Free Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi Page A

their families.
    “I stood right here on this balcony and saw a man stuff rice in his pocket once when I was a little girl and felt so fortunate for the baraka that had been bestowed on us, Zainab. Those were good days. It is so sad, habibiti . Now we can’t even give away food on Ashura without endangering the lives of our children.”
    Many parents have the freedom of handing down ancestral history without fear, but when my mother began telling me the history of our family that afternoon, I had to stand very close to hear her as she entrusted me with the story of our family.
    “Everything started with my grandfather—our fortune and our problems,” she said. “He was born in Baghdad in 1865. We even have his birth certificate. He is Iraqi! How could anyone think he was Iranian!”
    But her grandfather was born at a time when Iraq was a battle-ground of two empires, the Safavid Empire of Iran, which was Shia, and the Ottoman Empire, administered in Iraq by Sunnis, that reached all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. This grandfather—my third grandfather, jeddo we call it in Arabic—married a wealthy woman and built a successful business fabricating strings—ropes, sausage casings, threads. He plied ancient trade routes while his wife managed the finances and raised their children, including Mama’s father, a man fluent in five languages who would expand the business into leather factories. This wife was the matriarch I had heard so much about.
    “My grandmother was a strong woman,” Mama said. “Your aunts and I couldn’t help but want to be strong like her. So competent. So commanding. Yet how little freedom she allowed Mama! I wonder sometimes if that is why Mama allowed us so much.”
    At some point, probably in the nineteenth century, Mama explained, our original family surname had been lost. Men marrying into wealthy families often adopted their wife’s name, and birth names were sometimes replaced by occupations. By the time Mama was born, the family surname meant “Maker of Strings,” which made our family records hard to trace. It was possible, she said, that her grandfather’s grandfather was born in Iran. Bibi had a vague memory of visiting Tehran with her guardian when she was very small, and Mama said she thought we had relatives there, somewhere.
    “I went to Tehran once when I was your age,” Mama told me. “It was a beautiful city. I’ve been thinking since all this happened that maybe I have cousins there. I always wanted to find them someday. But how is that possible? Now we are shooting each other.”
    The odd part about it, as Mama explained it to me that day, was that the deportations weren’t even based on birth. Iraq, a vast plain with two great rivers and fertile soil between them, had been invaded many times over the centuries—Bibi herself had lived under an Ottoman Empire, a British occupation, an Iraqi kingdom, a Communist government, and several Baathist regimes. At the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, a census was taken in which heads of households were asked whether they were of Ottoman origin or of Iranian origin. This was not as innocuous a question as it seemed. Fearing induction into the Ottoman army and mindful of the importance of maintaining travel documents to conduct business across the border into Iran, my great-grandfather and many other Shia men registered as being “of Iranian origin.” All Iraqi citizenship papers still divided us that way, based on those grayed registration papers.
    But I still didn’t understand why my mother was at risk of being deported and my father was not. They were first cousins, marriage between cousins being permitted in Islam because inheritances are kept in the family and it is believed that a husband is likely to treat a cousin better than a stranger. But national origin apparently was deemed to follow the father’s bloodline, and it was their maternal grandfather they had in common. My father’s