In Search of My Lost Family
a memoir by Leilah Nadir, with photos by Farah Nosh
EXCERPT
IT IS MARCH 20, 2003, and I’m alone at home in Vancouver watching Baghdad burning on television. For the first time, I can see the Baghdad of my father’s childhood, that he hasn’t seen himself for more than forty years. And it is burning. Fires rage all over the city, the black night illuminated by the bonfires of the city’s buildings. A few nights before the war, I am woken from a vivid dream of walking in those streets, along the walls of Saddam’s palace enclosures near where I know my family house is, touching the sand-coloured stone. I felt such relief to be in Baghdad, despite my fear. Now it is all burning; great blazes of yellow light destroying the city, killing, maiming and traumatizing its people. I feel as if all the ancestral memory is going up in smoke, and I can’t stop it.
I think of all the people I know there who are desperately hoping to survive those bombs: my great-aunt Lina, my friend Farah hiding with her family, my cousin Karim and his wife and children, and my other extended family members, my grandmother’s brothers, Hector, Charles, Harry, my father’s aunts and cousins, most of whom I have never even met.
My siblings and I would not exist if the British hadn’t created Iraq from the defeated provinces of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Battles and empire produced our family, and so we are the “fruits of war.” But the same culture clash that created us also makes it impossible for me to visit my ancestral home. When I look in the mirror, I try and guess which of my features I inherited from my Iraqi father and which from my English mother. Now, as I watch this war, I feel as if one part of me is invading another.
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“Welcome to Iraq, the worst country in the world,” Farah’s uncle said to her just after she arrived. He and his family have fled their Baghdadi neighbourhood to stay with their relatives, just as they had done after the invasion in 2003, three years previously. The street fighting in their neighbourhood near the airport is too intense, and so they will rent out their house (who will rent a house in a war zone?) and try and find another place to live in a safer area.
Farah tells me that everyday Iraqis are being inexplicably murdered. A grandfather sitting in a courtyard with his grandson is shot and no one knows why. The man selling falafel on the street is killed. Why? After three days Farah has already stopped asking why when she hears these stories.
The headline in Western newspapers today is “New Abu Ghraib Videos Shown,” and yesterday’s story was a video of British soldiers in Basra beating helpless Iraqi teenagers. Farah hangs laundry in the courtyard looking over her shoulders at the gates for fear of kidnappers lurking on the street. She has already heard story upon story of masked men barging right into the house to murder or kidnap (and not just Westerners, so even if she is mistaken for Iraqi she is not really safe). For the first time since I’ve known her — and she has visited Iraq under Saddam, during the invasion, and in the aftermath — she admits to fear. Real fear, adrenalin-pumping, paranoid, heart-racing, dry mouth, animal fear.