Return to Ruin by Zainab Saleh

Author:Zainab Saleh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

IN THE MIDST OF WAR

My sister and I were close to Nour, who was my sister’s age, and Abeer, who was two years older than my sister. We would wait together for the school bus to take us to and from school. After school, we played together in the streets. One day in the early 1980s, we went to the bus stop, and Nour and Abeer were not there. Their house looked quiet. After school, my mother explained to us that Nour and Abeer, whose father had left Iraq to avoid military enlistment during the Iran-Iraq War, had been deported to Iran with their mother. Growing up under Hussein’s reign, I often heard stories about the disappeared. Some of my father’s friends disappeared after they were arrested, and our neighbor always talked about her disappeared brother. Rumors about people being arrested and never released circulated widely. However, I had not realized that my friends could also disappear.

What happened to Nour, Abeer, and their mother was part of a deportation campaign initiated by the Hussein regime in the early 1980s. It targeted the so-called Iraqis of Iranian origin. The regime sent thousands of families to the border with Iran after it confiscated their property, documents, and belongings. I still remember my mother’s disbelief that Iraqi citizens who had been living in Iraq for generations and identified as Iraqis were suddenly designated as Iranians by the regime and deported. Unlike the majority of deportees who were sent to Iran, Nour, Abeer, and their mother reappeared after a few weeks. My mother warned us that we should not ask the girls any questions and that we should behave as if nothing had happened. Moreover, we were made to understand that their mother was being forced to collaborate with the regime and had to write reports on neighbors in order for her and her daughters not to be deported. While we went on playing with Nour and Abeer and pretended that everything was normal, we exercised caution and self-censorship.

The deportation campaign, the increasing brutality of the regime, and the Iran-Iraq War intensified the sense of foreboding in the country in the 1980s, which compounded my personal anxiety about my mother. By the time I began primary school, at the age of six, self-censorship and apprehension were already deeply ingrained in me. Being at school only intensified my worry. Not only did I have to watch what I said constantly, but I also had to resist the pressure to join the Ba‘th Party. Ba‘th members often came to schools and forced students to join the party by making them sign a membership application and pay a fee. The possibility of these random visits made me fret. My mother warned my sister and me against giving in to pressure. She told us that we should say that we could not sign anything without her permission, but I always doubted my ability to stand my ground if I were put in this situation, especially if a Ba‘th official screamed at or threatened me.

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