For about three weeks of every year in Sulaimani, the mountains cradling the valley are covered completely in red tulips. Massive mounds of sweet-smelling red fill the entire horizon, and then disappear before April gives way to May. The poppies in Afghanistan may be lovely, but there isn’t a red like Kurdish tulips anywhere else in the world.
My mother used to sing a story-poem about the Sulaimani tulips, back when our family all lived in one house and my uncles were there to play the tambourine and the oud for her. She still sings it sometimes, usually when she is cooking. But her voice is softer now, almost absent-minded. There is much less performance now that the audience is just me, and she sings like steam gently floating up from mugs of tea.
The story she sings is a Kurdish classic, a way to account for the strange floral vanishing act the tulips perform for us every year. It takes place centuries ago, in the days of the sultans. They lived in palaces at the heart of the Sulaimani valley, a place now called Engineers’ Hill. The sultans had the most beautiful gardens in all of Iraq. Their flowers would bloom even when the autumn frost had stripped all the green from the rest of the world. It was a mark of divinity, I think. The flowers were a way for these men to prove that they could out-think nature and overpower time. The sultans loved their gardens so much, they even used up water reserves on them in the dry months when it rains dust.
In that time, there was an autumn festival every year in Sulaimani. The Kurdish people would celebrate the last few warm nights of the year together. The women would wear their gorgeous traditional dresses. Each dress has a silk petticoat and camisole underneath, with a sheer outer dress embroidered in beads layered over it. My own dress is a deep blue, embroidered with silver beaded flowers. The fabric and jewelry are heavy on your body, but when a woman dances in her traditional dress, she feels feather-light, no matter how much gold there is around her waist.
In the time of the sultans, a boy asked a girl to dance with him at the autumn festival. He had seen her months ago in the bazaar and lost his heart to her the second she looked at him. But she was unimpressed with this boy, and asked why he should think that he deserved her favor. The boy asked her to give him a challenge, a test, anything to prove his love and his worth. So the beautiful, calculating girl in the myth thought it over, and decided that what she wanted most was a bouquet of red tulips. The boy stared at her, and feebly protested that there wasn’t a single tulip left on any of the mountains. It was fall, after all, and much too cold for them to grow. But the girl insisted that there were still tulips in the place time doesn’t touch. She asked him to break into the Sultan’s garden and steal her the flowers, or else she would think his affection (and his manhood) a cheap imitation of the real thing. So the boy promised that he would bring her those flowers, if she would just wait for him at the top of the mountain at dawn.
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Dawn was coming faster than it had any right to, and my mother was not having it. But the light wasn’t breaking on the palace in the era of sultans; it was coming up on Engineers’ Hill in 1989. We are still in the heart of Sulaimani valley, but we’ve jumped over a few centuries. We’ve come to the place where my 19 year old mother is fighting against her father for what may be the very first time.
The dictator Saddam Hussein had just issued an extermination order for the entire Kurdish ethnicity. The Iraqi army was marching on Sulaimani, with the first squadron expected to arrive just after dawn. Anyone who stayed in the city was to be rounded up and systematically executed. That was why every family in Sulaimani had packed quietly in the middle of the night, wrapped their children in blankets, and piled into old Toyotas to drive off into the mountains. There would be time to rebuild later, just as the city had done before. Time to board up windows and fix roofs, to clean up broken glass and reassure small children. But that kind of reconstruction could only happen if the people of the city managed to live. Staying meant dying, and dying meant erasure. So not even the strongest men, those smoking anxiously in doorways and calculating how many children they could each carry, protested. The city was silent and compliant, and a steady stream of bodies moved through the streets. Those whose family had no car, walked.
The problem was that my grandfather could not walk. He had been a powerfully built man until 1980, when the Iranian forces bombed his sugar factory. My grandfather was the manager, one of our brave men with a strong mind and high ideals. He had stayed above ground to make sure that every one of his worker had gotten into a shelter. When the bomb hit, he was the only one still on the factory floor, looking up into the flood of rubble and light. He was paralyzed from the waist down.
Now he was bound to a wheelchair, unable to leave our family home. He was trying to convince my mother to flee with the rest of the family and leave him behind. Her violent refusal took everyone by surprise. This was no time for objection, for defiance, or for thoughts beyond fear and motion. Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten into a clear blue. None of them had ever seen a more sickly and sinister color.
They went back and forth with rising urgency as palsied rays of light started to creep under the doorways. My mother swore that she would not leave him. He ordered her to go. She tried to reason with him, saying that they could find a way to move him. He shot back that it would take too much time, time they didn’t have. She said that she would stay beside him whether he wanted her there or not. Then my grandfather said something that shocked her into compliance.
“If soldiers break into this house, and find only us, what do you think they will do to you before they kill you? These are men who have not seen a woman in a very long time. What do you think they will force me to watch while I sit here and can’t do a thing to stop it? Do not make me witness that. It would be kinder to let me die here alone.”
Among the many traditional beliefs shared by the Kurdish community, the only one I’ve ever truly understood is the idea that there are things much worse than dying. Dying can be a beautiful, honorable thing. It can bring peace at the end of a troubled life. But there are things that can crawl up inside of you and unhinge your mind, drown your dignity, usurp the autonomy of your soul. I have seen women who are little, mute ghosts in their own hollow bodies. It is that, more than dying, that terrifies a Kurdish woman.
So my mother left. She didn’t do it because she wanted to, or because it felt right. She did it for him, against all her judgment. I wonder how long it took for my mother to stop crying, fleeing her city in the early light, under the cover of dust and red tulips.
Once again, my grandfather was alone, after having gotten everyone else out of harm’s way. He was alone at the top of Engineers’ Hill, on any empty street. For the first time, he did not hear the sounds of little boys playing soccer outside his window, or of old women trading stories on the rooftops of the city below. There were no smells of tea brewing or bread baking. He rolled his wheelchair to the window, and watched the horizon. With every inch of blue that suffused the sky, a dark line in the distance grew larger, more defined. By the time the sun rose fully, he could see the individual shapes of soldiers in the army descending. He willed himself to look directly into the light and face the enemy. He willed himself not to search the mountains for any trace of his daughter.
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I wish I could say that was the last time my mother ran for her life. But it took decades for Saddam to be overthrown. When I ask my uncles about him, they don’t describe what I think evil must look like. They tell stories of a crazy man, broadcasting live as he went into people’s homes. He’d look for the silverware drawer, and then proclaim right into the camera that everything under his reign was orderly, even the spoons.
The thing that finally made it feel real, I think, was when they rounded up a group of Kurdish men that included my mother’s uncle. Every single one of those men were executed, and their families were given no reason. My mother and her family realized that their chances to get out were narrowing with each absurd and horrifying instance of cruelty. So they ran. She was pregnant with me at the time, and terrified of so much change. I think she only did it because she knew the rest of her family was pulling for evacuation.
Kurdish women fight for their home and their families in one of two ways: they sacrifice by staying with the people they love, even under fire, or by leaving to live on. Of the two, leaving and living is the harder choice, I think. My mother had sacrificed her own emotional needs to leave her city once, and now she was being asked to do it again.
A few years ago, financial and personal tragedy hit our family hard, in a way it had not done since the evacuation. I was presented with a choice to leave for college, or to stay and help my family with the day to day work of reconstructing our lives. I thought of my mother, and of the life she had risked so much to give me. And I couldn’t decide if it would better honor her sacrifices if I stayed or if I left.
In the end, I stayed here, in Saint Louis. My mother and I are working to save up the money so we can both go to law school, together. Our dreams have both been deferred, but at least we’re together and alive and working through it.
I am grateful for that, but in my moments of doubt, I wonder if either of us made the right choice. Every time I hear someone call Iraqi refugees “terrorists” or “turban heads”, I have to wonder if my mother wouldn’t have been better off staying on Engineers’ Hill. And sometimes, when I’m driving down 55 in the evening and I see the exit to my street coming up. I am tempted to keep driving, across the Mississippi, all the way to the coast and further.
Being Kurdish is strange because there is no official country of Kurdistan. We have a language of our own, but no state. There are no borders to mark our homeland, but all the little boys in my family can do the traditional Kurdish dances. They have little grasp on the language, but they play the tambourine just like my uncles.
I may not have a country or even a solid connection to our traditional way of life, but I have started to notice that the older I get, the more I sing like my mother. ⋆⋆⋆⋆
Blue light and tambourine music drifted up from the valley to the top of Asmur Mountain, where the solitary figure of a beautiful girl watched the autumn festival with a tight, sad clench in her stomach. The boy was supposed to meet her at dawn, but the morning had come and he was nowhere to be seen. She had not meant to kill him. She had only wanted him to be valiant and reckless and worthy of her. She knelt in the grass and waited, and waited. She listened to the wailing of an oud from below and tried to keep her breathing deep and steady. And then the drumbeats of the musicians gave way to a louder, harsher volley of pops and bangs. A warning drum. The notes of the oud grew shrill, and she realized that what she was listening to were screams. She saw the crowds below part for a single, swaying figure, who made its way slowly up the side of the mountain.
With her eyes wide and her dress whipping around her, she flew down Asmur like heavy rain, all motion and panic. She reached the boy just as he collapsed, and caught him in her arms. He was holding a package, wrapped up in old parchment paper, and he smiled as he opened it with shaking fingers. Inside were the most beautiful, bright yellow tulips from the Sultan’s garden.
The girl stared at the them, and felt only disappointment. She had wanted red tulips, and he had failed her. Seeing this, the boy’s smile never faltered. He pulled open his jacket to reveal a deep stab wound in his abdomen, a heavily bleeding gash made by the sword of a royal guard. She made a horrified noise, and he shushed her gently. He pressed the yellow flowers to his body, and they watched, together, as the yellow petals were stained red by his blood. He had brought her red tulips after all.
She realized two things at the same time: she loved him, and he was going to die. She told him both in a whisper, and he said that he was the happiest man in the world. And then he was gone.
There is a word in Kurdish, baqurban, that means “I would give my life for yours”. It is an expression of love that means you are willing to pay the highest price for someone’s safety and happiness. But I think, as the mythic girl held her lover’s body and red tulips bloomed all over the mountain for her to cover his grave with, that she paid the highest price. There are worse things than dying, and one of them is being left alone to face the morning.
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My grandfather wondered if there was anyone else left in the city that morning. He wrote down the names of all of his neighbors in an old journal. Who among them, he wondered, was too old or too sick to be moved? He tried to remember, but adrenaline was cracking through his mind like electricity. A series of loud pops and bangs made his eyes snap to the window. There must be people in the city, or else why would the soldiers be firing? There was too much gunfire and smoke for him to believe that they were just marking territory.
This was how he passed the next few hours. Rolling his chair to the window, and away, and back. Writing down names. Praying. Flinching with every volley of gunshots. Waiting. Every now and then, he would pick up a pair of old army-grade binoculars, and use them to scan the mountains for traces of a struggle.
And then there was a very loud banging at the front door, and my grandfather let out the breath he had been holding since dawn. They had come. He would not open the door for them, but he would not hide either. He wheeled himself to the center of his bedroom, folded his hands in his lap, and prepared himself to stare directly into the faces of the men who broke down his door.
A man in a commander’s uniform walked in first. The soldier was middle-aged, his dark hair graying and his eyes tired. But even with two heavy purple bags under his eyes, he still had the strength to carry two guns, in the fashion of the Iraqi honor guard. One in his arms, the other slung over his shoulder. That way, he could drop the first and reach back for the second without ever having to worry about reloading.
He walked cautiously across my grandfather’s small room. There was a desk, some books, and an old bed rigged up for his wheelchair. Whatever contraband would justify an invasion of a man’s home, my grandfather had none of it. No guns or secret anti-government ideology pamphlets. Something flickered across the soldier’s face. He could have called to alert his men, but he was quiet.
Decades later, I would ask my grandfather if he hated that man. I might have hated him. But my grandfather is not like me and my mom. Peace comes more easily to him.
“Salam u alaikum.”
The soldier’s voice was polite. My grandfather blinked.
“Alaikum u salam,” he returned, slowly.
Peace be unto you.
And unto you.
The soldiers outside the bedroom searched our family home for contraband and stragglers, but the commander of the unit stayed in my grandfather’s room and watched out the window with him. The two men were silent as they took in the ravaged city below.
“Sir,” the soldier finally said, “about these.”
He had seen the binoculars at the window. He picked them up and played with their dials. My grandfather gripped the wheels of his chair to keep his hands from shaking. Civilians were not supposed to have that kind of equipment in those days, even non-weapon gear. It was a law that applied only to Kurdish people, and a deadly one to break. There was no such thing as a minor violation for us.
“Yes, that is mine,” my grandfather said, as evenly as he could. No sense panicking at this point. He willed himself to be grateful and at peace for his last moments. At least his daughter did not have to see this scene unfold.
The soldier stood perfectly still. Both of them hardly breathed. Outside, the wind rolled over the mountains and through the tulips. The desert sprawled and burned.
“You know,” he said slowly, “these are illegal.”
“I know.”
“But you have them anyway.”
“I do.”
The soldier stared at the man in the chair in silence. I’ll never know if he was thinking of his father or brother, who might have looked like my grandfather. Or if he was just sick and sad with all the killing Saddam had made him participate in. Sometimes we forget that the people who march with the enemy have families and can be blackmailed, too. In any case, I think that what that soldier risked that day, he did so for his own peace of mind. Sometimes sacrifice is something that we do for ourselves, to remind us that we are still capable of acting with honor.
“You know,” he said, smiling just a little, “These are very old. Disgraceful, really. I don’t know how you see through them.”
My grandfather laughed, a surprised and nervous exhale.
“I don’t know, sir. I manage.”
“Well, sir,” said the soldier, his tone as respectful as if he were speaking to another officer, “I cannot in good conscience leave you with such a disgraceful piece of equipment.” He rifled through the heavy pack he carried with him, and pulled out another set of army-yellow, brand new binoculars.
“Take mine.”
My grandfather took them slowly, like a ritual was being performed in the act of handing them over.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Of course, sir. Take care of yourself.”
And with a little salute, the commander walked to the door.
“This one’s empty!” he shouted to his men. He pressed a finger to his lips, a plea for silence. They won’t all be like me.
My grandfather nodded in a daze, holding the new binoculars in his lap. He raised a hand in a silent farewell to the man who had spared his life.
Salam u alaikum.
A swift nod.
Alaikum u salam.
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Peace is hard to hold onto, but easy enough to find. Especially now that I am in college, and settled into St. Louis for a few years. My family survived the war and displacement, and now we are alive to start again.
I have started the long and difficult work of reconstruction. I study, I work. I take nights off where I stay at my friend’s apartments. A few weeks ago, in my friend’s two-level flat, a group of my friends asked me to tell them about Kurdistan. We had just come back from a party, and everyone was talking with that earnest intensity that comes after a few drinks. I think they were expecting a war story, which wouldn’t be an inaccurate representation. But I stayed up all night telling them about flowers and binoculars. I talked about the mountains, and sang bits of old Kurdish poems until the sky started to lighten.
Eventually they had all fallen asleep, and I was awake by myself with Hannah’s cat for company. For some reason, I couldn’t sleep. A strange sort of aching had built up in my chest, singing those old songs, and I moved to the window to watch the streets of Saint Louis wake up. Around the corner, you could see the carefully kept gardens of SLU, beautifully maintained even in dry months. And in an island of green, in the middle of South Grand, yellow tulips were blooming.