Between Two Worlds Read Online Free PDF Page B

did not manage to scare him as a ten-year-old child. He was determined to go to school and he knew only his uncle could help him accomplish that. He started first grade when he was ten years old. He often talked about how excited he was wearing underwear for the first time in his life. That day in school, he kept on lifting his dishdasha to show his schoolmates his underwear. He thought that it was the best thing anybody had and he wanted to brag about it. He also talked about his days of political activism and these stories took hours of narration as we sat around and listened to him carefully.
    We were not sure how things would change when he became president. He surprised us with a visit to our home at 8 P.M. one night in July 1979. I remember he told us, “I got rid of the old man” (referring to the president at the time, Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr). He was very happy and merry that night. Saddam despised the fact that Al-Bakr used to consult with his fortune-teller before he held his meetings. He hated the fact that this blind fortune-teller, who lived in an area known as Al-Doubjee, had so much influence on political decisions. He told us that he had sent for her at the palace and killed her himself. “She knew too many secrets and I had to get rid of her,” he told us.
    He talked about friendship that night and how death would be the punishment for any friend who betrays a friend. We were silent and focused on what he was telling us. It was both a threat to us as well as a reference to his killing of one of his best friends, Mahmoud Al-Hamdanee, who was the Minister of Education at the time. Saddam had had dinner with Mahmoud the night before he killed him.

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    STRINGS
    WHEN MAMA BEGAN WRITING to me in her notebook in 1999, there was so little affect in her entries that they felt more like footnotes in a history book than the story behind my parents’ relationship. However, I understood the missing emotional context because for years that was all I had; it was facts I was missing. I was twenty-nine years old then, and that was the first time we were able to discuss Amo more or less openly. Iraqi parents never had the luxury many parents do of telling their children, don’t worry, honey, there’s nothing to be afraid of. My mother was perpetually caught between telling me the truth, which was her natural inclination, and holding back because simply knowing the truth was dangerous.
    There are probably four recurring themes in my life—women, war, family, and religion. I learned about them first through stories and overheard conversations, then wove in my own observations. I grew up with two great storytellers, my grandmother, Bibi, and her youngest daughter, my mother. Mama, a Pisces, spun utopian fantasies that wandered off into green fields and rainbows. Bibi, a traditional Muslim mother, favored fables from 1001 Arabian Nights that were studded with princesses and swashbucklers who galloped in on white horses to save them. It was from these stories that I drew my earliest lessons about women and men, about being Muslim and being secular, and about war and whatever you call life between wars, which I never knew to be peace.
    Mama’s utopia was the Women’s Village, a place she and my aunts—particularly Aunt Samer when she was arguing with her husband—would slip into conversations over the years. I heard about the Women’s Village for the first time when I was still little enough to sit on Mama’s lap on field trips with her students to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and ancient Hatra. She and her fellow teachers would find a shady spot for a picnic, open Tupperware full of grape leaves, burak, and tabouleh, and wind up sharing complaints about their husbands the way wives often do. How moody men could be, how demanding! How carefree life would be without them! How much better the world would be if women ran it! And so they conjured up an idyllic village filled with cottages and farmhouses that were close