The outsider’s search for home
A life of upheaval and uncertainty has left Anna Gailani wondering about the true meaning of home.
I’m often asked where I am from – well-intentioned curiosity – and I find that I give different answers depending on who I am talking to.
I might talk about where I was born, where I have lived, or where I belong. They all seem to provide fragments of what home is to me.
I left Baghdad three decades ago. There were more reasons to leave than to stay. On a hot summer afternoon, I climbed into a taxi with my family to begin the journey.
Most people were inside sheltering from the sun, but I turned my head to take one last look and saw my grandmother in her house dress, her loose embroidered headscarf flying, leaning to reach us from a distance. She was throwing rice in our wake, making some ancient plea for us to come back safely. We never returned.
My first sense of home was when I lived with my elf-like, cotton white grandmother who had come to Baghdad as a child from some unknown faraway land. I had been sent to live with her because my mother had her hands full with my brother and sisters.
My grandmother had been widowed young and lived in a big house one block down the road. There, I would wake up to the sound of pigeons and the smell of freshly baked bread from the local bakery owned by a Kurdish family. Later in the morning, I would chase her grumpy turkeys instead of checking on the hens’ eggs as she had asked me to.
My grandmother would be cooking, and when I heard the ladle tapping twice on the edge of the old pot, I knew that lunch was ready, food simmered to perfection. That was the right time to ask Grandma for what she called a ‘‘token of patience’’ – a piece of bread dipped in a delicious broth of tomatoes and herbs.
My second recollection of home is from around the time I started school. My father had already been taken away by the Mukhabarat – Saddam’s pervasive intelligence service. He had been anti-Baathist and was made to disappear. He was only 39 years old and a skilled surgeon who saved lives – all life, be it pro-Baath or otherwise.
But the regime punished non-Baathists to the point that it cost them their lives and destroyed their families.
My mother was told of his death but could not visit his grave.
After my father was taken away, my young mother took on the burden of holding the family together and trying to keep us safe. There are still good memories.
Running around the shower in circles with my sisters to cool ourselves, and giggling until the water tank almost ran out. Safe at home, we spent our days immersed in Russian literature and Arab and Western music. I suppose we shut out the world. My mother was not accepted socially because she chose to live with her children alone. She did not seek the ready shelter of a second marriage, or return to her parental home after being widowed. She did not wear mourning clothes for the rest of her life, as was expected.
Her unconventional attitudes reflected wider dissident views which made for a precarious life. My mother would say, ‘‘Even if they came for us now, if the house was turned upside down, you keep studying, and I will take care of it.’’ But there was no escaping the reality that the world around me was an increasingly threatening place.
One morning, as I went to my friend Zahra’s house to join her for our walk to school, I found her family’s newly built home empty, the gate wide open. I peered in to find an abandoned place – a ghost house. I walked across the road to the little shop where an old man selling olive oil soap, pomegranate juice and fenugreek cakes told me they had been deported overnight. He said they probably went to Iran, where they originated from. At that time, Iraq and Iran were at war, and Saddam Hussein’s regime was plucking people of Iranian descent and ejecting them at the Iraq-Iran borders, never to be allowed to return to Iraq.
I stood there looking at Zahra’s house, and thought of my own family, outsiders for different reasons, but no less vulnerable, and with no one to intervene on our behalf if we upset someone important. I began to understand the crippling fear that my mother lived with.
We no longer felt safe, and increasingly she spoke of leaving. My sorrow was not so much about abandoning Baghdad as having to say goodbye to my extended family, in particular my beloved grandmother and aunt. I felt little attachment to the country, because we could no longer fit into a place synonymous with fear and persecution.
Yes, I still have fond memories of tagging along with my mother through crowded shopping alleys on River Street in the Old City, of hot chickpea soup served from a horse-led carriage roaming through our neighbourhood, and my brother and his childhood friends playing soccer in the street until dusk.
Later, as a teenager, I received a copy of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider from my brother, and I remember the lines, ‘‘Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.’’
Within my family, we labelled ourselves outsiders, and were willing to accept the proposition that we might need to find home somewhere else. The dislocation I felt was not because I left Baghdad; rather, it came as a result of living there.
A couple of years ago, I read in a university thesis of an Iraqi man who had moved to the USA and said, ‘‘Here is safety, we have everything available. But Iraq is home.’’ I strove for years to reach safety, so it seemed strange to me that someone would be nostalgic for a place of hurt.
The journey which began that day took us to Europe, and on to Athens. I arrived there knowing very little of how a more open society functioned. But the fact was that I was now a refugee in limbo and stuck in Greece.
I learned a new language and took on a local name easier for those around me to pronounce. I listened to bouzouki music and followed the nation’s politics. I studied and worked, all the while with a semi-legal status and a card that read ‘‘Alien’s Permit’’. In the meantime, my family and I tried repeatedly to resettle in a final destination country, but luck was not on our side, and the years passed.
Then one day in 2003, George W Bush put on a bomber jacket and, standing aboard the vast aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, announced that the major combat operation in Iraq was over.
The banner behind him read Mission Accomplished. For the Greek government, this meant it was time for Iraqis to go back.
For me and my family, however, return to Iraq was simply not an option. I was 32 years old and had been living in a quicksand of impermanence in Greece for two decades. Now my family had to move again. The thought was exhausting. I had tried hard to belong and achieved a fragile stability in Greece, and I certainly did not want to fall into another limbo.
My journey towards a safe home, where I could belong emotionally, physically and legally, had not yet finished.
And so I left Greece, on my own. A few days before my departure, I bought a ticket to the Acropolis – a ticket I could not really afford – and I climbed to take one last look across this marvellous city that had given me much but not home. I was not sad to leave, but it was hard to accept that after all this time my family and I were still not anchored to safety.
After an adventurous journey, I arrived in New Zealand alone, knowing absolutely no one and with nothing but my education. It is only now, after more than a decade, that I can say I am completely settled here.
Perhaps it may be more accurate to say that I am anchored here. In fact, at a concert I even thanked Don McGlashan for writing the song Anchor Me. Why has it taken so long to be anchored?
For refugees, the journey does not end when we arrive. The constant shifting and sudden changes in our lives create a fractured identity, and this fracture needs time to heal.
I never had a home. I did not know where to start to forge the ties of belonging. I missed neither Baghdad nor Athens; did not yearn for old neighbourhoods or childhood friends, and did not seek to unite with people from the diaspora. What I had learned well was how to survive.
As time went by, and thanks to the safety afforded to me in New Zealand, I have been able to reflect peacefully and come to realise that for me home is but a notion. There is no Ithaca for me to find. Home is not the place I am in, not a social group to which I should belong, not a religion in which I must believe, nor one specific ethnicity with which I identify. Home is not something I have lost, for how can I lose what I never had?
Home for me is my resilient and wise mother, my noble brother, my loving sisters, my aunt’s pure heart, and the thought of my grandmother resting in peace. Home is where one lives in safety and dignity.
They say home is where you hang your hat, and I have to say that my blue fedora seems to look just a little more in place each time I put it up on the hook in the hallway of my Auckland flat.