For a few hours I thought Dwayne was right about my country as he dissolved facts into a summary of my history. It was a night that I spent under the blanket feeling cold in a grueling hot Dubai summer outside. How could he understand everything I went through as an in Iraqi in Iraq? As an Iraqi whose family spent decades living targeted by Saddam forces.
Maybe I shouldn't have made such a big deal about it when he compared his president to Saddam. Maybe I should have let it go after hearing him say "They are turning the country into Iraq". Your people should stand up to their oppressive regimes, he said, for a few hours I thought he was right. He broke down our history in the matter of minutes, down from a Farhud where the government killed and exiled Jewish people all the way to Kurdistan getting bombed, maybe he was right, I thought.
I thought he was right as he told me the numbers of innocents victims our governments have killed throughout the years. You should have stood by the heroes in Basra when they revolted in the 90s, he said. His words kept hunting me for hours, for hours I thought about my mother hiding my sister's because the presidents son showed up at the hotel and was looking to have sex with someone. For hours I thought about my mom holding a knife waiting to pounce at him should he deem with lust that my sister is "Desirable".
For hours I thought about what was said by this American whose father is here to run an oil well in Dubai for 180 thousand dollars a year, along with insurance, benefits, and education fees for his family paid by the government. After all, he listed facts and connected them at a rate that would leave academic professors wowed. What do I know after all? As he exposed all of my education as a farce used to indoctrinate, a word I learned from him that day at Dubai mall, people into being minority hating antisemitic assholes.
For hours and hours I thought about how people from the west have us all figured out. Listing all of our problems and how to solve them and still have empty space on the paper to draw a self-portrait of themselves with a halo on top of their heads. You just need to stand up, he said, that is all what we needed to do, I believed it for hours. All of the sudden, something occurred to me and I fell into a deep peaceful sleep enjoying and treasuring the cold air from my air condition.
Next day, my father woke me up so I could join him at the mosque for Friday's prayer and speech. I remember not thinking about Dwayne at all while listening to the speech about the importance of treating our neighbors well. After that, I left the mosque to take a taxi to al- Khor park to join my friends to play football.
Throughout the day I could see him looking at me, expecting me to go to him say he was right and not just resort to silence like I did the day before after his speech. Beside the few seconds I would see him looking at me, I wasn't thinking about how "A Government is as Good as Its People", or how silent makes me complicit, or really any of the things I had heard from him the night before.
By the time we went to the local restaurant to eat after a tiring match, he gave up on me going to him and decided to come for me instead. "Hey", he said "Listen, no hard feelings about yesterday, right?" I shook my head with a smile saying no. But I knew that wasn't the end of it, I knew he wanted me to say more.
"About yesterday," He said "I didn't mean to upset you, I just needed to open your eyes about what is happening in your country. I understand how you feel, we are under the same type of regime, but the difference is, we are fighting it".
To me, it all sounded like just mint flavored air coming my way scented by the gum he was chewing. But I also knew at some point I was going to have to explain to him what can't be explained just so he would understand that he can't understand it.
I have in fact thought about what you said, I explained, for hours actually, but then I understood everything, fell asleep, and didn't think about you until now. I figured out that you are just a book worm, one that doesn't know about anything in the real world about which it is reading.
"Well," He exclaimed "That is rude"
Yes, it does sound that way, doesn't it? I elaborated, which is probably why we don't say that. You may know the concept of Saddam's mass graves and how around 300,000 people were buried in it. But you don't understand losing family, relatives and friends.
You also will never understand a mother taken away from her child to return years later to find him dead and physically dry. You may know what torture means and could list the different methods and tools. But you simply don't understand my father sleeping in his bed safely and then uttering apologies and begging for mercy in his sleep at the age of 62 far countries apart from his torturers who are now dead.
You could possibly list me facts about my country that I didn't even know using google and books in a second, but it would take me literal years and you may or may not understand what is it like to know that your uncle is "there somewhere" among the skulls of dead people.
You know the term dictatorship but you don't understand watching your mother panicking as she hides her daughters as she works in a hotel where the president's son decided to have sex with someone. You haven't seen your older sister wishing that she would be "Unwanted". You haven't seen a respectable singer forced to strip naked and sings happy songs in front of hundreds of people, including his family, who are forced to laugh and sing along so they wouldn't be next.
You don't understand watching your neighbor honor killed after a minister had raped her. You honestly don't understand thing. You were taught those terms, us in the Middle East lived it. You were taught about the ideologies, lies, methods, and head count results about mass graves. But the lecture ends there, so you don't know the aftermath of a mass grave where families search through skulls hoping to somehow find their 3 years old relative.
You also don't even understand Southern Kurdish Feyli stranded in the dessert, men, women, and children, between Iraq and Iran for days with neither letting you in. You haven't slept in the desert, you haven't stared helplessly onto your son as he asks you for water.
What do you understand about watching your father beg a baker for bread, or a grocery owner for food? You haven't been in prison where there is no food and people risking their lives to deliver you food then you get tortured because you ate and are still alive.
Honest to GOD, what do you know about dictatorships and someone being like Hitler or Saddam? Definitions? Do you understand what those are? Do you honestly understand being oppressed? When you are able to protest in the street, trust me, you are not being oppressed then. Being oppressed is barely being able to look up. It is not something you say, you see it in your neighbor's eyes just like he sees it in yours. Then you both walk in with your heads down and remain silent as someone might be listening from behind the walls in your own homes. You haven't lived that fear to understand it.
You were never told "Shut up or they will kill us" as a kid and it was honestly, statistically, and truthfully said. Stop trying to relate, you don't understand what it's like. You may have cried while hearing a survivor sharing a story, but they weren't relatives of yours.
You haven't seen your grandmother crying as her son's cellmate shares his last few days before getting executed and his body was never found. You haven't been woken up at 3 AM in pitch darkness to look for a fly in a big garden as a policeman is beating you with baton.
You can sue absolutely anyone if they take a button off your shirt, you don't understand your sister getting dragged in front of you. You can make thousands if you find an insect in your food while eating at a restaurant, you haven't been forcibly fed them. You haven't lived knowing you're indefinitely fucked up. You haven't understood what it takes a 17 years old Yazidi rape victim to make a joke like "Oh, she was only raped twice? Lucky girl", you haven't laughed at that joke knowing what it means just to encourage her humor.
The most painful part is all of that, isn't even 10% of it. And I am pretty sure you could google the rest and recite all of it, and you would remember all of it, and you would know all of it, but you won't understand any of it. You may even cry about it, but that'd be a choice. You have the choice to live that in your mind, fantasizing about being oppressed and fighting the power, changing the system, topple the government, and be a hero.
So, you're gay, right? I asked as I received a yes for an answer. Do you think I understand your experience by watching Milk, Brokeback Mountain, or reading a summary of LGBTQ history? No? Yet you didn't mind dismantling my family's entire history like a stolen car at a shady shop and sold me parts of it under a label of your choosing.
The heroes you idolize were protected by a law that encourages their existence. The heroes I know don't make it home after making a joke about the president in a coffee shop. You might not be wrong, I said to him as I stood up to leave, but you are simply not right and there is nothing I could learn from you that I can't google.