundwork.
But Heather feared she was watching the same failures and mistakes from afar as she had seen from the conference rooms inside the Green Zone. As for the U.S. efforts to export women’s rights, Heather felt the end effect was the opposite. Any involvement the Americans had with women’s issues only provoked accusations of Western influence and tainted the Iraqi women involved. Better, she thought, to have a light touch and let Iraqi women run the show.
After the bombing of the Askari mosque in Samarra in spring 2006, Heather finally gave up hope. The newspaper reports of the start of the civil war were grisly: beheaded bodies floating down the Tigris; mass executions and ethnic cleansings of entire neighborhoods. This was the nightmare scenario Heather had feared for so long. Wherever she went—to work, on the Metro, in a bar with friends—she tried to concentrate on the friendly chatter around her, but found herself drifting off, staring silently, miserably into the distance. Washingtonians debated a troop surge, but Heather felt it was too late to save Iraq. All the fatal decisions had been made early on. The Americans’ credibility had been shattered. The window of opportunity for nation-building in Iraq had slammed shut on American fingers. “We sold the Iraqis out,” she sighed to friends. “The same way Saddam sold them out.”
Sometimes she ran into old colleagues from the CPA. Most of them felt as she did: disappointed, ashamed, and angry. But occasionally, Heather ran into those “bright idea fairies”; to her amazement, they still insisted on depicting the Iraq situation sunnily. Once, at a party, Heather ran into a woman who had worked at the CPA’s program review board, which had given Heather final approval for the $1.4 million for the women’s centers.
Heather tried to make a dark joke. “Oh, how could you have approved that money?” she said. “Why didn’t you stop me from destroying the country?”
She smiled wryly, expecting the woman to agree. Instead, the woman gave her an icy look and walked away.
We destroyed the country, Heather thought bitterly. Why are you still playing this game?
In 2007, a number of books and movies came out assailing America’s role in the war. Heather agreed with almost all the criticism. The purging of all the Ba’ath Party members from government had left the ministries with no experienced leaders; disbanding the Iraqi army had created too much unemployment; and the bureaucrats working in the CPA were underqualified, unprepared, and had been chosen more for their loyalty to the Republican Party than for their expertise. Troop levels were too low, she agreed, although she felt the number of troops was not nearly as important as the kind of people on the ground. While Bush tried to push the blame onto the Iraqis for not “stepping up,” his approval ratings had sunk to the lowest in the history of the presidency. Not far from Heather’s apartment, antiwar marches closed down streets as protesters demanded the USA get out
of Iraq.
Then Paul Bremer’s memoir, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, was released. Heather blamed Bremer for many of the early mistakes, and the book proffered the same head-in-the-sand analysis of the situation as had existed in the early days. Had we learned nothing at all? she wondered. The book included a few paragraphs about women’s issues and described his dawn visit to her and Manal’s women’s center:
“Monday, March 8, was International Women’s Day,” he wrote. “I opened the first of nine Women’s Centers we planned for Baghdad, a chance to emphasize the importance we attached to helping Iraq’s women. As we sat on the floor and ate sweets and dates, I told the women at the center that the TAL required Iraq’s electoral law to guarantee that 25 percent of Iraq’s parliament be women, one of the highest percentages in the world.”
That was the last straw. The idea that Bremer had the nerve to now try to take credit for the 25 percent quota of women infuriated Heather.
After that, she began lecturing on the issue, and was more honest and self-critical than most others. By then there were nascent signs that Iraq’s civil war was exhausted. The Bush administration had increased troops on the ground, and some of the Sunni Awakening councils had turned against Al Qaeda and teamed up with the U.S. military. However, nothing could erase the painful damage already done. In late 2007, she published a piece in The American Interest entitled “Amateur Hour: Nation-Building in Iraq.” She argued that the USA went into Iraq relying largely on the military to deal with everything from humanitarian crisis intervention to large-scale reconstruction efforts to democracy building—none of which it was trained or prepared to do. Such tasks required professional planning, specialized expertise, and a large resource base—if it could be done at all, she wrote. Even if the troops had sealed the borders, stopped the looting, and never disbanded the Iraqi army, they still wouldn’t have had any idea what to do next.
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