I had found an Iraqi community without my mother translating for or obligating me, without my differentiating between Iraqis born in Iraq and those born in America. Those born abroad were my parents’ friends—they loved gaudy furniture with gold trim, they arrived to everything at least an hour late, and they had little regard for posted rules (seat belts were optional. DO NOT ENTER signs were mere suggestions.). I befriended their children, who were like me—accent free, style conscious, and rule abiding.
In the company of my new friends in Cleveland, though, I discovered how many stereotypes I’d held of my own people. My notions of Iraqis were based on a single community, most of whom had immigrated in the 1970s, and much of what I’d observed had been generational. These women, however, were my peers, with similar interests and tastes. They dreamt of HGTV homes, arrived on time, dressed in the latest styles, and even if they didn’t always wear their seat belts, at least they believed they should.
I became a full-fledged member of this new world. Now I was the one picking up the phone, inviting friends over, and being invited places. We broke our fasts together during Ramadan in apartment-building party rooms. We picnicked in parks in the summer. We chatted and ate as our children played. All year long, there were visits to be made for deaths, hospitalizations, and births that made the American in me rear her head at the endless socializing. But another part of me was proud. Every time I showed up with a cake in hand to welcome visiting relatives or to comfort those mourning the loss of a loved one was a small triumph over assimilation. My children would grow up knowing they belonged to more than just Cleveland; they were one more generation with ties to a country they’d never seen, with an understanding of the ravages of war.
From 2006 to 2009, the conditions in Iraq deteriorated, and the number of casualties rose steadily. During those years, we heard of new families arriving on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis. Most of the newcomers said the relief agencies had given them a choice of cities. Detroit, renowned for its Arab immigrant population, was full but Cleveland was open. They’d been told the winters were rough, but the price of living was reasonable. And so they came, nuclear families, extended families, and single mothers. Among them were doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and business owners, willing to flounder in a new country so their children could succeed.
Whenever the local Iraqi community got word of new arrivals, we showed up with gifts in hand. In apartments scattered all over Cleveland’s west side, we heard harrowing stories brought from Iraq, of friends gone out to buy groceries and losing their lives to roadside bombs, fathers assassinated on their way to work, bodyguards shot at front doorsteps, children kidnapped on their way to school. We heard of suitcases packed haphazardly, a lifetime of belongings abandoned in houses far grander than the four walls these newcomers now called home.
These stories made the Iraq War more real to me than any of the country’s past conflicts. I’d come of age learning about the Iran–Iraq War, and the Gulf War and its sanctions, by listening in on adult conversations. My siblings and I were never spoken to directly about Iraq. We were merely admonished to finish our plates with the mention of starving Iraqi children. We were told we’d have nightmares if we snuck peeks at the contraband Arabic newsmagazine circulating among my parents’ friends, the one with pictures of brutally wounded child soldiers. Growing up, the only impression I had of Iraq was one of vast blistering suffering. Those of us born in America were the guilty survivors, raised on an excess of food and American television, distant from our culture, the owners of shamefully sparse Arabic vocabularies.
But within this community, I was useful in exile for the first time. I edited the résumés and college applications of our new arrivals, wrote letters, and made calls. Someone was benefitting from my English.
Like Khawla, a striking woman in her early forties and the mother of three boys. She had been a teacher in Baghdad and the wife of an engineer. Now she was a single mother living in a Lakewood apartment. Her husband had worked at a power plant and was suspected to have been killed by insurgents with something to gain from keeping the power off. Prior to this, she’d enjoyed a comfortable life, surrounded by family and friends, never wanting for money or help with her children. She never thought one day she’d be living in America without a husband, that she’d have to support her children alone and learn a new language.
At her secondhand dining table, we studied together. She tutored me in Arabic and I tutored her in English. She was sharp, a fast learner who didn’t ask me to translate anything for her. She only wanted me to correct the essays she’d labored through with her “best friend,” the nickname she’d given to her Arabic–English dictionary.
The afternoon her ESL teacher assigned an essay on a terrible day in your life, Khawla told me of searching for her husband and winding up in the midst of a car bomb. The blast picked her up and threw her against a wall. When she came to, she was certain she was in hell. Bits of blood and flesh from the exploded bodies had burrowed into her mouth and nose, and clung to her face and clothes.
“In those days,” she added, “people would bring in their clotheslines and find the same kind of pieces of bodies on their clothes and sheets.”
Now I was the one on the frontlines, bringing home stories to tell my parents. I told them about Khawla, about our friends who’d just
