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This semester I spent a month in an intensive outpatient psychiatric treatment program. It was there that I met another patient named Salma. She speaks little English so I communicated with her via a translator. Despite the language barrier and substantial age difference, we became friends quickly. As I listened to her speak about her past I became grateful for the opportunity to get to know someone so strong and resilient in the face of great adversity. Salma and I both came to the program to heal from trauma, although we were both recovering from very different types of trauma, we shared the common goal of taking back the power we felt we had lost. Healing from trauma is a complex process. Trauma generates intense emotions that need to be processed, otherwise these negative feelings become bound to us, unconsciously affecting our lives. One of the most effective ways to heal is to tell the people who hurt you what they have done to you. But who do you tell when the party responsible for your trauma is not an individual person but a larger circumstance beyond the scope of your control? For Salma, there was no clear answer. Her pain was caused largely by a nation at war and a society that oppressed her on the basis of her gender. When this question was raised in the group, our leader brought up an expression that greatly resonated with us: “When elephants go to war, it’s the ants who get hurt.” In Salma’s case, the elephants were an oppressive society and a nation at war.
As a McConnell Scholar, I recognize that I have privilege in being given this platform to share my thoughts and opinions. I’d like to share this privilege with Salma. The McConnell Center cultivates strong leaders so I find it fitting that Salma share her story here so that the future leaders of the world might more deeply consider the effects of their actions.
“My name is Salma, I’m fifty-eight years old and I’m from Iraq. I have lived in Louisville, KY for nine years, I like everything about America. I like the weather, trees, and people. Everything is very nice. I’m married with one daughter named Rasha, she is thirty-four years old. I have two grandchildren, a girl and a boy. I am now separated from my husband and live with my daughter and her family. I would like to tell you my story.
I begin with childhood, I remember nothing from my childhood but the painful things. I did not know all the means available to children. Our physical condition was very difficult. No food, no good clothes, and no comfort in the house. We were deprived of all kinds of needs and lived in the house of my grandfather, we had one room for nine people. The real suffering began with my father and the school, my father worked in the street driving a taxi but he did not like to work much so often did not see tour needs of eating. And we were in school so we needed school uniforms, books, notepads, and pens. We would go to school dressed in torn clothes used by my aunt, students in school were always looking, whispering and laughing at us because of our clothes. My sister was very smart, she wanted to go to university and complete her studies, she had ambition and I also had ambition. But my father destroyed our ambition and we did not complete our studies. Every day he worked against us so that we could not study and succeed. My sister would not accept this and would fight with him. In this period my health began to suffer from stress, fainting, low blood pressure, and acute anemia. The fighting was not good for my health, my body could not accept that my mind was at war. Eventually, my sister gave in and married despite her wish to study. She did not want to marry or have children but she had four sons and one daughter. Her husband wanted the children.Like my sister, my real suffering began with marriage, I always said to myself that I would marry any man who came and betrothed me in order to rid myself of my father’s injustice and my fear of him. I decided when I got married to give my husband and his family all the love and respect. I decided to accept anything and not make problems with them because in me there was a volcano that I want to extinguish forever from the many harsh lives I have already lived.
The Iranian and Iraqi war started before I got married and I lived in the middle of the days of terror. We didn’t know when a missile could fall on our house or our relatives or our neighbors, When they throw missiles they don’t know where it will fall. We were the people who were the victims and our children were on the battlefronts. My brother in law was only married to my sister for one year and eight months and they had a four-month-old child when she was martyred in the war.
As for marriage mine was a traditional one. I was not married by love but by the parents of my husband. They saw that I had good manners and met their expectations so they came to ask my parents and ask me if I accepted their young man. In my marriage, my husband was always nervous on the simplest of things. I say do not bother us, the Lord of the worlds will stand with us and help us improve our condition. But inside I am burned from the psychological and physical situation because we had no food or drink and a small child who has special needs. My husband’s parents would not help us and never thought about us. They do not even think of our child and her needs. My father-in-law was a doctor at a clinic so he had a good situation but still he did not help.
When the Iranian-Iraqi war ended in 1988 we rejoiced a lot despite the wounds left by the Iraqis and we said thank God. Butt in 1990 our President Saddam did not calm down and entered the state of Kuwait to our neighbor with a large army and destroyed what was in it and destroyed our Iraqi army.
In 1991, the U.S. government intervened and bombed places belonging to the Iraqi government, for example, the State Department bombed a quarter of a mile away from my husband's parents 'apartment and when they threw missiles at the State Department so that my husband's parents' apartment was destroyed, the roof fell on them. and one day my husband and my little daughter and I visited my husband's parents, and while we were sitting, my 6-year-old daughter was playing near the window, and a missile hits the area, the curtains protected my daughter from serious wounds or certain death and then I decided not to go to my husband's family home or anywhere else to avoid danger. Even in my apartment I always put my daughter in a place far away from the windows. From 1990 to 2003 we lived through the period of the siege. I still had to put my daughter away from the windows in my apartment because of the Rockets, the U.S. government kept firing at us every now and then in order to force Saddam to submit. In 2003 the war began between the United States and Iraq, this period was very difficult for us. We left our homes and went to other provinces because the Iraqis complained that Saddam was throwing chemical bombs. The war ended in the same year and Saddam ended, we rejoiced and welcomed the U.S. Army and it did not support. And with joy, the Americans brought us this new government, whose loyalty to Iran, more than anything else, destroyed all good things that were founded before, as if they had come to destroy Iraq, not to build it, and a clear recommendation from the government. To destroy all the infrastructure in Iraq, the new Iraqi government stole, looted, destroyed and seized his charity and gave it to the Iranian government and yet they have not enough to take all the useful things from the Iraqis and give it to the criminal Iran. I hope the U.S. government will start to help the Iraqis, because if the U.S. government doesn't interfere in putting an end to these demon bastards, Iraq will perish and become under the command of the Iranians, and this is Iran's plan, they want to integrate Iraq with Iran, and I think that's not in America's interest. When the United States Army entered Iraq in 2003, my husband and brother-in-law and many people worked with the army, my husband and his brothers worked as translators with the United States Army. Here, new suffering began. groups of people who worked with the army began to leave the assistance of the United States Army. Many people were killed by terrorists. the United States Army and the United States government began to give forms to everyone who worked with them to let them emigrate to the United States, many of us registered and in 2011we emigrated to the United States.
And so my immigration began to America, and when I arrived at the city of Louisville I saw trees, grass, the atmosphere, the picturesque nature, and the warm people. I said to myself life here will open for me."
*Disclaimer: This blog has been translated and published with the consent of its author.
Abigail Cheek is a McConnell Scholar in the Class of 2023. She is studying psychology, history, and political science at the University of Louisville.