The Land of Clipped Braids

“Is it your fault that you were born in that country?
Three quarters of a century
and you still pay its tax
from your ebbing blood.”^[1]

Howls dissolve into the pit of void. The child I used to be, the child I’ll never be, asks to play on my shoulder. He longs to live whatever he has missed of a stolen life. A man, who brandishes his honour, patriotism, righteousness, and goodwill, offers me a weapon, urging me to kill. He hopes peace will descend upon us from high heavens once we have killed each other; once we have shared a common identity with other killers. And I wonder, which of the two demands I shall meet?

One summer night in Beirut, as we shared late-night cigarettes and coffee, a woman told me that I don’t know how to smile. I do know that I have a scar on my face to show for each day I lived in the camp, and that, for each day I shivered in the winter, one sun dropped lifeless and got buried in my face. The sea rides the earth and air beyond my eyelids, like a knight slashing the brutality of dreams, the thirst of a people who fled to Mount Şingal one summer.

Our lands have rulers who toggle values as they do their shirts and shoes. They change masks as desired by their masters beyond the borders. In our lands, which are not ours, we have enough bread for seagulls that fly over the Tigris- the Tigris of our blood, the Euphrates of our thirst - yet we sleep on empty stomachs, growling with every missile launched at us, to liberate us from our own terrorism, as the Wise West proclaims.

This land was never home to anyone. It is rather a forest; the jackasses of others are its lions; the neighbours’ dogs are its guardians and protectors; in charge of safeguarding its civilisations. This land has walled-off tents for those who are different; for those who have no representatives to fight for their right to live, in clandestine meetings inside and outside the parliament.

I do know that I have a scar on my face to show for each day I lived in the camp, and that, for each day I shivered in the winter, one sun dropped lifeless and got buried in my face. We sleep with empty stomachs, growling with every missile launched at us, to liberate us from our terrorism, as the Wise West proclaims.

How many women have pulled out their hair, chopped their braids, and beat themselves in sorrow over soldiers lost in the Iraq-Iran war? Numbers indicate a million killed, from both Iraqi and Iranian sides. They had to raise the world once more, plant bread loaves over walls made of air, tame the impossible during the siege, all so that their can children grow up, dreaming of a life amidst unending crimes.

Not everyone is headed for the One. Everyone is headed to the one death, however.

Mass graves are the houses of the poor. Lands are sold for millions. The corpses of our dead are stripped of any worth, without tombs. There is no heaven for the dead infidels, who do not follow the religion of the majority, to rest their souls. Each of their souls finds its way to become a hair in the tresses of a Şingalese woman, for her to cut and wrap around the tomb of her beloved, then fight and avenge his death!

This land is for thieves, for baby-killers, and girl-rapists. This land is cursed; it is haunted by a hellish soul, extinguished then lit up whenever a Daeshi^[2] cries “Allahu Akbar” as they finish off a life, or more.

Palestinians wrote their children’s names on their arms, so that their bodies aren’t lost, so that they recognise them after they’re bombed. This is what we failed to do. We should have written our names on our bones. Under August’s sun, the blood of my people dried on the mountain, and the bodies of the murdered decomposed. We should have written our names on our bones, so that they’re recognised in mass graves, rather than buried years later by public institutions, randomly and illegally.

Humanity lends itself to those who are humane. And for some mere genetic reason, following generations upon generations of coincidence, you were born, for no sin or choice of your own, within the borders of a country whose authorities have tried to Arabize you and yours for decades, giving Arabic names to your lands.^[3] When all else failed, Daesh came along. And when you turned out to be a wasteland with nothing to lose, they dumped your bodies into fenced-off camps, as they would do dead animals, to spend ten years there with your family of eight… or till forevermore.

An Undead Death

“Every soul shall taste death”^[4]. Why then should we live off of our own death? We consume it, day in and day out. We devour it like siege survivors, but why does it neither weaken nor die? Our death is epic; it has likely devoured the Plant of Immortality that Gilgamesh searched for, for ages, and now lives forever and ever! It seems that I, with my piles of memories, keep falling into the depths of this land. Governments, political parties, and colours change. Governments fight over lands for which my family and I have died twice,. One concedes lands for which my family and I have died twice. One gives up for a commercial enterprise the lands of a camp in which my family and I had died every day, for ten years.

In Şingal, where I was born, there are sun gardens in which forgotten gods blossom, gardens of moons suspended by a chain from which clusters flower as gypsies do. And I, who mastered the art of dancing like a child in the cold winter of the camp, who perfected the game of mirrors in the insane hell of summer tents, have called for nightmares which once brought me fear. Now, my chest feels nothing but the winds that scratch my hollow bones, threatening to rein the heart.

I thought that the world, with its philosophy, science, technology, literature, and poetry, after many lessons, intense ethical lecturing over the centuries, would finally be able to hear the howls of women being raped, deprived of their right to live as they were born. I thought that they would hear them after liberating them from the prisons of Daesh, or after their families bought them back from their captors one final time. But they were back to rot in nylon tents, where those who rule the land which is “the cradle of writing” fail to provide them with any education. They are now too old to join schools, and they have went missing in other countries, busy being bought and sold in slave markets, because their reproductive systems are permissible lands for “believers” to take. I thought mirrors would witness stone-cold hearts, but, and as the mythology goes, it’s death or victory: for one person to live, another must be buried in a mass grave in southern Şingal.

“You know

that the lands where you were born

were not breathing their meaning.

What fault of yours is it now

to claim the impossible?”

We were never worth discussing, except as numbers in the trade market of administrative seats. My father, looking for a job at 50 in a refugee camp at the far end of northern Iraq, is just a number for a candidate who promises, right before the elections, to help resettle the displaced back into their areas. My mother, who sews from the face of heaven and fire of hell, clothes to protect us from the winter cold, is just a number in the lists of the Ministry of Migration. My sisters, brothers, and I, are nothing but disgraced, walking disappointments before our parents’ eyes.

How many women have pulled out their hair, chopped their braids, and beat themselves in sorrow over soldiers lost in the Iraq-Iran war? Numbers indicate a million killed, from both Iraqi and Iranian sides. They had to raise the world once more, plant bread loaves over walls made of air, tame the impossible during the siege, all so that their can children grow up, dreaming of life…

What does your pain mean? The world is burning in the blaze of its wars. Who will care for your family, now in its tenth winter in displacement camps? 

Displacement is a storm that uproots us every day. Every day, we are expelled from our towns into the nylon world. Winter, the infertile old woman who stanches seasons away, kidnaps the childhood of the camp creatures, along with their playgrounds by camp fences. Who can tell them that their lives are no fault of their own? Who will tell the little girls that the entirety of global feminism is unable to put them on a par with girls who exist beyond the camp? Women aren’t half of society; they are the camp’s entirety. In its streets, they walk so they don’t go mad. They’re in its stores, shopping for whatever tiny part of their lost youth. They’re in the wakes of the dead, in the tiniest kitchens, built from untreated brick, in the bathrooms, which are toilets at the same time. They’re in queues, waiting to receive foodstuffs, walking the mud of streets as they push forward barrels full of white petrol, granted by the Ministry of Migration. But it’s not enough; it was never enough. They must ever search for another source of warmth. The graveyard, perhaps!

Humanity is white, and Mesopotamia has browned, petrified, and dried your skin. You’ve become a temple for hermits who dedicate their lives to nothingness. Nothing interests you except securing, or snatching away, your daily bread, even if it were from the mouth of a god, or politicians.

What does your pain mean? The world is burning in the blaze of its wars. Who will care for your family, now in its tenth winter in displacement camps? You must walk through the tunnel, waiting for no light at its end – if you ever reached it, that is, and survived ten other winters. May hope and its light burn, may they die in the dark. The dancing of kids - that movement of their shivering limbs under the tent’s nylon, where temperatures dropped below zero - doesn’t matter. The souls of the dead climb up the fences of the camp, revolting against the chilled hearts of its inhabitants, yearning for any possible warmth beyond this camp, which has become more like a morgue.

My father, looking for a job at 50 in a refugee camp at the far end of northern Iraq, is just a number for a candidate who promises, right before the elections, to help resettle the displaced back into their areas. My mother, who sews, from the face of heaven and fire of hell, clothes to protect us from the cold of winter, is just a number in the lists of the Ministry of Migration. My sisters, brothers, and I, are nothing but walking disappointments before our parents’ eyes.

It doesn’t matter that Nadia Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize if the mothers of Şingal are still fighting wars of the heart, mourning over the lost, the dead, the raped, or the living. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t matter if we fight wars against death every second in the camp, while we defend our existence in one way only: our memory. We know that, back in the day, on the rooftops of mud houses in Şingal, we used to raise our eyes up to the stars that filled the summer skies, and we slept until the sun chased away our dreams. The Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t matter if fire still lurks in every corner of the camp, ready to devour the living, the memories of the dead, and the nylon of the tents.

The crumbs that the West with its utterly unimportant ethics throws at us, like bones are tossed for dogs, so it can pat itself on the back at the expense of our hunger, don’t matter. All humanitarian initiatives don’t matter, and neither do the organisations, from which “great” Western values and nobility crane their necks like a celestial light, at the expense of our “terrorified”^[5] countries. All of that does not matter if thousands of children born in displacement camps never experienced the warmth of a home, or have only seen warmth from afar, in other people’s homes.

It doesn’t matter that a family carries its tent from the camp only to cover the ceilings of torn down rooms, rooms that the heavens, and its earthly soldiers, tampered with. It doesn’t matter that a family takes out its tent, carries it to install in the backyard of its own home in Khana Sor – because their home is no longer fit for human living. It doesn’t matter that humans need to displace themselves once again from their displacement to live in a tent in their own homeland.

Children crying in the cold don’t matter. They cry because the delivery of white petrol, which will arrive with a sign hung on its tank that reads “by orders of the Prime Minister and Minister of Migration and the Displaced”, would be delayed until December. All slogans that hail humanity, the consecration of the land and its bounty to serve humans, don’t matter if not an inch of it is ours to live upon, as we are! The land under which we will be buried doesn’t matter if we are to live in fear and cold above it.

It doesn’t matter if those in charge of the camp replace the pierced fence that surrounds it with another to prevent strangers from entering. The displaced are the displaced, and that is all. It doesn’t matter if organisations distribute new tents every few years for the guest inmates to enjoy or renew their displacement. No one is meant to live in their own land in one tent for ten years after all.

The rot in your hearts doesn’t matter; everything in the camp is rotten; even the hygiene baskets that the Ministry of Migration sends are expired.^[6]

War rages in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen. Do you really have hope in the world, in having it stop for a second to listen to your complaints or feel sorry for your tragedy, after ten years?

Displacement is a storm that uproots us every day. Every day, we are expelled from our towns into the nylon world. Winter, the infertile old woman who stanches seasons away, kidnaps the childhood of the camp creatures, along with their playgrounds by camp fences. Who can tell them that their lives are no fault of their own?

It doesn’t matter that a family takes out its tent, carries it to install in the backyard of its own home in Khana Sor – because their home is no longer fit for human living. It doesn’t matter that humans need to displace themselves once again from their displacement to live in a tent in their own homeland. 

Your suffering is expired, and the queue of pain has reached the gates of heaven. The heavens and earth take turns showing solidarity with the peoples. The tickets for the first few rows have been pre-booked, however. You may seek refuge in nothing but a UNHCR blanket.

Solidarity is a fish in the Arabian Desert, and all you have is a language not yours to write with, about a homeland not yours, about a house that the heavens tore down and is no longer yours, about a family no longer yours; a family that is a few names in the displacement lists, written in a language not yours, about that which is not yours.

______________________

-Translated from arabic by Yasmine Haj

-Edited by Sabah Jalloul

______________________

1. From a poem by Iraqi poet, Saadi Youssef. ↑
2. ISIS militant. ↑
3. The Baath party, which ruled Iraq prior to 2003, adopted a politics of nationalism, and focused on resettling the Yazidis in residential compounds far from their villages, giving them Arabic names. Khana Sor, for instance, became At-Ta’mim, Dougra became Al-Hittin, and so on. ↑
4. Holy Quran. 21: 35 ↑
5. Made to fit the “terrorist” label. ↑
6. https://www.rudawarabia.net/arabic/kurdistan/2711202311 ↑