Mirage
On my first day of first grade, I looked around the playground trying to decide whom I wanted to be friends with. I picked Chris Murphy because of her wavy golden pigtails. My decision was all surface, no substance. My experience in Kurdistan, Iraq was a lot like that. As long as something looked like it functioned, it didn’t matter if it actually worked. ATMs were plentiful in the city but were seldom stocked with currency or even on-line. For profit schools boasted high test scores yet marks were doctored or exams sold for thousands of dollars. New restaurants/lounges popped up around the Christian city of Ankawa playing the same music heard in Bangkok or New York, yet women were largely marginalized and excluded from everyday social life. The veneer of modernism confused: although the outside was familiar, the inside was tribal and foreign to me.
My teenage students were my portal into cultural comprehension. There is universality to teenage behavior that transcends religion, culture, and race. Watch middle school students in an exam hall anxiously waiting to be dismissed. Legs kick, bottoms squirm, talking ensues. High schoolers discover sex in Northern Iraq the same as in the west. They make jokes about the reproduction units in biology class, tell stories about who was kissing whom in cars, and flirt outrageously. There is gossip and rumor mongering, just like when I was in high school a million years ago. One of my eleventh graders recently told me that when she is out with her father’s family (a prominent political family), she sometimes wears an abaya or a hijab out of respect for tradition. I was amazed because I had never seen her wear a hijab, and she was clad in fitted denim as she told me. Then she laughed as she confessed that if the hijab slips, she doesn’t bother to refasten it. She lets it slide back or hang loosely down her back. I know her views on the hijab are personal and don’t apply to all girls who choose or are required to wear the hijab. However, a slipping hijab is a fitting metaphor for Northern Iraq at this time.
The autonomous Kurdish region has enjoyed unprecedented prosperity due to its huge reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium, gold and silver. Where there is money to be made, expats come a running. The influx of foreigners adds some flavor, but does it really foster change? Erbil wants to be the next Dubai, but raising its prices will not magically make it so. There must be fundamental changes including far reaching support for female education, gender protection laws, cultural institutions support, and tourism infrastructure development. Otherwise, Erbil will eventually re-tie its headscarf.
My time in Iraq has finished. I am deeply grateful to the people who have shared their stories with me and tolerated my cultural blunders, and to my students who taught me a lesson in heartbreak. This is my final posting.
