Da (Mother) 5

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni
Translated from the Persian with an Introduction by Paul Sprachman

2022-7-19

Da (Mother)

The Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni

Translated from the Persian with an Introduction by Paul Sprachman

Persian Version (2008)

Sooreh Mehr Publishing House

English Version (2014)

Mazda Publishers

***

One

Early Life in Iraq

We had no word of father for several months. His political activities kept him away from home so often we had gotten used to his absences. But this time was different; he had been gone for a very long time. Mother told us father had gotten involved in politics, meeting secretly with people after he had stopped working in grandfather’s mill and had started in the gunny-sack bazaar.

The owner of the place where father worked was a merchant of Iranian origin whom they called “Hajji.” He was aware of father’s political activities, and it seemed he himself and his other workers were also involved.

In father’s absence, Hajji looked after our family and would pass on messages about his welfare to us. From time to time when father was home, a message would come saying things were dangerous and he had to leave.

When our neighbors asked about father, which they often did, mother would tell them he had gone to a village near Basra and, because it was far away, he would be coming home late.

Those years we were living in the port city of Basra in southern Iraq. Our home was in the Rabat neighborhood, which was quite green because it was near the Tigris. Here immigrants lived in mud houses with sloping roofs made of reeds and straw matting. Those days most of the homes in Basra were made that way. They had large inner courtyards surrounded on all sides by living quarters. The better Basran homes were made of baked brick and were located in the Ashshar Quarter and its bazaar, which was considered the center of town.

One of father’s male cousins had a home in the Ashshar Quarter. I always looked forward to the times we visited there, because unlike our part of the city it had electricity. The light in our house was from kerosene lamps. Mother polished the chimneys of the lamps, which were called “tulips” in those days, and as soon as it got dark she would light the wicks. She placed several of these around the house. Because there was no electricity, we would normally go to bed early. At night the Ashshar Quarter with its square lined on all sides with shops was as bright as day. The ample lighting on the doors of the shops invited customers to enter and look at the goods inside. When I had mother’s permission, I would spend hours gaping at the bright electric lights, which made passersby’s eyes sparkle, and at the food. The bazaar in our neighborhood had no such luster. People from the villages would just sell their produce from baskets or carts.

Father and mother had come to Basra from the Kurdish village of Zarinabad near Dehloran. This was before their marriage, which took place at the end of the 1950s. My four siblings and I were born in the city: Ali in 1961, and afterwards with one year between us Mohsen, myself, and Leila. The last child, born three years after Leila, was Mansur.

Having grown up in Basra, we were all fluent in Arabic, but at home or when with fellow Kurdish immigrants we spoke Kurdish. We dressed the way the Arabs of the region dressed: in long-sleeved over-shirts known as dishdashas. Mother, whom we called in Kurdish “Da,” had been living in Basra since she was an adolescent and had long since grown used to the customs of the area. She spoke Arabic so fluently that people scarcely believed she was a Kurd. She even dressed the way the Arab women did, with a silk shawl wound around her head like a headdress and a long cloak like a chador.

Most of the men in our neighborhood worked like father, in the gunnysack bazaar or on the docks. All of them had a relatively low standard of living. For extra income we rented out two rooms near the entrance to our home, and we lived in a large room at the end of the courtyard.

Mother prepared meals on a pressure stove outside of the room under an overhang made of reed mats and wooden supports. She made a variety of local dishes like hilsa fish, okra goulash, and chopped fish soup. Sometimes she would make a rice casserole with “meat” balls made of mashed bulgur and yogurt fried in animal fat, which relatives had brought as a souvenir.

In the summer we mostly ate outside under the overhang I mentioned. All the children except Mansur, who was nursing, slept on a large wooden platform covered by mosquito netting.

Renting out the two rooms covered most of our expenses. Mother helped out by buying gunny sacking and weaving it into loofahs, which she sold in the bazaar. Father, of course, would provide money for her when he was at home.

When he did come home after long absences, the house became totally different. He would hug and kiss us, laugh and kid around; in short, he would do everything to show his love for us. At night we would all gather round and listen to him tell about the mischief he got into when he was a boy. It was interesting because father, not knowing Arabic very well, spoke in Kurdish. So when he was home, the household language was Kurdish. Father told us he had lost both of his parents when he was two years old, so he was raised by his mother’s brother. Because he was the last of his line, everyone, especially his uncle, made sure he was well looked after. “Uncle, who was a hunter,” he recalled, “would regularly take me on hunting trips in the mountains. He loved to smoke a pipe and I had the job of preparing it for him. Soon I got fed up with this and began to search for a way to get out of it. Then one time I packed the bowl with some gunpowder and covered it with tobacco. I handed it to uncle, who was sitting with his friends. He lit the pipe and when the flame reached the powder, the thing exploded singeing his mustache and beard. The gathering broke into wild laughter. Afraid of what uncle would do to me, I ran away and hid in a tree. On one hand uncle was furious, but on the other he feared that I’d be torn to pieces by a wild animal. He ran after me shouting, ‘Come back. I’m not going to do anything to you!’ My trick worked and, from that day on, uncle packed his pipe himself.”

As a four- or five-year-old child myself, I couldn’t get enough of the stories about the mischief father got into when he was my age.

Father also told us the story of how he came from Iran to Basra and how he and mother got married. Seyyed Hoseyn Hoseyni (my father) and Seyyedeh Shah-Pasand Hoseyni (my mother) were related and came from the same village.

Father, who was three years younger than mother, was born in 1936. At eighteen he left the village to work with his elder brother in Basra. There he caught the eye of my grandfather, Seyyed Najaf, a generous family man. Grandpa was working at a government mill at the time, and because he understood what it meant to be a stranger in a strange land, he took father under his wing, arranging work for him at the mill. Later, having seen for himself what a good worker father was and how devout he was, grandfather arranged the marriage between his daughter and my father. Father rented a home near grandfather, and it was there that they began their married life. They were very well suited; I never heard mother complain about father’s long absences.

One time I remember mother, her back to the door, was sweeping under the beds. We children were playing in the corner of the room. All of a sudden father entered and we all were about to rush into his arms, when he waved his hands, signaling to us not to say anything. Unaware of what was happening, mother continued to sweep. Father crept up behind her and put his hands over her eyes.

Mother was staggered “Who’s that?” she gasped. “Good God in heaven!” The joy of seeing father combined with mother’s panic made us all burst out laughing. With father at home everybody woke up when he called out to us at the crack of dawn. He was in the habit of exercising after prayer. He would work out with a metal exercise bar and do push-ups, all the while reciting verses of heroic poetry, and every time Imam Ali’s name was mentioned in the poetry, he’d send up prayers to him. After exercising he would turn on a small, two-band radio. The radio was only operated when father was home; other times we didn’t have permission to use or even go near it. It was father’s property, and honoring him meant that we didn’t touch his things. Later he bought a larger radio with the dimensions of a large, cardboard box. After you turned it on, it took a long time to warm up. Father explained, “The tubes have to be on for a while before it’ll work.” I listened to the radio while he and mother saw to the other children. He was very considerate toward her and the rest of the family, realizing, given the short time we had together, he had to try to provide what we needed so he could again leave with a clear conscience. I never actually saw him leave, as he waited for us to go to sleep before he exited the house. But after his departures, the hardships for mother would begin again: the children’s tears and the excuses, father’s friends coming around asking questions and the made-up answers, and, worst of all, the raids of the state security agents. Whenever we heard the pounding on the door, we knew they were after us again, and we would all run to mother, who was white-faced with fright. Her fear affected us and we started trembling like willows in the wind. She had instructed us ahead of time to keep our mouths shut and stay in our room. We took her seriously, even though we didn’t understand what was happening. Seeing our peace and security in danger was enough to keep us from doing something stupid, which would make matters worse. After peppering mother with questions and terrifying us, and having gotten nothing for their troubles, the agents would storm out the door. We were certain, however, that they would be back.

After they had gone, mother would lean against the wall, and, in a voice choked with tears, say, “There is nothing to this Hasan al-Bakr; Saddam Hussein is the one pulling all the strings.” Then she would curse Saddam calling him “the spawn of Shemr’s bastard son.” Regaining her calm, she would point to the framed picture of Seyyed Mohsen Hakim hanging on the wall and say, “Why expect the person who cut off the water supply to Hakim’s family, showing no mercy to the great scholar, to take pity on the likes of us?”[1]

Mother’s words frightened me even more than the security agents. Though I was too young to know about such things, I had no trouble spotting them. The few times that I opened the front door for them, I was too scared to talk. They had thick mustaches and generally wore brownish suits. I clearly remember once one of them sat down on his haunches, made a sweet face at me, and said, “If you tell me where your daddy is, I’ll buy you some baklava.”

Scared beyond my wits, and with mother’s warning echoing in my head, I said, “I don’t want any baklava.” Baathists agents were everywhere. No matter what or where, whenever something happened, they would descend on our neighborhood and arrest a few people. Most of the people there were Kurdish refugees, whom the agents suspected of every crime. People like father who participated in politics came under even more suspicion.

Father’s comings and goings and his activities continued. One day a man with a wife and a daughter rented a room from us. He didn’t seem like an ordinary person, staying at home for a few days and then vanishing for a time, but always keeping us under surveillance. He would often take us children aside and question us about father. He even tried to get our other border, Naneh Papi (a Kurdish woman whose son was Papi) to talk. The poor woman would always tell him that she didn’t know anything. Mother was very afraid of this man and, playing on his name “Ali,” would curse, “May Ali break his back. The man’s an enemy of the Shiis, a spy for the security agency. He calls himself ‘Ali’ to fool people.” She warned us not to tell him anything. As it turned out her fears were not misplaced. It was around this time father’s long absence began. Security agents would come and go, asking about him. After a while, they came for uncle and took him away.

Because uncle’s home and ours had a common wall, security agents arrested him thinking that they could get information about father from him. Uncle told them that he had nothing to do with his brother’s activities, which they doubted given that his house was right next door. But they soon realized that uncle was not involved in father’s politics and released him.

Father’s absence dragged on for months until one day we finally got word that the Baathists had imprisoned him in Khanaqin for being an Iranian spy. Not long after that our Arabic-speaking boarder moved out.