were several levels of membership, however, and everyone came to know the difference between getting along and being a true believer. The entry level, moua’ayed, or endorser, was the least you could get away with. If you wanted a little more protection in your job then you could attend meetings for a few years and rise to naseer, or follower . Later, of course, it became clear to us all that to rise in the ranks of the Baath Party, you had to write reports on other people, in other words, become a spy.
My mother resented the notion of anyone trying to tell her how to act or dress, let alone how to think. When she got her recruitment notice to attend a Baath Party meeting, she showed up in heels and her Nina Ricci mink—a combination (from what I could ascertain later) of the bold and the oblivious. When the leader said, “One Arab United Nation with a United Glorious Message,” she knew enough to stand in unison with her fellow teachers and respond, “Unity, Freedom, and Socialism.” But, in the process of delivering her one required line, she fainted dead away on the floor. She had a tendency to faint, which I saw as romantic, one of her many skills I never quite mastered. I remember when a group of aunts brought her home that night, and how they were teasing her.
“Can’t stand the heat, can you?” teased her sister, my aunt Samer. Aunt Samer was a onetime political activist who felt her Baath revolution had been stolen by Saddam Hussein just as the Iranian revolution had been stolen by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
“It’s not that,” insisted Mama, fanning herself. “It’s my allergies. I’m allergic to the Baath Party!”
With the help of hindsight, I realize that sexism gave women a slight advantage over men when it came to political dissent. Slips of the tongue could be written off to ditziness. Once, when Aunt Samer answered her phone, a friendly voice greeted her with, “Hi, Samer, how’s the Baath Party?” and she quipped, “Oh God, what Baath Party?” Then she recognized the chuckle on the other end of the line: it was Saddam Hussein. No man could have gotten away with that. Early on in Saddam Hussein’s reign, a woman could occasionally express a contrary opinion as long as she joked, cried, or sounded like a bit of an airhead. My mother, I suspect, understood that game and played it occasionally, with utmost discretion, when it suited her needs. She was excused from future meetings on a technicality—my baby brother had just been born and was ill at the time—but she quit teaching not long afterward because, I suspect, of her allergies.
As war revived up, anti-Iranian sentiment grew. In the name of patriotism, people even stopped listening to Iranian music and buying Iranian pistachios. Our family didn’t vilify Iran as many people did, but we stopped dying eggs for Norouz, or Persian New Year, on March 21. We had always decorated dyed eggs with faces of a mama, baba, and children, glued cotton on top for hair, and displayed our egg family on our dining room table along with yogurt, cardamom and other foods to bring baraka for the new year ahead. I didn’t understand. Norouz wasn’t just a Persian holiday. It was an ancient holiday marking the coming of spring. Kurds, a separate ethnic group in the north with their own language and culture, celebrated Norouz too. Why couldn’t we? “Things are different now,” Mama told me with an unsatisfying vagueness. “We can’t do that anymore.”
Because our enemy’s government was run by Shia clerics, all things Shia began to feel suspect. Karbalā’ itself seemed to fall under suspicion, so my mother and her siblings moved Bibi to Baghdad and instructed me to erase from my mind the fact that Bibi had once known Khomeini. It was as if that look of disgust I had seen on Mohammed’s face in fourth grade was spreading nationwide, as if all Shia had cooties. I could feel the difference in school. Zainab is a common name across the Middle East,
My mother resented the notion of anyone trying to tell her how to act or dress, let alone how to think. When she got her recruitment notice to attend a Baath Party meeting, she showed up in heels and her Nina Ricci mink—a combination (from what I could ascertain later) of the bold and the oblivious. When the leader said, “One Arab United Nation with a United Glorious Message,” she knew enough to stand in unison with her fellow teachers and respond, “Unity, Freedom, and Socialism.” But, in the process of delivering her one required line, she fainted dead away on the floor. She had a tendency to faint, which I saw as romantic, one of her many skills I never quite mastered. I remember when a group of aunts brought her home that night, and how they were teasing her.
“Can’t stand the heat, can you?” teased her sister, my aunt Samer. Aunt Samer was a onetime political activist who felt her Baath revolution had been stolen by Saddam Hussein just as the Iranian revolution had been stolen by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
“It’s not that,” insisted Mama, fanning herself. “It’s my allergies. I’m allergic to the Baath Party!”
With the help of hindsight, I realize that sexism gave women a slight advantage over men when it came to political dissent. Slips of the tongue could be written off to ditziness. Once, when Aunt Samer answered her phone, a friendly voice greeted her with, “Hi, Samer, how’s the Baath Party?” and she quipped, “Oh God, what Baath Party?” Then she recognized the chuckle on the other end of the line: it was Saddam Hussein. No man could have gotten away with that. Early on in Saddam Hussein’s reign, a woman could occasionally express a contrary opinion as long as she joked, cried, or sounded like a bit of an airhead. My mother, I suspect, understood that game and played it occasionally, with utmost discretion, when it suited her needs. She was excused from future meetings on a technicality—my baby brother had just been born and was ill at the time—but she quit teaching not long afterward because, I suspect, of her allergies.
As war revived up, anti-Iranian sentiment grew. In the name of patriotism, people even stopped listening to Iranian music and buying Iranian pistachios. Our family didn’t vilify Iran as many people did, but we stopped dying eggs for Norouz, or Persian New Year, on March 21. We had always decorated dyed eggs with faces of a mama, baba, and children, glued cotton on top for hair, and displayed our egg family on our dining room table along with yogurt, cardamom and other foods to bring baraka for the new year ahead. I didn’t understand. Norouz wasn’t just a Persian holiday. It was an ancient holiday marking the coming of spring. Kurds, a separate ethnic group in the north with their own language and culture, celebrated Norouz too. Why couldn’t we? “Things are different now,” Mama told me with an unsatisfying vagueness. “We can’t do that anymore.”
Because our enemy’s government was run by Shia clerics, all things Shia began to feel suspect. Karbalā’ itself seemed to fall under suspicion, so my mother and her siblings moved Bibi to Baghdad and instructed me to erase from my mind the fact that Bibi had once known Khomeini. It was as if that look of disgust I had seen on Mohammed’s face in fourth grade was spreading nationwide, as if all Shia had cooties. I could feel the difference in school. Zainab is a common name across the Middle East,
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