[Title here] by God 99 (epub)

Author:God 99 (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

An Illiterate Mother

Two years after the car bomb exploded on our street, we arrived in Sweden. The one who suffered most in exile was my mother. She had lost the simple and familiar life she had had in the poor neighbourhood where we’d been living on the edges of Baghdad. In Stockholm, my mother was very much like a lost child. She couldn’t read or write. She had been born into a religiously conservative family that didn’t allow girls to get an education. Her great dream was that I should finish my education so that I could see the world in full colour. She used to say she saw life only in black and white because of her ignorance. Stockholm was like a maze to her. She felt uneasy when she went into the mall to shop. She said it was too big and it had lots of frightening lights. Another thing that baffled my mother was addresses and bus numbers. She would say with surprise, ‘How come there are still trees in Sweden when they use so much paper?’ She meant the paper used for advertising posters or by the woman from the social services department.

‘It’s the paper that preserves the trees and maintains the system,’ my father would reply. Then he would start chanting as if at a demonstration: ‘It’s numbers and prices on paper that rule the world!’ As time passed, I began to feel angry and resentful at the way my father treated my mother. He made fun of her in a foolish, arrogant way. Even shittier than that, he insisted on finding fault with my mother, with or without reason, as if she were responsible for creating the mushroom cloud of capitalism that my father imagined he was trying to stand up against. Once he flew into a rage against my mother’s hijab, saying it would draw the attention of racists, and people would think we were fanatical Islamists. My mother took no notice of what he said. As far as she was concerned, the hijab was part of her body. It had covered her hair since childhood. My father, who claimed to be secular and a freethinker, had married my mother under the traditional tribal system. His mother had chosen one of his relatives, my mother, and he went along with her choice. He didn’t see my mother’s face until they were married, so he knew much less about love than about the struggle against global imperialism. When his shitty prediction finally came true, my father fanned out his feathers like a peacock. One day my mother came back from a shopping trip distressed and in tears. A drunken Swedish man had tried to pull her hijab off and had sworn at her. I asked my mother to give me a description of the man. I was furious and prayed that I might someday run into the racist who had insulted and frightened her.

My leftist father, my illiterate mother and I, a fan of films and video games, all went to Swedish language school.

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