Amman July 2024

My Home - by Dylan Jaff

My father, his uncles, and my grandparents, I spent hours with them on end, hearing their stories. They remembered their home, the garden, the food, the streets, and the shops, they remembered everything like the back of their hand. They would always remember.

In the stillness of dawn, the sun’s golden rays split over the tiles of Baghdad’s rooftops, and the scent of red tea wafted through the air. I had never seen it, but Iraq was my home. It was a place of memories woven into every alleyway, every once-bustling marketplace of memories, memories not mine.

Home was the house they lived in. The slightly small pool, always full of kids and cousins. The brown couch, the beige coffee table. The smell of masgouf. The dust that covered every corner, the dust from generations past.

Home was the garden my Teta tended to. I can almost remember watching her water the red roses, the avocados and the oranges. It was a vibrant courtyard, one where my friends would’ve gathered to sit under the shade. I can almost see it, but I never did, I never will. But still, I see it, ever so clearly in my head.

Home was where the heart was, wasn’t it? But where was my heart? My heart belonged to Iraq, but it was with me. My heart is not mine. I remember watching the TV one night. I saw the little destroyed Mosque. I saw the streets and the homes, the ones I knew so well but not at all. I didn’t understand it then, I don’t understand it now.

It came all of a sudden, the heavy rainfall of bombs, one after the other. I remember it all, the blood-curling screams, the children, the horrified uncertainty of the truth. The streets our family knew so well were now a maze of blood and corpses, each corner holding up what remained of our home, my home.

29,192, an exact number of how many bombs came down. 200,000 citizens were killed. More than 9.2 million people were displaced. $728 Billion spent just to kill.

Everything had changed, or maybe it had just started for me. The landmarks that once lined and decorated Iraq were now rubble and dust. Rooftops crumpled over families and the garden I had heard of so much was dead.

I saw it all destroyed, and I did nothing. I couldn’t do anything, really. But I did nothing, said nothing. I couldn’t fathom how everything had been destroyed, everything had died. People survived, yeah, but their souls didn’t. It all died that day. Its silence suffocated me, and it still does.

I still cry to this day, I don’t know who I cry for, or why. I had never known that home, the one generations of families were born and raised in—the one they abandoned because of some American man’s conspiracy. I cry for them, for the lives that were lost, for the homes and families destroyed, for the ground they burnt, and for myself.

I drink my tea like my family did, eat the food they did, and talk like they did.

I don’t know why, maybe to keep the culture alive, the memories. I act as if I’ve always been there, in their memories, as if I’ve always lived in Iraq.

 

I do it because if I don’t, who else is there to remember it?