AIAW Featured Writer: MARJAN KAMALI

Marjan Kamali - Iranian American Writer

Three years ago when the Iranian people had stormed the streets, Mina's brothers had cheered and clapped and jumped up to slap each other high-five, American-style. The Shah is gone. We're rid of the dictator’s evil ways. But then Mina’s mother's miniskirts were outlawed and now bearded men covered every corner of every street dressed in army fatigues, holding guns. And all that was legal before – Mina’s bare legs, her father’s alcohol, American rock and roll - was now illegal. And bombs started to fall on Tehran. It was almost enough to make a ten year old girl miss the Shah.

Saddam dropped the first bomb. In the middle of the night when Mina was fast asleep, dreaming of fat juicy pomegranates. Bam. The house shook and down they all went to the basement to lie on the floor. He had very good eyes, she knew that much. The fighters in his planes could see mice at midnight under no moon. Why else would the entire population of Tehran cover their windowpanes with aluminum foil at nights? He would kill her once he found her – of that she was beginning to be sure. The men in her country had almost all gone mad - growing beards, carrying around speeches of new Ayatollahs, clenching their fists and yelling, "Death to the Shah!" even though he was already dead from cancer, frozen with grief under the soil of a foreign country. But the biggest most frightening madman of all lived in the country next door. In Iraq he sat, drinking tea and holding conferences with advisors who wanted to kill.

They would all, she knew, kill her if they could.

She darted to school and darted back - no longer confident that his planes wouldn't dare try bombing in broad daylight.

And at night, as she said her prayers, she almost felt like the basement was a finer place to rest her head than her bed. For surely, and this happened often, he dropped his bombs in the middle of the night, and there she and her parents and brothers would be, crowded, shivering, huddling as close as they could to the earth. If she could slide under the ground to escape the bombs, she would.

She couldn't let him win.

In the mornings, as she spread sour cherry jam on her barbari bread, she vowed he wouldn't get her or anyone else in her family. She imagined him drawing on his chart with a huge black felt-tip pen, tracking her moves - did he know she swam on Wednesdays at her cousin's house - probably. She'd make sure she took a different route to her cousin’s house then.

Every night before bed she bargained with God. Keep my mother alive. I will not lie about anything ever again. Keep my father alive. I will stop procrastinating on my homework. My brothers. I promise I won't argue with them anymore. Keep us alive and don't, please don't, let Saddam win.

And God - he must be on her side. She didn't call him "Allah", just "khoda" the Farsi word for God. She prayed to a God that looked much like a picture of the ancient poet Rumi.

She wagered that she would live and that he, Saddam, would die first.

One day she made a list. Of all the things she still had yet to do. Finish elementary school. Get my period. Learn to cook like my mother and grandmother. Do eighty eight double-dutch jumps in a row, no pausing. Get married and have little babies, one day. Help poor people all over. Memorize at least one hundred ghazals of Hafez. Learn to roller-skate. Make lots of paintings. End all wars somehow. The list went on and on. Plenty. See that Saddam? She had plenty left to do. So for him to bomb her country and kill her – well, it just wasn't going to work out with her plans.

But he was everywhere. She saw an outline of his moustache in the clouds. In the sheen of the oily water of the city’s sewer joobs, she was sure she counted his fat fingers floating. Parts of the tufts of his hair appeared in her lentil rice. When her grandmother died in his bomb, while buying pomegranates at a greengrocer’s downtown (11:37 AM, that’s how audacious his bombs had become) - Mina knew then for sure that Saddam's goal was to stomp her spirit dead.

As she cried at the funeral holding onto her mother's hand - she promised, even as she looked above for his planes - that she would get him back. He would not kill, he would not erase another person from the world. He could not kill Mamani and just get away with it.

And Iran started to swell and then fold in on the sides, deflated finally to a bump of prickly sadness. Mina wanted to go to the post office to mail a letter to her uncle in America but Saddam had bombed the place. She went to her other uncle's house to play cards with him now that he was back from the war, but Saddam had blown his hands up. Men, her brother's friends, disappeared in small trucks, vowing to fight him to the end. Get him.

It was practically 1982 and he was still parading around. If she were to cup her hands around her mouth and shout out to the world to come help them, would anybody hear her? The world hated her country more than they hated his. Her brother said that the U.S. and Britain sold arms to Saddam, because they preferred him over them. Could she drag Ronald Reagan by the hand and convince him, the most powerful man in the world, to stop the war? Could she show him the chemical weapons Saddam used, could she convince him to not help Saddam so? Mr. Reagan wouldn't listen to her though. He'd probably slap her across the face and say, "You took the hostages!" And then she'd have to walk across town to where the lunatic-fanatic students had held the American hostages and shout at them for making them all pay for their actions.

Her cousin's friend had given her a smuggled issue of an American teen magazine. That was the most enticing possession she had to barter - every girl in school (except the brainwashed Islamic zealot Farnaz) had envied her for having it as they pored over the pages in secret, in the school bathroom.
But the students who held the hostages wouldn't want Teen Beat magazine.

What did they want?

She wasn't sure. Well, if Ronald Reagan couldn't help, then really it was hopeless because no one was more powerful than him. So strong. Clearly, he didn't mind that Saddam was killing them or that her government was killing the Iraqi people. He was busy, she knew. Plus the hostages. That made everybody hate the whole country. Those damn fanatic students.

To pack the right books for school, to memorize the history dates due that day, to learn foreign Arabic words, to not get killed at daytime, or especially at nighttime, to find a way to get Mr. Reagan to hate Iran less than he hated Saddam - she had a lot to do.

Which was precisely why she couldn't die.

As her mother braided her hair, Mina counted the number of ways she could get him. A ten year old girl didn't have much access to equipment. Her options were limited. But her grandmother was dead and she just couldn’t let him keep killing more.

Could she get to his palace? But the borders were closed. She couldn't escape the country, couldn't carry a weapon into his bedroom at about two in the morning, look him in the eye, tell him how he’d killed her grandmother, the postman, blown off her uncle's hands, murdered half her brother's friends, and turned the playground into rubble. He would pause, start to cry, beg her to re-consider. She would then beat in his ugly face with both her fists, punch him hard, bash his head against the headboard of the bed, maybe even stomp on him, till he begged for mercy.

Afterwards, she'd become a hero. The Iranian people would praise her and hold a huge ceremony. They'd award her a medal for stopping Saddam. At the ceremony she’d give a speech where she'd thank her mother for all her hard work, then remember the spirit of her grandmother. She'd tell the whole country about the thick Aush soup her grandmother made, how Mamani loved Rumi and how she'd spent time picking out big juicy pomegranates for her the day that she died. Which is why she died. Which was what was killing Mina. Then she'd tell the new Islamic government that some girls hated being forced to cover their hair and bodies, that it wasn't right, and she'd be brave enough to say out loud that the new laws were far too restrictive and people shouldn't be put in jail just because they said something bad about the Islamic regime.

There would be silence. People would start to slowly nod, look at one another, then clap one by one and soon the whole crowd would be clapping and cheering her on and yelling, "Freedom! Freedom! Demohkrahsee!" The new Islamic hard-liners would hang their heads in shame and say they were sorry they didn't know what was wrong with them, they had punished and imprisoned and executed so many people for no reason and if everyone would just give them a second chance, they'd like to try again and be a democracy this time. And the people would yell, "Get the hell out of here, you lousy hypocrites!" and the hardliners would flee for their lives and move to Pakistan.

A few suggestions would be made for a brand new leader. Mina's name would be thrown around of course, people would trust her to lead in the tradition of the ancient child-emperors of China, a petition would even be drawn to have her elected. But Mina would politely refuse, say no no, she was busy with school and the obligations of fifth grade, and finally, reluctantly, the people would let her go. They would get hard to work to set up the plans for a new election and the beginning of democracy.

And that day the country would finally be free. Everyone would dance in the streets till two in the morning, just like after winning a soccer game, only more, and the women would throw their headscarves triumphantly up in the air, not even caring anymore that their hair showed. Her mother and father would do a jig in the middle of the town square. Millions of cotton candy trucks would pass out celebratory cotton candy and mixed nuts and popcorn, and small round colorful chocolates, the exact kind Sepideh Solati had at her birthday party. Mina would be given a tiara to wear like the one her barbie doll had when barbie dolls were still allowed. Barbie dolls would become allowed again. Mina's parents would buy her a new red bicycle which she would ride to school as her hair blew freely in the wind and no men with guns guarded the street corners anymore.

At recess they would play dodge-ball and gossip again, instead of singing war songs and death chants. Girls and boys wouldn't have to go to separate schools anymore. There'd be no more bombs at night at all because Saddam would be gone.

And everyone would start off 1982 with hope that there really could be peace in the world.


Marjan Kamali

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