Dreaming of Baghdad by Haifa Zangana

Author:Haifa Zangana [Zangana, Haifa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781558616059
Google: Fi4qAQAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 6640494
Publisher: Feminist Press
Published: 2009-01-15T08:18:11+00:00

* The market in any Arab or Muslim city.

ANOTHER SHORE

Like a child, my mother hated darkness. She would switch on all the lights in the house to make sure everyone was all right.

One day, she told me, “When I die, put lights around my grave.”

That little woman with big black eyes, full lips, and a round face, that woman who hated walking the streets alone, hated shopping alone, hated sleeping in the dark, went to the Ministry of Defense alone for weeks on end. At the rear gate there was an information office dealing with political detainees. My mother had one preoccupation: to leave home early each morning with a cardboard box containing a towel, some clothes, and tins of food. To the officer in charge, the sergeant and soldiers, she would repeat the same sentences: “Take the box. My daughter needs clothes. She was not allowed to take anything with her when she was arrested.”

The answers were likewise the same: “We haven’t got a prisoner here by that name. Who said we have political prisoners here? Don’t you know we are living through a new era, the era of the Progressive National Front?”

A strange silence permeated the house, its rooms, and the garden. In the street outside, the silence was different. The neighbors said nothing as they tried to avoid watching my mother carry her cardboard box to and from a place they knew only too well. They avoided looking and listening so they would not be accused of sympathizing with her. They would casually close their garden gates and doors and pull down their blinds. The few yards separating our house from theirs became miles dense with suspicion and isolation. In time, the neighbors stopped visiting our house altogether.

Eventually, my mother no longer questioned the officer. She began taking her youngest daughter along with her and the two of them sat in front of the ministry’s gate. Sweating in the baking sun of August, covered in her abaya, her daughter bored and complaining of a persistent headache, my mother was seen by every person who went into the ministry, morning and afternoon. Her constant presence provoked whispers and enquiries. Many people avoided looking at her, at her box. One day, a soldier approached and asked, “Khala,* why are you sitting here?”

Before she had time to answer, the sergeant shouted at the soldier to leave her be, not to interfere. On the tenth day, the officer ordered the sergeant to get rid of her. He managed to move her away from the gate. The next morning, my mother and her daughter, my sister, took their place a few yards away. At the end of the third week, the sergeant called her, saying:

“What’s your daughter’s name? Give me the box. Go home.”

She gazed in awe at the cruel face with its thick mustache, handed over the box, and began to cry. At home, a smile lighting up her face, she forbore my father’s anger and bitterness. “Didn’t I tell you?

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