How do you write when you feel so emotional and full of pain? How do you write when your birth country is used as a playground for weapons testing and propagated with lies and hate? How do you write when you are surrounded by a society that only thinks of you as someone not to be dealt with directly because it’s too ‘sensitive’ so they ignore you instead. Because that’s the polite thing to do. How do you start to pull yourself together from the anger that wells within you and you know you must bite your tongue at all times because saying anything will be deemed ‘wrong’, misconstrued, and even confirm the bias that you are a trouble maker. You’re not towing the line, not keeping status quo…not conforming. Conform damn it! That’s what you do, don’t you? Well that’s what I have done all my life.

So I now look around and wonder if I really am so helpless. I mean what can I do, really? Nothing? Just focus on my work, head down and continue plodding on. Is that it? That’s what our parents did after all. But as I think back, they did more than that, they did protest, they did help their families back home. They worked hard to make new families and build their own peace after facing war.

The harsh events in Iraq remind me that the world needs to connect with the land and not through terror bombs and missiles. But stories that see us as human because that’s the fickle world we live in. Being a human being isn’t enough. They need to see you, to hear you, to read you. That’s the tip of the anger released ….but I’m no longer staying quiet.

Let us begin our stories…

Summer 1996 London/Amsterdam

We had just arrived back from our crazy three-week family reunion trip in Jordan when my father decided it was time to take a holiday from our holiday. Since this was the year we were issued our very own passports for the first time since arriving in London in 1982, it was a sort of celebration for him, I guess.

Randomly my parents booked Amsterdam via ferry. It was the worst voyage of my life. During the day time my brother and I walked around not able to do much and we had no social skills to join any of the activities so we were very bored. During the night time our family had to separate. My mum and I shared with female strangers and my father and brother likewise with random male strangers where one took to going to bed naked, apparently. My mum sniggered when she told me. My father was not amused.

The 10-hour journey was overnight thankfully (the return wasn’t), but I had never been on a ship before and I remember feeling slightly unnerved when I’d try to sleep but instead hear all these squeaky noises of what I imagined rusty screws coming loose. The Oscar winning Titanic movie hadn’t come out yet or I’d probably have fainted at the port.

Once we finally arrived in Amsterdam my parents continued to surprise me by failing to book a place to stay. I grabbed an information pamphlet from somewhere, an information desk from the Ferry, let’s say and suggested we head to the place where they can help us: The Tourist information office at the centre of Amsterdam. That’s where my fuzzy brain imagined it was.

They nodded, thought it a good idea whilst I rolled my eyes still unimpressed with their planning skills. Anyway we ended up in a cosy ground floor two bedroom flat. Once my mum realised that people from the street could quite easily climb through the sash windows and into the living room and murder us, she set up a makeshift security system made up of cutlery positioned ever so delicately upright so that anyone who should dare venture in then they …erm…had to face the clunking of cutlery falling to the ground. We’d, in theory, be alerted. That’s how we spent the nights. Awake.

By day 2 my father realised we had old Iraqi neighbours living in Amsterdam. They used to live next door to my grandfather’s house before Saddam, backed by America, wiped out our Jewish communities in all of Iraq. So my father, the nostalgic that he is called Mr Maurice who invited us out with his wife. They invited us to a restaurant and not any old restaurant but one that was owned by a Christian Iraqi. So this now sounds like a setup for a joke…a Jewish, a Muslim and a Christian walk into a restaurant…

But what stayed with me was how powerful culture was. Not only were they speaking Arabic but they greeted each other the same way with ‘salaams’ and shared the same sentiment to things by saying ‘insha Allah’. And of course there was so much merriment I just sat as the impressionable teenager that I was. This was obviously the highlight of our trip and it was lovely to watch. Even the owner joined in the conversation as these adults were happy reminiscing about an Iraq they hold so dear and remember so well. Memories I couldn’t share but I could watch and enjoy the love that glowed from the faces.

And the conversation continued through the night into the streets of Amsterdam. Including one of those adult streets where dancing women at windows could be seen. I turned to my brother and gave him a concerned look of ‘do you think our parents noticed?’. We looked back at the four adults lost in their innocent world. They hadn’t.