Being the only one leaves a mark: a Black mother on the long shadow of school segregation
I’m sitting in the auditorium at my children’s elementary school. On stage is a multiracial group of kids in a circle singing a K-pop song – in Korean – for the annual talent show. The gym floor that doubles as theatre seating is full of parents, teachers, caregivers and supporters of all kinds.
I scan the demographics in the room like a statistician, curious at how diverse it is. Craning my head to discern how many languages are being spoken around me, how many nations are represented. I wonder about the span of ages, people with disabilities, and race. Always race.
It’s beautiful. A moving, living thing. A diverse community in action, teeming with difference. But then I think of the dread I often feel walking through the school playground at pickup time. Same school but, somehow, a different demographic.
In the leafy, progressive part of northwest Washington DC, where I live, social and cultural divisions are clearly on display on playgrounds. Nannies from various countries gather in groups to socialize, always keeping a watchful eye on the babies and toddlers in their care. Mothers who can afford not to work wear expensive workout gear accessorized with even more expensive baby gear. And there is the still unusual and often solitary dad on playground duty for whatever reason.
We joined our local school when our eldest was four years old; he’s now 10. We deliberately chose it for its warmth, small size and history of cultural diversity. We have friends here. And yet, my discomfort on the playground remains because I belong to several groups and none at the same time.
I’m often the sole Black mother walking through a sea of white parents. The tide of whiteness regularly swallows up everything other than itself and I feel starkly exposed and different.
Our school is one of the more racially diverse in this part of town and yet much of the social activity that surrounds it – the Parent Teacher Association, fundraising, volunteering and life on the playground – feels dominated by white parents. Parents of color are underrepresented. Is it because they don’t feel welcome? Is it a problem of distance, free time, work schedules or financial pressures? I have struggled with participating for all these reasons.
Let me be clear: there are no dirty looks or any outward forms of exclusion – no hostility whatsoever. I am by no means walking through the torrent of rocks and spit and hatred spewed on the first families to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1950s. But I do hear those echoes somehow.
No one is throwing rocks, but being the only one leaves a mark. Washington DC is a notoriously segregated city and the school system has always shown the evidence, even in its most “liberal” spots.
For me, there are echoes, there are ghosts.
•••
I am the granddaughter of Drs Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, psychologists and educators whose research with African American children was central to arguments that led to the 1954 Brown v Board of Education supreme court decision to desegregate public schools.
My grandparents designed a study commonly known as “the doll test”, in which they used four dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s racial perceptions. Black and white dolls were presented to children to help determine their preferences and sense of self. Most of the children preferred the white dolls to the Black ones. They said the Black dolls were “bad” and the white dolls looked most like them, reflecting not how they actually looked but how they wanted to be.
The findings helped the supreme court to conclude that segregation was detrimental to the self-esteem of Black and white children, and that “separate but equal” was a doctrine that should not stand.
On the day the court handed down its decision, my grandparents were thrilled. My mother, Kate, who is now 82, recalls: “There was such joy. People calling up, people coming by. It was just ecstasy. People were so happy, my father making a lot of noise, yelling and carrying on.
“There was euphoria but very quickly everybody knew that it wasn’t going to be utopia, that this wasn’t going to happen easily and indeed, it didn’t happen easily in the south,” my mother says. “The north was actually worse than the south, not by law, but by neighborhood, because Black people lived in this neighborhood and then they went to that school.”
In the seven decades since the Brown decision, various local and national programs to enforce school integration such as busing, which involved transporting students to schools in different neighborhoods to improve racial diversity, have been largely unsuccessful, met with vitriol, violence and crucially a lack of will to train teachers, community leaders and families about how to connect after generations of social and economic apartheid.
Almost 80 years after my grandparents completed the doll test, segregation remains a fact of life in much of America.
•••
My childhood is filled with memories of my grandparents’ house in the near suburbs of New York City, overlooking the Hudson River. It was full of music, smells and people traffic during holidays, or any given Sunday.
My mother remembers extraordinary people – James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Jacob Lawrence, John Hope Franklin – as dear family friends; they would gather and talk, laugh, eat, argue. In her memory and my own, the house was filled with life.
At other times, the house was museum-quiet. The library, a gift from my grandmother to my grandfather, had high sloping ceilings and oddly shaped windows, and a massive desk that dwarfed us all. Books upon books were interrupted by paintings and sculptures as well as medals and awards with one or both of their names engraved.
My grandfather, who wore tortoiseshell glasses, would be there writing and studying, with his pack of Marlboro red cigarettes never far from his hands. He did not seem to bear the visible scars of racism; he carried an urbane, professorial dignity and could never be referred to as anyone’s “boy”.
On some Saturday mornings, my grandmother would heat an iron comb on the gas stove and use it to straighten my and my sister’s hair. My sister and I sometimes went to the attic to touch her clothes: taffetas, fur, embroidery, African prints, silks. My grandmother was available and warm in her own way, while also being impossibly beautiful and elegant. She held herself and others to incredibly high standards. Raised as a Black woman in the deep south, she knew she had to be twice as good.
It all sounds grand as I write this and yes, my grandparents had risen to a social class that defied the rules for who could be upwardly mobile in US society. They were the first two Black PhD graduates in psychology from Columbia University, and they founded the first Black thinktank in the US. My grandfather was the first African American president of the American Psychological Association. He was a university professor and the author of several books on the subject of inequality in American cities and its consequences on children and communities of color.
Together my grandparents founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem – a center for children and families that supports behavioral, mental and educational health. It was one of the first centers of its kind, founded over 70 years ago and still in operation today. The contributions they made in their fields continue to influence families, students, professors and lawmakers.
But it is also true that no matter how much opportunity or privilege they may have had access to, there would always be sharp reminders of our status as Black people in the US.
My grandfather, in particular, gained national renown as a champion of racial integration. Born to Jamaican parents and arriving in the US via Ellis Island, he had an immigrant’s faith that every child, if given the right tools, could claim their share of the American dream. He thought education was the key. He therefore rejected the calls of 1960s radicals for Black nationalism and separatism.
Later in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, he became known as an elder in civil rights circles, a thinker, a leader – and always an “integrationist”, as the title of a 1982 New Yorker magazine profile put it. But the term was not always meant to flatter. To join forces with white people has always been charged territory for many Black activists, as marginalization and racism continue to be insidious even in the most enlightened, the “safest”, of spaces.
My grandfather was not afraid to be contrary and could easily be stubborn in the face of criticism. He certainly received it from all sides. Some found him arrogant and committed to respectability while others thought he pushed too hard. He moderated several televised roundtables and discussions with his peers, notable thinkers and activists of the day including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and his friend James Baldwin, bringing together disparate perspectives that he didn’t always agree with.
He wasn’t so much interested in consensus but solutions, and he was willing to get his reputation a little dirty in the process. He even seemed to enjoy a little bit of conflict, knowing he had refuge in a tight circle of friends and confidants – above all in my grandmother. He never recovered his spark after she died too soon.
•••
When my grandparents moved the family from Harlem in the late 1950s, my mother was furious at her parents for taking her away from her friends and her life back in the city. “I felt alone. I wasn’t happy with the suburbs at all,” she says. “I didn’t like my school. I was the only Black child in my class. At recess the other children would avoid me or stare. I felt terrible. I felt my parents were torturing me by bringing me into this environment. I was mad at them for years for not getting it. They didn’t seem to see that it was a problem.”
My mother decided to respond by working hard and being a suc
cessful student, eventually becoming president of the honor society – though she was not welcome to join her classmates socially or in their homes.
I went to the same middle school, in the same predominantly white suburb as my mother, and was successful too. I was also more able to integrate socially. I found a little group of friends and was invited to dinner and parties and sleepovers, though I can’t say that I ever truly found connection or community. I had a nagging, subtle sense of not belonging. My fellow students would ask to touch my hair and express curiosity about my “exotic” life even though I lived in the same small world they did. I did not find my people there.
Later, I switched to a private high school in Manhattan. It was my choice: the quiet streets of our provincial town were no match for New York City and all its cultural delights. I also had a desire to achieve and contribute in the way I saw my parents and grandparents doing. That education might be the way forward was not lost on me. The school was and still is known for educating an elite class of movers, shakers, achievers – it is said that those who can afford these schools are purchasing a near guarantee of success later in life.
There were more students of color than in my previous school but still not many, and often they were city kids, not soft and suburban as I felt. It seemed that the Black and Hispanic students were there to diversify the population, more as a feature of the place rather than a part of it. Academically, I fared well; internally, I was trying to keep my head above water.
Black boys, in my view, were often the most othered, stereotyped and made to suffer for being different, a problem we have not yet solved in or out of the classroom. I learned firsthand that the consequences of that pressured environment could harshly affect students of all races; the evidence was clear in drug and alcohol abuse, mental health problems and social dysfunction. I carry the scars from that time and worry that my own son will suffer through unconscious bias or indifference to his glowing potential, as I have witnessed among so many of my male counterparts and relatives, regardless of the type of school he attends.
College was different for me. Finally, I found true racial diversity and I found my people – friends who shared my interests and my quirks, who brought out my strengths and softened my insecurities. Most of my new friends were Black. Some would call it selfsegregation, but I found home with the people that looked like me, understood me and felt like family.
I went even further by spending a semester at Spelman College in Atlanta, the well known historically Black college for women.
I told my grandfather, feeling proud of my choice. It was the only time he ever shut me down. He openly disapproved, implying that I was limiting myself. I wish I could have made him understand that my choice was based in love for us – our community and myself. My grandmother had died years earlier and I believe she might have understood – I wanted to study with those amazing Black female academics and sit with my sisters as we did it.
My time at Spelman remains a magical moment in my memory. The friends I made and still have, the professors who nurtured both my feminism and femininity, a culture that fed all of my cravings – that period is golden in my mind.
My grandfather died in 2005, deeply disappointed that the systems of racism and segregation in housing and schools remained entrenched, his vision for the country unfulfilled. My mother says: “My father died a very angry man because he was confronted with segregation in every way.”
Her husband – my father – Don Harris, 82, a civil rights activist in his youth, adds: “He became increasingly depressed and bitter about what the future would look like. Both he and my own father were bitter that things hadn’t moved faster and been more positive for Black people.
“Kenneth’s grand scheme, at the end, is so dependent upon white people to make it work and the reality is that none of us really trust white people. You’re not going to put all your trust and confidence and hope in them to make the dream happen. If you do that, you’re not going to have a dream; it won’t be realized, it will be deferred, once again.”
•••
David, the father of my children, my husband, is white – though he is British, not American (and full disclosure: he’s a journalist at the Guardian). The caveat counts for me because, while the UK’s history is also full of racial violence, abuse and degradation, that is another mess. This is my mess. I grew up here in these spaces, I played as a child in these playgrounds; the marks don’t wash away with time.
I’ve thought so often about what my grandparents would have made of my husband. In truth, I think they might have been suspicious or wary before they truly knew him. Although they had warm, productive and close relationships with white people in their work, my sense is that they were keenly aware of the sharp difference between social integration and the educational integration they fought for.
I have always been socially adventurous; I sought connection everywhere I might find it. But as I began to seek a life partner I always hoped that I would end up with someone like my father, for his spirit but also for his Blackness.
In the end, I believe I did find the things I wished for, but in ways I hadn’t planned on. I have no doubts about my choice of a life partner, but I have struggled with finding a sense of place for us and our family. The sharp focus on racial division that intensified during the first waves of the pandemic; my grief during the still painful season when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered; the fight to silence America’s racial history in schools – these things churn my insides, the repetitions and reverberations of intolerance. I struggle with how much whiteness we live with, how it might damage me or my children.
Like me, my elder brother, Scott, is in an interracial marriage, and national statistics show such partnerships at an all-time high. Yet Scott, 56, is pessimistic: “As a divided country, we’re divided on race more than ever now. A lot of people want to go back to what they say is simpler times but that’s a euphemism for when people knew their place.”
The author Toni Morrison was so visionary as to exclude whiteness altogether from her cultural conversation. That does not appear to be an option for me, not only because I have an interracial family, but was it ever possible as a child of those who found integration to be the way forward?
As much as I wish it wasn’t true, my identity, journey, history, past, present, future are linked to this interconnection – the best and the worst of it. •••
I am now used to our predominantly white-centered playground, so I regularly come to gather my children and wave to the familiar faces, wishing them a great summer, or happy holidays, and “Yes, let’s arrange that playdate”. And I mean it. They are warm and so am I.
But this other thing is true too. That in our decidedly American way, we can live in the center of horrifying inequity knowing full well that the world should not be organized in this way.
The immediate instinct as a parent is to look after your own, keep your children safe and thriving and give them the conditions in which to bloom. My children are not navigating physical violence or poverty but there are dangers we live with every day: the psychological violence of invisibility and insignificance, the world telling them that they don’t matter. That violence links them to children who are faced with the more immediate threats and consequences of inequality and segregation; it links me to the generations I came up with and those before me who were excluded directly or subtly. All those ghosts.
My mother counsels me to focus my faith in my children and trust their foundation and my own to forge our path. My father agrees that there is no safe place for my son. This world will find him more and more threatening as he grows, though he is the one under threat. No school can fix the problems we face as Black people in the world, economic, social, judicial, educational – take your pick.
I continue to struggle with what is. I’d give anything to ask my grandparents what they think I should do not only for my son but for all the sons and daughters who are living with less than they deserve. By sending our children to schools within this broken system, am I repeating what I experienced, blindly digging into the same groove without progress?
What I’m grappling with now is not the one-room schoolhouse in the deep south where only Black children were permitted, where they were treated like family, even if there were not enough books to go around. I’m talking about the inverse: where everyone is supposedly invited but only very few have access to opportunity even from the inside.
I have seen the same distressing patterns repeat in generation after generation in my own family. My nephew, Myles, 25, who began his university experience at a predominantly white college in Indiana, says: “There were no direct racial slurs or anything towards me personally but I could tell in some interactions inside and outside of the classroom that many were learning how to coexist with Black people.
“There would be a lot of questions, a lot of curiosity surrounding, ‘Why do you do that?’ I got tired of the effort I had to put forth to try and fit in. I was just tired of trying to put forth an image and effort in trying to coexist so I just retreated into my own shell.”
Myles withdrew after a year and transferred to Howard University, one of our most heralded HBCUs. His two younger sisters followed and both have matriculated there. He explains: “I just felt more comfortable. I realized, OK, yeah, I’m good now, I’m here, I’m free to explore.
“There is something about being in an environment where you can connect with someone on a non-verbal level and just understand versus having to put effort to try and fit in. The less effort you have to put in to actually learn and grow and be in an educational endeavor, the more successful you’ll be in finding whatever it is you like or want to do.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise that all three of my sister’s children have chosen and thrived at Howard in the ways that I did at Spelman. My grandparents met and married while at Howard University; the seeds of their doll study and lifetime of collaboration began there. •••
My daughter, who is nine, is obsessed with dolls. I have made it my business to make sure her dolls reflect the colors of my family. I would be mortified to do the doll test on my own daughter and have it turn out the “wrong” way. Her prized doll was made to look like a mini replica of her: freckled, golden, red and bronze. Not Black or white but certainly steeped in both.
My 10-year-old son is very happy in his social life. The majority of his friends are kids of color, often interracial, internationally mixed children as he is. They seem to recognize one another and flock together.
A new school year is well under way and the playground looms for me still. It’s not my favorite place but I’m pushing myself to sit in the discomfort and spend a little more time there. It is a perfect container for the dynamics of belonging and isolation, conscious or unconscious, race or class related, passive or aggressive. All of this ricochets inside me and I’m thinking about my grandparents again, wishing I could talk with them and ask them for an answer.
History’s rhythms repeat, rhyme and skip through the generations in my family …the way a flat rock skips on a wide lake. I like to imagine my grandmother on the Howard campus, here in Washington DC where I live. I visit the campus often these days and each time I pause hoping to catch a glimpse of her ghost – happy and free, blooming and inspired with the good work to come.
She wanted all children to feel that they belonged, despite the system that tells us only some truly do. No matter how much you are loved or not loved, if the system did not call for you, you could gather up the scraps and do your best.
All four of my grandparents did that – and made sure that we knew there was no other choice than to spin straw into whatever kind of gold we could.
As much as I wish it wasn’t true, my identity, journey, history, past, present, future are linked to this interconnection – the best and the worst of it
enough to hold a single bed, a writing table and a trunk. A nook at one end housed the sink, the stove and the toilet. For decoration, I had painted one wall a bright orange-red, which amplified and radiated the hot Baghdad sunlight. The old air conditioner had died and I had no money to fix it. In the summer of 2002, the room was stifling hot, and I felt the walls were closing in on me. I hadn’t paid the rent for six months. As an architect working in private practice, I was paid $50 every few months. In the years of sanctions, I was doing ugly work for ugly people who had the money to afford their ugly houses. I wanted to leave the country, to travel and walk through the streets of different cities, but I was a military deserter, and without documentation I could not get a passport.
I had not been tortured by the mukhabarat, the regime intelligence service, nor did any of my family vanish into a mass grave, but like the rest of the nation, I was trapped with no hope and no prospects. What if, we wondered, the Leader were to become mortally ill one day? How would our lives change after his death? Would we be ruled by one of his sons? Would that be better than this? Worse? In the years before the invasion, I had felt that my life was seeping slowly away in that hot and oppressive place I called home. Now, aged 28, it seemed that a different life might be possible.
I went down to my room to listen to the news bulletin when the neighbour came knocking on my door. “The Americans are here,” he said with excitement.
“Yes, I heard on the radio that they had reached Hillah,” I said, referring to a city 60 miles south of Baghdad.
“Hillah?” the neighbour said with a grin. “They are here, down in the street.”
I went down, and I saw a few boatlike armoured amphibious vehicles spread around the intersection near my flat, as if the shores of Normandy lay just behind the buildings. They were slung with the soldiers’ large backpacks, covered in dust. Descending from one of these boats were American soldiers, like the ones we’d seen on TV, in my street, in my own city.
The soldiers spread across the road, knelt on a single knee and pointed their guns at us, the handful of people who stood watching them. Behind the soldiers came men dressed in blue vests and carrying big cameras. Their helmets bore the letters “TV”.
I sat on the kerb watching as the soldiers trained their guns at the buildings around them. One of the men in blue, tall with a bald head, and carrying two cameras with large zooms, was moving gingerly towards us, like a wildlife photographer approaching a herd of wild animals, not wanting to scare them away and yet not sure if they might charge him. He squatted a few feet in front of me and trained a long white lens at me; fuck off, I shooed him away, I didn’t want to become an item of news, another face of a defeated nation. The soldiers climbed back into their armoured boat-trucks and started driving down the road, past the national theatre and down Sadoon Street. A small crowd of men and children followed.
The armoured vehicles and the crowd moved slowly, passing in front of the Vatican embassy, where a papal diplomat, dressed in his black cassock with a purple sash around his waist, stood observing the invading army. He shook his head in disbelief and muttered to anyone who cared to listen that this was bad, that this was an illegal occupation. On the other side of the street, a chubby middle-aged Iraqi man, standing at the entrance of his shop, sputtered insults, but most of the crowd that followed the Americans was excited. The old and decaying regime had fallen. The armoured column came to a stop in front of the Meridian and Sheraton hotels, where most of the international media had set up base. In front of the hotels stood a large statue of Saddam, his right arm stretched awkwardly into the sky, inviting looks of scorn and spite from the crowd below, like someone still lingering uninvited long after the party was over.
I stood there watching, along with a few other Iraqis and a much larger crowd of foreign journalists, as a handful of enthusiastic men began banging at the plinth base of the statue with hammers and metal rods, succeeding only in cracking the marble cladding. It was taking the men a long time, and the journalists were getting bored, when one of the armoured vehicles, with a large crane on the back, started reversing into the middle of the square. A marine climbed to the top and dropped a thick rope around the neck, and then he pulled out an American flag. No, no, you can’t be doing this, I gasped, at least allow the facade of liberation to last for a day. But no, with all the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, he covered the face of the defeated dictator with the flag of his victorious nation; briefly, but long enough to seal the fate of the invasion in the eyes of many.
But then, why shouldn’t he raise an American flag? Maybe in all the declarations and justifications of the war by leaders and commanders who spoke of liberation and democracy, the act of that marine was the most honest; he understood the war as a conflict between the US and Iraq – a conflict that he and his countrymen had won. It was his right to plant a flag.
The armoured vehicle pulled, the statue resisted a bit, and then gave way just above the feet. It tumbled into the square with a hollow crash. Like his state, the Leader’s statue was only an empty cast with a single metal pillar inside supporting it. A dozen or so men jumped on the statue, beating it with chains and shoes. That iconic image has played again and again on every report on Iraq ever since, as if those men represented all the nation; their jubilation was a justification, even if briefly, for the madness that would follow. The head of the statue was dragged through the streets and more men spat on it and cursed it.
I met a friend, also standing in the square. We walked around the block imagining what would come next: the hopes, the future, and the anxieties. The Unicef building, less than 50 metres away from the square where the Americans had established their base, was in the process of being looted.
We met an old woman dragging a carpet from the directorate of dams and irrigation. “This is my money, Saddam stole it from me,” she said. The carpet was old and torn and worth nothing, but maybe she felt that this was a piece of the regime, part of Saddam’s tyranny and authority, and that claiming it might magically erase her suffering of the last few decades.
* * *
The next morning I found the garage of my building piled with junk: a desk chair flipped upside down, an old air-conditioning unit, computer cases and a couple of monitors stacked on top of each other, all looted from the Ba’ath party newspaper offices nearby. A neighbour and her two sons inspected the loot cheerfully. The doorman came into the garage carrying another computer case.
I decided to walk to the presidential palace. I wanted to see where the Leader had lived. I thought that the walls of the rooms and corridors where he walked, where he conferred with his closest aides and ordered the destruction of tens of thousands of his people, might get me closer to him, help me make sense of what he was and why he shaped our lives and our history the way he did. Or maybe it was my own act of desecration of the holy sanctum of power, an act of insolence just like that of the people looting.
It was still early and the streets were empty. Tongues of black smoke poured from the windows of buildings that had been looted the night before. There were American checkpoints, defended by young soldiers and coils of barbed wire; I talked my way through them by claiming that I was a British journalist and that the Iraqi police had confiscated my papers.
The combination of the knapsack on my back and my imitation of a World Service accent did the trick. I reached the Jimhouriya bridge and crossed the Tigris. At the entrance to the presidential palace complex, I passed an armoured vehicle. I asked the exhausted soldier who sat atop the vehicle behind a machine gun if I could go inside, and he waved me a through.
I walked through the tall arches of the gate and down the well-paved, clean road, lined with trees and rose bushes. Halfway down I came across a swollen and blackened corpse that lay to the side of the road. I hesitated, I hadn’t seen a dead man before, but kept walking.
The presidential palace loomed in the distance. Giant bronze busts of the Leader adorned its four corners. His moustached head, wearing a helmet in the shape of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, was peering from above with silent and solemn greatness, ignoring the insolent soldiers who had occupied his palace, continuing to stare at the distant horizon.
Inside, a young American officer gave me a tour of a massive dining hall, with a beautiful cascading wooden ceiling, now converted into a large dormitory with dozens of metal beds stacked next to each other. I wanted to walk further towards the intelligence headquarters, another symbol of the regime.
But the American told me that there was still fighting going on, so I walked back towards the gate, and hitched a ride with James Meek, a British journalist who worked for the Guardian. He hired me as his interpreter.
* * *
In the Baghdad of 2003, chaos reigned. All was permissible and everything was possible. Beer and whisky were sold on the pavements or from the boots of parked cars. Mobs ransacked government offices and ministries, apart from the Ministry of Oil, protected by American tanks. They gutted factories, pulled the doors off their hinges and stripped electrical wiring from the walls, and then sold the looted equipment as scrap metal. Weapons and ammunition from looted military camps and depots were traded on the open market. In the months and years to come, these arsenals would sustain civil wars in Iraq and Syria, with some smuggled out to nourish distant wars in Yemen and Somalia. Soviet jet fighters, hidden in the deserts outside military bases to save them from American attacks, lay half buried in the sand like the skeletons of beached whales. They, too, were stripped of their weapons and metal plates. But there was probably nothing more painful and damaging than the pillaging of the Iraqi Museum. Nearly 15,000 items were looted, most disappearing for ever.
Armed mobs roamed the city looking for plunder. What they couldn’t claim, they set on fire, like the national library, or the TV and radio archives that burned for days. In central Baghdad, I saw the smoke rising from the windows of the directorate of nationality: the archives and registries of a century were burning. Yes, destroy everything, I thought to myself with the naivety of the self-righteous. Why do we even need the directorate of nationality? Didn’t Saddam manipulate everything for his own interest? Didn’t he deport tens of thousands, and strip millions more of their will to live? Wasn’t our whole state a construct of his will? So why not destroy everything, and from the carnage a new country will be born, with no fear or oppression, where everyone will be equal and prosperous?
The “Great Leader” had dominated our lives and moulded the whole nation in his image for decades. So when his statue was toppled and people wanted vengeance for the years of oppression, they not only destroyed the symbols of his power, his palaces, his statues and murals, they also turned their anger on anything that symbolised the state, because the state was Saddam and Saddam was the state, as he used to say. Even words like citizenship, solidarity, patriotism were soiled because they were associated with his rule. In that destructive atmosphere many, foreigners and Iraqis, were willing to tear the very concept of an Iraqi state apart completely.
The poor moved out of their wretched, overcrowded neighbourhoods and started building on military camps and government lands. These new slums of one-storey concrete shacks with rivulets of oily green sewage and heaps of trash were called Hawassim, after the name of the Leader’s last battles – and the same name given to those who subsequently acquired colossal wealth.
* * *
It was also a time of grim discovery, of unearthing the horrors committed by the regime and its men. Mass graves were discovered near prisons, or on remote roadsides, where thousands of men had been buried after the failed 1991 uprising.
Bulldozers exhumed what was left of their bodies amid heaps of dry yellowish-grey earth. Women draped in black wailed and scratched their faces in grief over piles of bones and skulls that lay on plastic sheets, as a hot, dry and dusty wind blew. Some could identify their missing one from a picture stashed in a pocket, or an ID card; others hurriedly gathered bones, any bones, to bury and finally have a grave at which to mourn their lost children. In their homes, families hung pictures of relatives who had been executed or long since disappeared by the regime; they were now able to show their pride in people who up until a few weeks ago they had striven to hide and disown. In other houses, a rectangle of white appeared on grimy walls where the portrait of the Leader had recently hung.
The history that had been written by the Leader was unravelling, and
people demanded that the lies be corrected. They wanted compensation and amendments for the oppression, a redress of the wrongs committed against them for decades. And just as these mass graves were exhumed, local conflicts, grievances and struggles were coming to the surface after decades buried under the monolithic power of the regime. In late April 2003, I watched thousands of people march to the city of Karbala, their feet kicking up a thick cloud of dust. They were commemorating the Arba’een, marking 40 days after the day of Ashura when Imam Hussein had been killed 12 centuries earlier. It is traditionally a day of sadness and mourning – people weep and beat their chests – but on that occasion, it was also a day of joy, because for the first time in decades Shias were allowed to freely express a religious and cultural identity long suppressed by the Leader. It was an extreme contrast to how the day of Ashura had been observed a few weeks earlier, just before the war, when I had sat in the Khadimiya, the biggest Shia shrine in Baghdad, and watched a few people shuffle quickly in and out.
In May 2003, I met an old man in a poor and crowded suburb of eastern Baghdad. He sat on an empty tin box, with a broad smile drawn across his face. He said the Americans who had brought all these tanks and planes would fix everything in a matter of weeks.
They would bring electricity and turn his wretched neighbourhood into heaven. He spoke as if he could see his tiny alleyway already transformed, the sewage flowing next to his feet disappearing, the poverty dissipating, the houses of concrete cinder blocks cleaned up and freshly painted. But weeks and months passed, and the situation was only getting worse. The collective intoxication of Iraqis at the end of the regime wore off quickly, and the people of Baghdad moved from euphoria to frustration and then fury.
When they wanted to go to hospitals they found them looted. Schools had either been burned down or were occupied by squatters. There was no one in control and public services had collapsed. Mile-long queues had formed outside petrol stations because oilwells and refineries had been damaged in the looting. Electricity failed because there was no fuel for the power plants and because transmission towers and high-voltage cables had been stripped and sold as scrap copper. With no electricity, water pumps and purification plants stopped running and raw sewage was piped into the rivers. Doctors and nurses carried guns and stood guarding the few hospitals and clinics that had not already been ransacked.
American soldiers, stupefied by the Baghdad heat, stood clueless amid that chaos, and Iraqis – accustomed to decades of efficient centralised bureaucracy – were baffled at the rash and arbitrary way the Americans were running the country. Everything was decided on the spur of the moment. Sometimes the soldiers tried to stop the looting, but mostly they just stood by; sometimes they tried to control the massive traffic gridlocks, while at others they drove their tanks into the middle of roads causing even bigger snarlups. The Iraqis could not believe that their new colonial masters had made no preparations for what was going to happen after the invasion. Or that the whole adventure was based solely on their might and the messianic half-beliefs of Bush and co. When the myth of American-generated prosperity clashed with the realities of occupation, chaos and destruction followed. All the suppressed rage of the previous decades exploded.
I abandoned my former life as an architect. I worked first as an interpreter and fixer, and was then promoted to news assistant – a glorified interpreter and fixer – leading a peripatetic lifestyle. For years I moved from one hotel room to another, travelling the width and length of Iraq. In reality, I – the Iraqi who had never left Iraq – was discovering my country for the first time, just as the foreign journalists were. My only advantage was that I spoke the language.
With my daily fees, an enormous fortune compared to the meagre salary I was paid as an architect, I bought a camera and I started taking pictures of the chaos unfolding around me. One picture got published, then another, and by 2004 I was hired as a stringer for a wire agency.
Around that time I published my first article in the Guardian. I wrote how both Saddam and I spent our first night in an American prison cell. The Leader had been taken earlier that day, and the American journalists for whom I was interpreting thought it unwise to show up in the Leader’s home town the day he had been captured by their government, so I volunteered to go and do some vox pops. On my way back that night we were stopped at a checkpoint north of Baghdad, and the American officer thought the driver and I looked suspicious. (Well, I did have a beard.) An hour later we were blindfolded and taken to an American military base and locked in a prison cell. We slept on the cold concrete floor, and the next day, when we were led out, I laughed at the irony of it all: we were in a former Iraqi military base, which the Americans were using, and I, who proudly spent years dodging my Iraqi military service and avoiding capture, was finally locked in an Iraqi military prison by my own supposed “liberators”. * * *
We were told, much later, that the adventure of the Iraq war was based on the myopic vision of a band of American neoconservatives, who – in their desire to project American power in a unipolar world – argued that regime change here would bring democracy not only to Iraq but the whole Middle East, bringing it closer to the US. The oil wealth of Iraq, they thought, would pay for its reconstruction. Some still use the same argument to preach war with Iran.
In May 2003, the UN security council bestowed posthumous legitimacy on the illegal war by granting the Americans “occupying power status” with all the happy connotations the word “occupation” has in the Middle East. After some weeks of faffing about, a new American administration was established, led by Paul Bremer, a close ally of the neocons in Washington. He became the viceroy and the ruler of the country, and was given sweeping legislative and executive powers reminiscent of a British proconsul of the Indian Raj. The new occupation authority – called the Coalition Provisional Authority, the CPA – was staffed by young, naive zealots who held unchallenged powers to reshape Iraq the way their masters wanted. They represented the worst combination of colonial hubris, racist arrogance and criminal incompetence. Many would later write books about their heroic struggle in the lands of the Arabs. Some of these CPA officials were put in charge of ministries, upending existing administrative systems. Others ran whole cities or provinces.
In Baghdad, the presidential palace, former government buildings and neighbouring streets became the green zone, the centre of the delusional administration. Access to the Americans in these chaotic days when blocks of dollars were handed out without oversight established the model of corruption that the new state would be based on. Contracts were inflated for projects that were never built, and in some cases, there was corruption within the CPA itself. Fortunes were made, corruption institutionalised. Long queues formed outside the gates of the green zone; they included the sincere who wished for American help in forming an NGO, the maverick tribal sheikhs who wanted recognition and financial subsidies, and opportunists looking for any niches they might exploit.
In the years since, many western writers and journalists have argued that Bremer’s first two fatal decisions – the disbanding of the Iraqi army and all security apparatuses, and the banning of members of the Ba’ath party from public jobs, both of which left hundreds of thousands of men without pension or salary – helped instigate the insurgency that would consume the country. These western pontificators lamented the stupidity of Bush and the neocons. If only, they said, they had done their homework and planned for the post-invasion Iraq, things could have been so different. But the truth is that the occupation was bound to collapse and fail, because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to instantly become a democracy. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.
The war that was based on a lie not only destroyed Iraq and unleashed a sectarian war that would engulf the region, but it permanently crippled democracy in the Middle East. So, democracy was another victim of the criminally incompetent administration. “You want democracy? Didn’t you see what democracy did to Iraq?” became the repeated refrain of dictators and potentates throughout the region.
Adapted from A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, published by Hutchinson Heinemann on 2 March and available from the Guardian Bookshop.
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