Between Two Worlds (26 page)

 

 

When I arrived in Los Angeles, I went to the Immigration and Naturalization Service because my tourist visa, acquired on the assumption I eventually would be admitted as the spouse of a green card holder, was about to expire. After hours in many lines, I wound up talking to an African-American INS agent who was so gentle and motherly to me I can still remember her face. She listened to me and made me feel I would be okay. “You can get a job,” she said, and when I walked out that day I had a temporary work permit available to foreigners caught in America due to political crises. I got two jobs, one selling clothes at The Limited and another as a cashier at a Hallmark stationery store run by a kind Italian family my father’s uncle knew. As soon as I got a paycheck, I filed for divorce and bought a car. The car was a battered two-tone 1978 Chevy that cost $600. It was the first thing I’d ever bought with my own money, and I was ecstatic driving it off the lot.

Meanwhile, the United States and Iraq were on the brink of war. Amo was on the news constantly. I remember watching a little British boy who was one of hundreds of people taken hostage as human shields in the days leading up to the war. Amo allowed cameras in to document how well he was treating them. The little boy was on his lap, and Amo patted his head. “Did Stuart have his milk today?” he asked. And I thought of poor Hassan watching this in Baghdad; he had been made to sit on Amo’s lap, looking as scared as little Stuart did now. I cringed as I remembered Amo holding a glass of whiskey to Hassan’s lips and forcing him to drink, thinking, no doubt, he was helping make a man of him.

American news commentators recoiled at the way Amo treated this little British boy—an affection which, incidentally, I saw as genuine. (I knew that Amo saw no conflict between feeling fondness for people and killing them.) They talked about the perversion of a man who would pat a child on the head one moment and send him off for use as a human shield the next. They were right, but why couldn’t they take it one more step? If Americans could feel so much sympathy for that one child, why didn’t they even mention the millions of Iraqi children who didn’t have their milk today? Or take the logical next step? All Iraqis were that little boy. All of us were hostages. By the time I had met Amo, I was too big to sit on his lap, yet I was there for ten years. So were my mother and my father. Americans were a generous and empathetic people. Why had they remained silent about all the crimes Amo had committed when he was one of America’s best friends and the U.S. government was sending him money? There had been years of torture, years of ethnic cleansing and corruption and mass deportations. Why, now that everyone was aware of his tyranny, was the White House talking about bombing his victims? Why was the FBI harassing Iraqi-American children at school? Sending agents into Iraqi-American homes and questioning their loyalty to America? Even considering putting exiles into internment camps as they had Japanese-Americans during World War II? The way the U.S. government was demonizing Iraqis reminded me of the way Amo had demonized Iranians, dehumanizing them in preparation for war. “Never tell anyone you’re Iraqi,” one Iranian-American I met advised me. “Trust me, you’ll just be harassed. Say you’re from Saudi Arabia.” I decided I would rather be harassed. My family had suffered too much trying to prove its Iraqi citizenship. I was a citizen of Iraq. I was proud to be Iraqi.

Soon it was Christmas. Shopping season. Lights twinkled in Southern California malls. Children sat in Santa Claus’s lap and made wishes. Sometimes a mother would sneak back into the Hallmark store and buy her daughter something she had had her eye on when they had been in together. I was so lonely for my mother. It had been three months since I’d had any communication with home. I was so, so lonely. Finally, on January 2, 1991, my mother got a call through to me. Someone in Jordan had forwarded my letter to her, and she said she just stared at the message on the outside in tears before opening it. She sounded drained and hurried, as if she had just managed to stop crying and didn’t know how long we had. I could only imagine what she had to do to get that call through.

“Our garden is dry, honey,” she said, talking very fast and crying.

That was the secret code we had decided she would use to get past Amo’s listeners to let me know something was wrong. She talked fast. “There are some things you need to know in case anything happens to us in this war, because you are the only one who is safe outside the country. You need to know what we own so you will know what to do.”

She told me to get out a pencil and paper, and she began telling me about her inheritance and what was registered in whose name. Tears streamed down my face. I didn’t take notes. I didn’t care what we owned. I just listened and cried and wished I were there, no matter what sort of war was going to happen. We’d been through it before, right? She had been the brave one who made us laugh and feel normal. But now she was afraid, and I was afraid I would lose her. I told her I loved her. I told her again that I loved her. Then the connection was lost. I was afraid I would never hear her voice again.

The Gulf War began the next night. Like many Iraqi exiles, I watched the war on television aching because I wasn’t there with my family. For Iraqi exiles, every building that exploded in bursts of light had a name, military targets had civilian employees, and bridges blown up were routes we took to school and home. It all looked more like a video game than what I knew war to be. I saw nothing on CNN of the people who waited at the other end of this war, ordinary people wondering if they were going to die; nothing of the families whose lives were being shattered by death or disrupted by the destruction of the power grid that allowed them to cook their food and light their houses and keep their schools and hospitals and businesses running. I went through my days at work like a zombie, worrying about my family as the war went on. When the Pentagon finally acknowledged “collateral damage,” we feared that the people under the rubble were people we knew. The irony for many Iraqi-Americans was heart-sickening; many were Republicans who had voted for President Bush and lobbied for years to get the U.S. government to do something about Saddam Hussein. Now that Washington had finally gotten the message, it was their families who were suffering, not Saddam. But this message didn’t seem to be getting out to the American people. If they only understood, I kept thinking, we could find another way to change the dictatorship and spare our families. I kept wishing there was some way I could help the people in Iraq.

I was asked to join a friend at a press conference that the Iraqi-American community was holding at a mosque in Los Angeles, to ask for a cessation in the bombing. The mosque was just a converted house with no gold or Quranic calligraphy, but as I waited for the press conference to start, I prayed as intensely as I ever have in my life. I asked God why he was keeping me away from my family when we needed each other the most. I started crying and couldn’t stop. Why are you doing this to me? How could you do this? You’re supposed to save me. Why did you leave me here all alone? Why won’t you let me be back home with my family? But I didn’t hear an answer, and I got so angry I stopped praying.

A reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
noticed my tears that day and asked to interview me. I told her my family was in Baghdad, and I didn’t know if they were dead or alive. She asked how I had come to be in the United States. It was a simple question with such a complicated answer I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t even know how to describe myself. I wasn’t a refugee. I wasn’t a tourist. I had come here as a bride, but I wasn’t a wife. I couldn’t tell her that I had wound up here because my parents were friends of Saddam Hussein’s and my mother had sent me here to try to make a better life for myself. So I told her half of the truth, which was that I had come to the United States on vacation, on a tourist visa, and gotten stranded when the borders were closed. She wrote a story and told a friend of hers from CBS News about me, and I wound up as a kind of national poster girl for the “Iraqi side” of the story, innocent victims caught up in war. People would recognize me in the Hallmark store and say, “Oh, you’re that poor girl from Iraq, aren’t you? Have you heard from your mother yet?” I was the lucky one, the innocent, nonthreatening Iraqi who got to see only nice, kind people while other Iraqis I knew were being called “sand nigger” and having their cars smashed and houses attacked, even though some of them had been born in the United States. The harassment brought back memories of our passports, stamped generations later with “of Ottoman origin” or “of Iranian origin.” Why were these people being demonized?

 

 

No one had any reason to connect me with the man who had been Saddam Hussein’s pilot. In these stories, my name was Zainab Rasheed, not Zainab Salbi. I didn’t lie about it; Amo had changed it. People were upset that he had been giving top jobs and properties to his tribesmen from Tikrit, but instead of stopping nepotism, he ordered everyone to start using their grandfathers’ surnames on the premise that then nobody would know who the favored people were. I’m sure the official pronouncement sounded more reasonable than my recollection of it, but the result was the same. Our last names were officially changed to our grandfathers’ first name—the paperwork alone must have been enormous—and by the time I came to the United States, my passport said Zainab Rasheed.

In the waning days of war, I saw the bombed tanks and troops that lined the highway leading back to Baghdad from Kuwait. Many bodies were burned to a crisp, and I thought of Radya. How many of her cousins or neighbors had been forced to fight this time on Amo’s pointless battlefields, only to be seen as enemies and killed by Americans? What choice had those young men ever had? Thousands of young men were dead, many of them no doubt conscripts whose mothers and wives would probably never know for sure what had happened to them.

I got word my family was alive just as the war was ending. Mama had managed to send a letter with a British doctor who was leaving Iraq for Jordan. He had mailed it from London.

 

The
Los Angeles Times
ran a copy of that letter as the war ended, along with a quote from me saying, “My mother really is my best friend, and I am her only daughter. I just want to go home.” I also said I was worried about my father and my older brother because Mama had barely mentioned them in her letter.

Amo had lost the war. It was an unprecedented, humiliating defeat. I didn’t think his ego would be able to handle it. I honestly thought he would step down or even commit suicide and leave some grandiose statement to ensure his legacy. It actually surprised me when he didn’t, and I found myself talking to him in my mind as I drove to work in my Chevy. If you ever believed one single thing you said on all those nights about how much you loved your people and your country, why don’t you resign? Haven’t you taken enough lives already with your senseless wars? If you can’t leave, Amo, please have the decency to kill yourself! Wouldn’t death be the punishment you would mete out to anyone else?

But he stayed and fought—this time against his own people. Iraqis in the United States cheered when we heard through the media and the Iraqi-American grapevine that for six days Iraqis all over the country rose up against him. Kurds were fighting in the north. In the south, planes had dropped leaflets promising U.S. support if Shia rebels rose up against Saddam, and Shia did rise up, struggling to overcome decades of oppression by Saddam. Then, somehow, a deal was cut, and Saddam Hussein was back in control. Kurds were given certain protections and self-governance by the United States; the message about the gassing had come through to the American people. But the Shia in the south were afforded no such protection. Saddam Hussein was allowed to violate a “no-fly” zone over the region and massacre thousands of Shia. He sent gunmen into the holy cemetery in Najaf and attacked the shrine where rebels had taken refuge. He bombed the ancient marshes of the south where insurgents had hidden. To make sure they never hid there again, he ordered his engineers to divert the Euphrates River itself and dessicate their villages, floating settlements of reed and mud that had occupied that delta for five thousand years.