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“Aloo? Aloo? Hayati? Then tears. And, in a way, in a distant but very present and visceral way, as a young child then, I felt the trauma of war. The war I had avoided by accident. ”
by Sara Leana Ahmad
I remember this one evening when I was six watching the news with my family from our suburban home in the San Fernando Valley. During those days my mom was always crying. One of the first times I ever saw her cry was in those first days of the invasion, crouched under the dinner table, too ashamed to face us, wailing like I’d never seen since. With most of her family still in Iraq, everything was very real for her. She felt too guilty in her safety to take her eyes off the news. All day, all night, every word, every breath was the war. It was in her eyes and her motions and in our meals and in the air. Always dialing the phone, long distance rates, trying to reach her sisters or brothers or someone to find out if her family was okay. The phone would ring and sometimes an answer but always an abrupt cut. Aloo? Aloo? Hayati? Then tears. And, in a way, in a distant but very present and visceral way, as a young child then, I felt the trauma of war. The war I had avoided by accident. My parents having only meant to stay here for two years. And yet it wasn’t mine to feel. I wasn’t there, I had never even been there, and there is deep and unrelenting confusion in that. And I remember this one evening when I was six, watching the news with my family, or rather, listening from the other room. It was always on. We could not turn the war off. I remember my mother suddenly changing the channel. Maybe she had changed it before or turned it off at times, but I only remember this one moment. She changed the channel and it was some other news program, but this time the hour-long segment was about a wealthy woman in Malibu and her trauma of having lost her home in a random fire. Just her. The camera would close in on salvaged photographs, edges burned, and her tears. For an hour. I remember thinking or maybe even asking my mom why we saw her face and her home and her tears. I remember feeling angry then, at six years old, that this woman got an entire hour for everyone to feel something for her. And I remember growing more and more bitter and resentful at school, knowing that these kids would easily shed a tear for that one Malibu woman, but never feel a thing for any Iraqi.
Sara Leana Ahmad is an Iraqi American educator, writer, and keeper of family stories who is based in Los Angeles. Her food blog, Add a Little Lemon, approaches the Iraqi diaspora from the perspective of the second generation’s internal dilemma. Ahmad has hosted pop-ups from Los Angeles to Beirut, was a Saveur Blog Award finalist, has been featured in Food 52, Buzzfeed, Middle East Eye, and the Arab American National Museum, among others, as well as the cookbook anthology A House With a Date Palm Will Never Starve (2019).
Banner image of Iraq is by Levi Meir Clancy and downloaded from unsplash.com