Mariam Bazeed - War and Popcorn

 

The year is 1990, and my twin brother and I are six years old. We've repurposed our dining room table into a bomb shelter. Now, the reason for this was real. Iraq had actually just invaded Kuwait. And so, we were living there. My parents told us that if ever we heard rockets come too close to our house, that we should run to the dining room table and get under the wood, so that we'd be protected from the falling rubble. So, we did this a couple of times, like drills, my twin brother and I, for fun. But we weren't really taking this too seriously, because literally nothing had ever happened in Kuwait, except for the discovery of oil. [audience laughter]

 

My life proceeded like clockwork there, pick up from school at 3 o' clock, then we go home and have lunch, which always started with clear vegetable soup, and then dishes and then communal family nap time. [audience laughter] It was like my life was so regular that we didn't need an alarm clock to know when it was time to wake up. So, the idea that there would suddenly be like rockets falling on our dining room table, I was like, “All right.” [audience laughter] 

 

There's a lot of foreign labor in Kuwait because of the oil money. My family is Egyptian. I'd been born in Kuwait, but that didn't give us citizenship rights there. So, our stay there was contingent on someone in my family having a work visa, right? So, my parents were discussing this, “What do we do? What do we do?” They decided that my mother would take my twin brother and I back to Egypt, where we were from and where we spent every summer, and my father would stay in Kuwait during the war to anchor us there. 

 

Now, my parents were really strong believers in the resilience of children, which made them really bad communicators. [audience laughter] So, they didn't really discuss [chuckles] what the plan was with us. But we packed our stuff up and with a cooler of food in the backseat of the car, we drove to the border. In 1990, there's 500,000 Kuwaiti nationals living in Kuwait. There are 1.5 million foreign nationals living there. We outnumber them 3:1. So, if you can imagine, at the border between Kuwait and Iraq, there's this enormous line of cars of families going back, either temporarily or permanently, to where they were actually from. 

 

And so, we drive up. There's a border agent, and you have to take everything out of your car, and they inspect everything, and they have a little mirror at the end of a stick and they look at the underneath of the car. And so, we do all of this. They look at our documents and we load the car back up and then my dad just doesn't get into the driver's seat and he says, “Be good, Take care of your mother. I'll see you. See you.” [laughs] He hugs us. And then my mother gets behind the steering wheel and we're supposed to drive this way. 

 

And my father is literally the only person going back into Kuwait, because to review, there's a war on. [audience laughter] There's no public transport going down that way. I'm just looking behind at the rear-view mirror and watching him get shorter in the desert and being like, “How is he going to get home?” I know how distressing this sounds, but actually, I was young. And also, the idea of saying goodbye to people abruptly was just an everyday part of my life as a daughter of people who had migrated for labor. There was someone who was always in between school years just leaving, right, because their family had repatriated. 

 

The first goodbye that I said to a close family member, I was two years old when my sister, who had been my primary caregiver up until that point, had to go back to Egypt to start college. So, this idea that I would just suddenly have to say goodbye to my dad and then like, “See you when I see you,” was just a part of my life. It was every day. 

 

There was something exciting about going home to Egypt. It was the place we spent every summer, it was really exciting. There are great beaches there, our cousins were there, horseback riding lessons were there. So, I was excited a bit to be going back home. But then, being somewhere for a summer and then having to resume your life somewhere are two different things. I found that I didn't like Egypt when I had to just be living there. I didn't have any of my stuff, and I really hated the school that I went to. Everything was unfamiliar. I didn't like my teachers. 

 

I began every single morning just wailing. When I say every single morning, I mean that literally, like every day for the time that I was at that school, every single day I cried. I'd have to get peeled away from my mother. So, I was famous for it at the school [audience laughter] that I went to. Because at six years old, it actually takes a lot of stamina to make a huge scene every morning. [audience laughter] So, I was that kid. 

 

And then, it actually got to the point where this woman who ran the canteen thing that you could buy snacks in the playground and stuff, she would take pity on me. And every morning would like, wait until I'd been peeled away from my mother and was still weeping in the corner, and she would come to me and bring me to sit next to her at the canteen and give me an enormous bag of salted popcorn and a huge glass bottle of Coca Cola, second breakfast, [audience laughter] and I would sit there and just eat the whole thing and drink the whole thing and then start to feel like a little bit all right. [audience laughter] 

 

And one day, she actually met my mom. She came and met her and said, “Hi, your daughter has been eating my food all term and hasn't paid me for it.” [audience laughter] She just told her an arbitrary number of what my mother owed her. I was in a lot of trouble. I know she was a poor person in a poor country, but I was still hurt. It wasn't just me who was having a hard time, right? So, I was crying in the morning and my mother was crying at night, The Bazeed family. [audience laughter] I didn't understand that. I was like, “What's wrong with you? You're from here. [audience laughter] You were born here. This is where you're from. This is what's familiar to you. This is where you've been telling me we're going to come back to eventually. Why are you so upset?” Like, “You're home, supposedly.” 

 

But yeah, the adults in my life didn't seem any less dislocated than I was. But while I could generate all the energy I needed just internally, my mother needed a visual aid. Her visual aid was this concert that had been composed about the war very hastily. And that aired on the local channel every single night. And so, she would listen to this and just be sobbing, and I would be watching her listening to this and be sobbing. The lyrics went something like this, [foreign language] which translates into “Our hearts quake.” It's directed at the Prophet. “Our hearts quake, because in this war, both the victim and the aggressor are Muslim,” so we're fighting our own people. And so, my mother would listen to this and cry and listen to this and cry. 

 

Thankfully, the occupation didn't actually last very long. So, our time in Egypt finally came to an end. [audience laughter] The Americans had come in, and the war ended very quickly after that. And in exchange, of course, America got to protect its oil interests in the Middle East and also negotiate permanent military and air force bases in the Middle East, in addition to all the other permanent military bases that the United States has in the Middle East. Because nothing is free. Not war, not popcorn. [audience laughter] 

 

So, the war was over and I was coming-- We were going to Kuwait home and I was so excited to be seeing my dad. We flew back, and I remember he met us in the arrivals hall. All of us were so excited to see him. My twin brother and I ran towards him, and my mother still got there first. [audience laughter] She kissed him on the cheek. It's the only time I've ever seen them do that in public in my whole life. 

 

So, we grab our luggage and then we go outside to the car. I notice as my dad's loading the car up that there's actually a bullet hole in the trunk of our red Chevrolet Impala. In the trunk. If the war had been in black and white for me up until that point, seeing that bullet hole was suddenly everything was just Technicolor. I just kept looking at the trunk of our car, and looking at where the steering wheel was, and then the trunk and the steering wheel and being like, “Actually, that's not a very big distance.” 

 

But we got in the car, and in the weeks after the end of the Iraqi occupation, everything on the radio was just like celebratory music composed for the end of this occupation. And on the radio, there were all these Kuwaiti children singing, “Welcome, welcome, Bush. Thank you. Thank you, Bush.” 

 

We drove home. I could see there was a clear effort that had been made in the apartment to welcome us home. My dad had dusted. [audience laughter] He'd made us our favorite meal that he makes. But there is something that still just felt so still about the inside of our home and something that was just so different about it and unfamiliar. But it was still it was good to be back together as a family. We were sitting down at the dining room table and this was finally a chance for my dad to actually tell us what the war had been like for him that we'd left him in the middle of. 

 

Because while the whole time we'd been in Egypt, we'd only been able to speak to him once a week for three minutes, which is not a lot of time. You don't get to tell any stories really in three minutes. And so, he's telling us about one day, when the rockets had actually gotten too close to our house. He had been in the shower. He panicked. And with soap suds covering his body, he grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist and then ran into the desert barefoot to get away from the lights.

 

I just remember feeling so ashamed at that moment that these were the stories that my dad had from the war, right, this bullet hole that he never talked to us about and then this image of my father running naked in the darkness, scared for his life. He had to leave, because dining room tables don't protect you from rockets actually. It was for me a moment of realizing that I'd been lied to about a lot of things in my life. It was a lie that American imperialism has ever or will ever save anyone. It was a lie that Egypt or Kuwait could be home for me when I needed a visa to stay in one place, and when I'd never actually lived in the other and the wood of that dining room table wouldn't have protected me. Thank you.