Photo Courtesy of Alexis Allison
“This weekend, I visit Chamchamal,” I told my Kurdish friend. We leaned over a Scrabble game with a group of my other college-age English learners, stuck to wooden chairs with sweat from the summer Iraq heat.
“Texas. You’re going to Texas.” He grinned.
“Texas? No. No, no, no. Chamchamal,” I said. Chamchamal is a village in northern Iraq — known locally as a dangerous, semi-tribal space replete with guns and explosives.
“Ah. We call it Texas.” His hands became pistols, and he drew them from his belt. “Like the Wild West. Hollywood.”
I froze mid-play. “I’m from Texas,” I said. “I’m from Texas — and it’s not like the Wild West. At all.”
My friend raised his eyebrows.
“I mean, some people have guns,” I said. “But that’s it.”
I wondered then, as we kept playing and laughing, if the typical American perception of Iraq represents reality as much as the old Hollywood westerns represent modern Texas — not much at all.
Before I traveled to Iraq, I associated only three words with the country: war, bombs, desert. Only three words — all a result of my own ignorance and my retention of what the media and Hollywood told me.
After working for two summers with Preemptive Love Coalition, an organization that provides heart surgery for Iraqi children, Iraq seems much bigger and much more complex than those three words.
For example: The first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane was the abundance of Ferris wheels. Northern Iraq brims with Ferris wheels.
The Ferris wheels taught me this: Stereotypes do not reveal the whole story, and it’s dangerous to think they do. As author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” stereotypes “make one story become the only story.”
And this thought confronted me on June 10, when the successor to al-Qaida in Iraq — a terrorist group called ISIS — captured the second-largest city in the country. Since then, they have hurt people in pursuit of power — beheading children, starving entire ethnic groups, executing uncooperative Muslims en masse and giving Christians and other minorities three choices: convert to a radicalized Islam, pay a “protection tax” or die.
Meanwhile, my friends and I were as far away from ISIS as Pepperdine is from San Diego — waiting, choosing to stay and asking ourselves: “How can humans do this to each other?”
I left Iraq on July 24, the same day the country elected a new president and ISIS blew up the tomb said to belong to the prophet Jonah. I left my friends and students behind —they do not have an American passport — and took my question with me.
Then, in the month I’ve been home, I came across a quote — traditionally attributed to British theologian G.K. Chesterton — that led me to an answer. While he was living, a newspaper apparently sent out letters to the public, asking, “What’s wrong with the world today?” Chesterton responded simply, “I am.”
I am what’s wrong with the world today.
How can humans do this to each other? I don’t know — but I do it to my roommates, my parents, my friends and the strangers I encounter every day.
The violence starts with me — just as this genocide in Iraq began as violence in one person’s heart.
Pursuing only one story about a person or people or group is its own sort of violence — a dispossession of explanation, a refusal to consider the whole. Pursuing only one story allows us to accept the traditional villain narrative. It gives us someone to blame. It gives us someone to hate.
I confess I have hated ISIS. I have hated how they choke my friends with fear, how they snuff out hospitals and how their presence may soon force my 18-year-old ESL students to pick up guns and fight them.
I also don’t know anyone in ISIS. I only know what the media have told me. But the media are just like Hollywood: as a limited organization, it can never tell all the stories.
I am also to blame. Thus far, I’ve only shared one story about ISIS. Here is another: Many of the people fighting for ISIS are Sunni Muslims — Iraqis who have been persecuted and disenfranchised by the Shiite-led government since Saddam Hussein, the fifth president of Iraq, fell in 2003.
Before U.S. and U.K. forces forcibly removed Hussein — a Sunni Muslim — from office, however, Hussein’s government suppressed the Shiite population, destroying their holy places, expelling them to Iran and refusing to allow schools to teach their curriculum.
Back and forth, the Sunnis or the Shiites were marginalized, regarded as “the Other,” viewed from the lens of only one story. And, back and forth, they did the same things to each other in return.
This other story about ISIS does not excuse their behavior. There is no excuse for what they have done. But this other story helps explain it. Back and back and back — people-groups in Iraq have been hurt, only to respond by hurting others.
It makes sense why Sunnis regard Shiites as “the Other,” why my Kurdish friends see Texas as merely the home of gun-slinging cowboys and why I once considered Iraq only a violent, backward place, when all we pursue is a single, incomplete story about one another.
The choice to pursue a second story, a third story, even a tenth story about each other allows grace, understanding and empathy to grow between two seemingly disparate groups.
May my friends in Iraq make this choice. May you and I make this choice. May you and I seek to understand each other instead of retaliate. May we seek more than one story, reject the traditional villain narrative and the crisp news headlines and quickly grasp the complexity of the human race. May we eradicate the violence of the single-story within our own hearts — and may Iraq, one day, also be known as a country that brims with Ferris wheels.
__________
Follow the Graphic on Twitter: @PeppGraphic
