I began writing The Children of This Madness in 2003, while I was an MFA (later PhD) student at the University of Houston, with the Iraq war raging in the background. Soon after, we read the novel of an Iraqi writer in our postcolonial theory and literature class, A Sky So Close. This writer visited and tried to publish another book, but wasn’t successful. Later, when I started peddling my own novel, from 2007 onwards, Iraq was already a present theme in TV shows, movies, and both adult and YA books, but only from an American perspective-a veteran going off to war, children growing up without fathers, or a hero who had saved lives in Iraq. I was surprised that there was no interest in stories from Iraq, about Iraq, about who Iraqis were, what this place had been, what their narratives were. There were the Baghdad Diaries and then reporting by some prominent journalists, but nothing in literary or genre fiction. I thought, surely people would want to read about Iraq, surely there would be an abundance of writing and translations, but now I know how innocent I was to think that. About 20 years on, the Iraq war is largely forgotten, although it still continues as an easy trope on TV.
I wanted to share a story that is not in the novel but informs the events and characters of the novel, which is largely about a group of immigrants from Bangladesh hellbent on success (more about that later) who walk through wars and suffering untouched and unaffected.
Crossing the Border
By Gemini Wahhaj
Beena, Iraqi border with Kuwait, 1982
By the time Beena’s family decided to leave Iraq, Mosul Airport had been bombed. Baghdad airport was closed also. In 1982., the only way out of the country was to take a bus to Kuwait and fly from the Kuwaiti airport.
Nasir Uddin and Rahela packed several suitcases and two large trunks for the journey home. In the trunks were old clothes folded neatly to give to poor people in Bangladesh. Stacks of foam that Nasir Uddin had bought to make a sofa and yards of a maroon woolen material for the cover. Rahela ran to the market in Babultope, now crowded with the popular army in uniform, to get the dinner sets and trousers that arrived in shipments from China. A rapidly advancing country, new bridges, new roads, all kinds of gadgets had flooded its new markets, consumerism at its most exciting: tiny washing machines that did not work, ice cream makers that churned out gooey milk, hair curlers with twenty different styling brushes. Now, in the middle of the war, things arrived in rapid shipments and were rapidly gone. Before leaving, the family had ordered from catalogues a Philips refrigerator, a TV, a Lego set, and various cooking gadgets that would be shipped directly to Dhaka.
They had lived happily enough in Mosul. Nasir Uddin had had a comfortable position teaching at Mosul University. Yet all through Beena’s childhood, he had ached for his country. Beena knew only Mosul, where she and her brothers had played colorful haired girls with the aid of fluffy towels on their heads, her brothers dressed in her old dresses; where she ran to corner shops to buy ice cream, energy bars, fresh crisp color pencils and tubes of color, exchanging greetings with the shopkeepers: “Marhaba!”; where she learned the Iraqi national anthem in school and sang popular tunes from the TV at home; where she and her brothers rode to school on public buses, chatting with the other passengers; where gypsy neighbors handed them ice and strained yoghurt over boundary walls, tomato paste, dress patterns, clothes for her brothers, tasty dishes, klecha, dolma, kube; where her mother sent her downstairs from their flat in Babultope to Mr. Emmanuel at the pharmacy for the latest issue of Woman, which she pored over before her mother could, lying on her stomach; where she and her Iraqi friends stood with their arms laced together, grinning into the camera for her father: “say cheese!” (Their dresses were short, just covering their underwear, and their smiles the innocence of the wicked, because soon they would fight and argue and cry over one another again. Nasir Uddin had packed the photo albums in trunks and shipped them ahead to Dhaka, but the trunks would be stuck at Chittagong port for a month, and the albums, when finally retrieved, would be beyond repair, the photos moistened and destroyed).
They took a bus out of Mosul. In Baghdad, they boarded another bus that would carry fleeing foreigners to the border with Kuwait. Someone had told Nasir Uddin that as the journey was long, it was likely that the kids would start vomiting. He had given Beena and Lenin each a liberal dose of an anti-nausea medicine. On the bus, Nasir Uddin and Rahela found another Bangladeshi and they exchanged expressions of extreme happiness. Nasir Uddin chatted with the fellow Bangladeshi during the ourney from Baghdad to the border in Basra.
“Where were you during the liberation war?” One would ask.
“In Dhaka, in the middle of it all. That was some experience,” the other would reply.
Beena listened to them from where Lenin and she sat behind her father. Lenin patted Nasir Uddin’s balding head while Beena tasted the words Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal) and green mangos.
The bus was not air-conditioned, and the driver was waiting to start at sunset, when the air would be bearable. They would travel all night to get to the border with Kuwait. The crowds outside cleared. There had never been beggars before in Iraq. Even the gypsies wore gold earrings. Now there were little boys who walked with tin cans. Beena and Lenin waved cheerily to no one, and the bus pulled out.
On the bus was an elderly Pakistani couple whose glasses hung around their necks on beaded string. Pakistani and Indian laborers who had been working in the refineries and factories, their luggage consisting of cartons tied with rope. The men moved heavily. In spite of their cheerful storytelling about the war to liberate Bangladesh, Beena’s parents answered sternly every time Lenin or Beena called to them, as if their voices had just rattled a bad tooth. Everyone carried a lot of heavy luggage, a tension that sought room for release in that tightly packed space. When some hours had passed on the airless bus, Beena’s head began to throb. Everything receded to a blurry distance. She moaned.
“Shut up!” her mother said to her. “Sit straight.”
Lenin lay with his head in their mother’s lap, half smothered by her georgette sari, his mouth open in contentment. Beena settled back in her seat and sang an Iraqi song.
“Marhaba! Ya Maarikal Masiir.”
Beena’s mother asked the laborers many questions: where they had come from, where they had worked, where they were headed. Beena dozed off with her head banging against the bus window.
“Why has the bus stopped?” Beena asked her mother. It was dark outside. They were in barren land, there were no buildings anywhere.
“We’re at the border,” Rahela said.
Lenin opened his eyes and began to wail.
“Shh,” Beena said. “We’re at the border!”
The men stood up and began to haul their luggage down from the compartment outside. A Pakistani laborer helped her father with their luggage.
As the men worked, they shouted in unison, “Heeyaah.”
The passengers were left standing in the middle of one large field of lean grass, with stretches of sand.
“Where shall we sleep?” Beena asked her mother.
“Shut up,” Rahela said.
The desert air turned cold at night. It cleared Beena’s head a little. Families lay down blankets on the grass. In the darkness, a thousand stars dazzled the sky.
“Look!” Beena pointed out the stars to Lenin.
“How beautiful!” he said. “Look, Ammu.”
Rahela did not pay them any attention.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Beena said.
“You’re always creating problems. Come with me,” Rahela said, handing Lenin to her father. She walked Beena to an even darker corner and asked Beena to squat. The urine trickled down Beena’s ankles. She finished quickly.
That night, they under the open sky, with no blankets to cover them and no sheets underneath. They lay side by side, with Lenin and Beena in the middle and their parents on either side. Other families bedded down around them. The grass felt cold and wet. All night a chill ran up and down Beena’s body, making it impossible to sleep. If only a thin blanket, just a sheet.
In the morning, sharp and too bright for sleep-weary eyes, the passengers discovered that they would have to carry their luggage themselves across the border to the Kuwaiti bus on the other side.
Nasir Uddin finished his piece of bread and said to Rahela, “You hold the children. I’ll load the luggage and come back.”
“How will you carry all this yourself? It’s such a long way!” Rahela protested.
She was scared by what he was going to do, and that made Beena feel scared too. The same Pakistani laborer appeared and held up his hands.
“Aapko help Chaiyye?” he asked in Urdu.
Beena and Lenin stood with their mother and watched the men walking in a long line to the border. Nothing marked the border. Just a stretch of fields that looked the same on either side. The road had been closed at the border with a bamboo-like pole that could be raised to let someone through. On the Kuwait side, there were a few rooms that were being used for official work. They saw the men stop, show passports, then cross over to the other side.
Beena’s head was getting worse. She received everything in a haze.
“Stop fidgeting!” her mother said.
“Ammu, I feel dizzy. My head hurts.”
“You shouldn’t cause your father any more trouble,” Rahela told her. “Stop acting.” A large handbag that had been weighed down with everything her mother owned cut into the skin of her mother’s shoulder, leaving a red weal.
“I am not acting!” Beena said. She started jumping up and down, tearing her hair.
She remembered how much she hated her mother. How she could never speak to her without crying. She fell on the grass, her voluminous hair hiding her face. Her head continued to swell, her forehead bulging to explode.
“Jiddan, jiddan,” Lenin applauded Beena’s performance in Arabic.
Rahela dropped the handbag from her shoulder, let it drop to the Iraqi soil. And at that moment, like waves of release, Beena vomited dollops of white creamy solid that immediately began to spread over the top of the soil. She wiped her face in relief, using the border of her mother’s sari. She felt much better. She remembered her brother Kazi whose feet she loved to kiss, Kazi raising his fat foot in the air and offering it to be kissed. Connected to her mother by the edge of her sari, she could share her mother’s grief. Kazi continued to rise in the early morning air, his invisible body a solid shape in the air.
When Nasir Uddin returned, he found Rahela crying.
“Where do you hurt?” he asked Beena.
Beena showed him her forehead. Her father picked up Lenin , took Beena’s hand, and looked at her mother who would have been carrying Kazi. They walked across the long stretch of desert land, clean sands with not a mark on them yet, walking away, away, away from all their memories. Once, her mother looked behind her, one last look.
“Come on, Ammu!” Beena said, pulling her mother’s fat, soft arm.
They passed through the border control, stopping only to have exit visas stamped on their passports. Beena and Lenin didn’t even have passports. Their names were on their mother’s passport. No one would ever know that they had come here and gone (which would be a good thing when they applied for US visas, or later, when they lived in America and the Gulf war started). But could they ignore, should they ignore, when they sat, so removed, so many years later, in American living rooms, what was happening to the people in that place where they had lived and fled a war themselves? Could they then pretend, like everyone else, that it was all a world away, a world marked by their brother’s grave? The excuse with things that happened in the world was always that it was far away.
“We’re here!” cried Lenin in a singsong voice.
“Shut up!” Beena said. She was imagining Kazi. Chubby, angry Kazi with frowning eyebrows.
At the bus, the Pakistani laborers hauled Beena aboard. She ran to find a seat. Lenin ran after her and sat down beside her.
“Wave.” Beena commanded him. “Wave good-bye to Iraq.”
Photo by Aram Sabah on Unsplash
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