Books |
Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny
Zainab Salbi and Laurie Berklund
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Memoir
Zainab Salbi is the founder and CEO of Women for Women International, a Washington-based organization that has, since 1993, helped more than 22,000 women in war-ravaged countries start their own businesses and jumpstart their lives.
Zainab Salbi is also the daughter of a 747 captain who was, in the early 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s personal pilot.
The connection between these identities — fearless champion of oppressed women, terrified child in an oppressed nation — is the story of “Between Two Worlds.” It isn’t the easiest book to read; “searing” is not too strong to describe the experience. What keeps you going — indeed, what keeps you reading as fast as you can — is how brilliantly Salbi and her collaborator, Laurie Berklund, show you what it was like to grow up “privileged” in Iraq: 24/7 scared, silenced, and, inevitably, victimized. And you stay through the horror because you know how it ends: a young woman in her 20s, with her back against the wall, will face down every demon, and, through her tears, come out slugging.
The first thing to understand about Salbi’s connection to Saddam is that it was a curse. As a child, she never used Saddam’s name; he was “Amo,” an uncle. Why the silence? Because everyone he befriended knew Saddam was a psychopath: charming, unpredictable, deadly. He would drop by her parents’ Baghdad home at all hours, usually clutching a bottle of Chivas Regal. And then he would talk about killing friends who betrayed him.
Her mother did her best to shelter her daughter: “I learned that men were born with power and women obtained it through sharpness of intellect and good acts. If you were kind, wise and did good works, you could wind up being the princess who had it all.” But young Zainab couldn’t help noticing how the parents of her school friends suddenly disappeared or were deported. Why did everyone give gold and jewels to Saddam, when he had so many palaces? And why were her parents — who were favorites of Saddam — always so tense?
Eventually she figured it out: “When he gave you his most affectionate, lingering smile, he was using that time to look behind your eyes.” Her parents, she decided, were “trapped in an abusive relationship.” As was she: “I was guarded by the very secret police Amo used to terrorize others.”
At 17, she devised her exit strategy: a Ph.D. in languages. By 26, she thought, she’d have one. But early in her college career, she fell in love and insisted on getting married. Her fiancé was sensitive and poetic — before the engagement. Then he became jealous and possessive and crude. Salbi broke off the engagement. Almost immediately, her mother suggested that she marry a man she’d never met, an Iraqi living in Chicago. Salbi, chastened by her bad judgment, agreed. Maybe her mother was right: You fall in love after you’re married.
But as soon as she landed in Chicago, she realized she’d made a mistake. She didn’t feel she could turn back, so she soon found herself a prisoner of a foul-tempered misogynist — in America, she was as unfree as her parents in Iraq. Eventually she fled, got divorced, made enough money to move to Washington. At a party, she met Amjad Atallah, a Palestinian-American with large dreams and a kind heart. Against her will, she fell in love. And, at last, she began to tell her story to someone who desperately wanted to hear it.
If you have not been in an abusive relationship, you can’t possibly understand how deeply ingrained the fear is — even after the threat is over. Until she was in her 20s, in Washington, Zainab Salbi had told no one in her new life that she was “the pilot’s daughter.” As she had learned in Baghdad, you dealt with unhappy knowledge by erasing it: “I creased my life down the middle like the spine of a book when you bend the pages back very hard. You could read the first half of the book of my life, then read the second half, and not know they were lived by the same person. I wanted it that way. I needed it that way.”
A Time Magazine piece about “rape camps” in Bosnia and Croatia triggered tears — and a sense of mission. There was nothing she could do to help her fellow Iraqis, but she could help these women reclaim their lives. Her program would be like those in which American donors “sponsor” whole families, but her beneficiaries would be rape victims. She spent her twenty-fourth birthday in a refugee camp and, back in Washington, found her voice, leading rallies at which she urged the Clinton administration to act. Two years later, in 1995, the White House gave her an award.
She hadn’t seen her mother for five years. Just as well. She couldn’t understand why her parents hadn’t left Iraq. And she couldn’t forgive her mother for pushing her into an arranged marriage with a swine. Then her mother, dying, came to live with her. Under a barrage of questioning, her mother revealed — well, I really don’t want to spoil the surprise, although it is disgusting and terrifying and reveals, as if you needed more proof, just how crazy Saddam was.
You can read this book on two levels: hers and yours. For Zainab Salbi, it is about breaking the silence and revealing your deepest secrets so you don’t live your life, as she calls it, “in pieces.” As a spectator, you cannot get through a page without being grateful for the life you have; our fears wouldn’t even register on Salbi’s chart.
These levels come together in Zainab Salbi’s cause. It is not my place to pitch you for every cause I care about, but I’ll do it unashamedly for this one, because my wife sponsors a woman in a post-conflict zone and says the $27 she commits is the best money she spends each month. It’s the kind of cause — targeted, efficient, life-changing — that makes you wish you were seriously rich.
But first, the book. It’s also targeted, efficient, life-changing. And that rare, rare thing: inspiring.
To buy “Between Two Worlds” from Amazon.com, click here.
To go to the Women for Women web site, click here.
