Thursday, 8/28/2008
This evening, while sitting in the van taking us to Ainkawa, I listened as one of my colleagues told me a story about a man who was trying to make an escape through Turkey and had to hide money in capsules and swallow them in order to get it past the officials. The Turkey officials eventually caught on to this little trick and devised a way to get them to poop it out or something by feeding them some sort of oil. This same man was captured, imprisoned and tortured with starvation and who knows what else for 2-3 months and nearly died because he found a razor and slashed himself all over trying to end his misery.
“Where did you hear this story? Was it a news article, or a movie?”
No, he said, it was Hazhar- one of our shuttle drivers. Hazhar, the one who so attentively helped me through my first shopping experience at Naza mall as I struggled to find the olive oil and understand the Arabic price tags. Hazhar who is no more than 30 years old! I would never have guessed that such a story was hidden behind that kind, unassuming face.
“Would you like to hear another story, even worse than the last one?”
I listened as he told me his own story and the story of many thousands of Kurds who were victims- as well as partakers- of horrible, atrocious acts of violence, of seeing streets strewn with body parts at the age of 12, of the largest diaspora in human history, of being trapped on the road with no food or drink for 7 days and being forced to drink water from a river which other fleeing Kurds were shitting and pissing into just a few meters away, of rebellion and revenge and the absolute evil of Saddam Hussein. As I took all this in, I couldn't believe that this was the true, personal story of the man sitting before me, a story told so casually and matter-of-factly that he would even pause to smile- and even laugh- in between takes.
The storyteller is also all of 30 years old, and I often characterized him to myself as a happy-go-lucky, theatrical man who looks like he came straight out of an old British comedy. But this was no ordinary comedy- more of a tragicomedy that is apparently all-too common a story among the Kurds I see and interact with on a daily basis now. You would not expect this just from seeing their faces. I am slowly coming to realize that in terms of representation, the face is not capable of doing justice to the horrors that the human soul is capable of undergoing- or causing in the case of people like Saddam Hussein and militants who rip fetuses out of pregnant women's bellies before burning the mutilated women to death. People like me have only experienced a tiny fraction of the huge range of emotions and acts that we are capable of undergoing. What must they think when they see us foreigners with genuinely happy smiles on our faces?
“You can never be truly happy, you know?” said my colleague.
I can only imagine, but by luck or chance or the grace of God, no I don't know.
Later, I was staring out the window and suddenly a truck carrying a family of 6 pulled up next to the van. Two of the children were sitting in the open-air trunk (a very common sight in Erbil), and with them was a live sheep, peeking curiously into the window at the other two children whose faces were squashed up against it.
“Is that sheep a pet or dinner?” I asked.
“A pet?” answered the Scot, “Don't be ridiculous, it's take-out!”
It was the funniest thing I'd seen all day.
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