7. Why Now? After All These Years....

Politics, religion and traditions have been and, perhaps, will remain, at least, for the foreseeable future the major factors impacting upon, shaping and intensely gripping the Middle-Eastern region, and ultimately bearing down momentously upon the lives of its people.

Political terrorization, to be precise, was instrumental in granting Saddam utter dominance, thus rendering the Iraqis totally submissive, captive, and incarcerated in a huge metaphorical prison that had been set up by the dictator and the overwhelming fear he had long established. Fear was the repulsive companion that adhered indivisibly to the minds and hearts of the Iraqis irrespective of time or place, and it survived yet notwithstanding the demise of the dictator or the efforts they made to extricate themselves from it. Being Iraqi, I wouldn’t be any different. The dictator has gone, my fears haven’t. The dictator has gone, traditions still exist. The dictator has gone, religion sustains, still, the upper hand. And so letting out, talking loud is stark madness, particularly when exposing such private experience could perilously bear upon my family’s social status. Moreover in this unseasonable time when my fellow Iraqis are still enduring agonies and are racked in anguish, such talk could seem all the more unfitting.

“I must be insane, absolutely insane. God, what am I doing? My people are being killed and brutally maimed on a daily basis. My country has been reduced to ruins. Its future is yet hanging in the balance, and I’m talking love and romance? Of all the taboos, LOVE? My culture’s ever triplet of shame and disgrace? How could I be so unfeeling? How could I be so indurate? So thoughtless and so inconsiderate? How could I let my self-interest so engulf me as to make me insulated and cloistered, and benumb my awareness of my people’s woes and sufferings? And how could I be so heedlessly impetuous and reckless to boot? No, this can’t be me! Dear Lord, what’s got into me?”

I recall the numerous times I rebuked myself asking these agonizing questions. How many sleepless nights have I dwelt heavily and silently on them and wept with excruciating pain, and afterwards angrily deleted whatever I had written. How many times I raged and vented out obscure anger, bewildering the most affectionate mum and my two brothers. Nor can I forbear from mentioning the times that I helplessly retreated to the old hermetic game of silence that I excelled in throughout the long years of agony. And how helplessly I wondered and prayed and implored: would it truly materialize? Would it ever reach him? ‘God, please dear God, help me through this, show me the way, tell me what to do, and how’.

And the conflict within just jaded me, made me vacillate, and kept me on tenterhooks, turning my life into a real hell for the past year or so, throughout which the dragons of reminiscences never simmered down or got lulled into quietness, but contumaciously reared their heads, obliterating my much wonted rationality and bringing to the surface feelings and thoughts that I had strenuously mollified through the finest years of my youth; And I was all but overpowered.

But the question that persisted is: Why now? What use would it do me after all these years? Surely I’m only a reminiscence now. Yes, nothing beyond a beautiful reminiscence that tickles, perhaps, his heart and his mind from time to time. He’s got his own life now, far-flung from mine. A family, perhaps a wife and children too. No, not perhaps, but most definitely. I’ve heard it so many times: men don’t cope as well as women, and it could possibly be true.

But then again, in the arduous hardship my country is presently undergoing, when news of decapitations and carnages are blaring, when hearts and minds are intumescing with hatred and cruelty, emitting malice, venom and malevolence, delivering the deathblow to any gleam of hope for a free, peaceful and flourishing IRAQ, what other messenger could I have opted for than love, to retaliate upon the revolting stench of blood and explosives that’s grotesquely preponderating and the evil that’s menacingly thriving, ripping our humanity and lacerating my people?

For almost two years now, the news imparted nothing but death, misery and wretchedness from my beloved IRAQ. Indescribable calamities and catastrophes are ceaselessly showering upon my poor fellow Iraqis, further drenching the Iraqi soil with blood and turning the country into a hellhole. The innocents, children mainly, were the main recipients of death blows. Neither their young ages nor their fledgling bodies, not even their seraphic innocence could intercede to spare their lives. They were remorselessly slain when they were younger than the age of roses. Their little bodies lay blood-spattered next to a school bag with their sweet tiny hands still clinging to a toy or a lollipop or an unfinished sandwich; the splintered great white hope of an aspiring nation.

Watching these little angels dismembered and maimed in the name of so called patriotism and religion was way beyond my staying power. Those horrific scenes will be forever engraved in my memory, evidencing a bizarre and outlandish time when wild jungles have turned into far more secure places. It would be quite derogatory to the animals to compare our world to a jungle. For in theirs, killing is for survival, while in ours, it’s for the mere gratifying of the perpetual bloodthirstiness and savagery of a debased humanity. As if it didn’t suffice having Saddam ravening the past of a whole nation, so his disciples of evil are now fervidly ruining its present and its future too, finishing off whatever remains of this ill-fated nation.

Love remains the sole sanative paragon that washes off the hatred, nefariousness, malevolence, vengeance and all the transgressions that are permeating our hearts and gnawing at our humanity, turning us into demons. Love is the precise urgent that is lacking in our tumultuous world. Love sluices the heart, and when in love, people become kind, merciful, forgiving and unselfish. What else better than love do we need then to sustain our humanity? Of all people, I perfectly fathom the great value of faith and religion. I sacrificed love and the beloved for the sake of religion and faith. I bartered a whole happy life I could have most certainly had, for years of silent heart-wrenching pain. Love is the empyreal grace that the Creator endowed to sublimate the instincts of humankind. But the perverted religion and politics have combined to botch up our world. They both went off the beam, although originally designed for the well being of the inhabitants of this earth and for the purpose of rendering love, peace and above all justice and rightfulness. It’s with love that we should fight back and create a bigger and invincible circle. So hold my hand please; let’s talk love, spread words of love and fight for love with love. Help me share my story with you... in all its pleasure... in all its pain. The genuine essence of humanity, civilization, faith and religion lies only in love and in spreading love, peace and amity.

I will be taking you through a life journey that turned out to be nothing short of being excruciating, full of anguish, and, not least, joy and pleasure. GOD, SADDAM, AND MY AMERICAN SWEETHEART, is an autobiography that was intended for a book. A spur of the moment insane decision shifted it into Ishtarria, far from the toil and time-consuming process of book publishing.