By Avantika Sharma
One of the torturers greeted Mayada with a hard kick to her lower body as the giant threw her to the floor. She cried out in surprise and he laughed as he said mockingly, “Welcome, Mayada Nizar Jafar Mustafa Al-Askari.”
“So, you are a supporter of the Shiite!” he accused, swinging his rubber truncheon close to Mayada’s head.
Keeping her face free of the panic she felt, Mayada protested in vain. “I have done nothing wrong.”
“This is what happens to supporters of the Shiite,” the big-headed torturer said, as he stepped forward and slapped Mayada’s face three times hard.
One man suddenly threatened, “This is what happens to traitors.”
Mayada heard the hum of machinery. Immediately, the first burst of electricity coursed through her, and her head jerked backward as the electricity rolled down her neck and into her armpits, and up her neck and into her groin. She wondered if her body had been set afire.
Mayada, Daughter of Iraq presents a heart-wrenching account of an innocent woman being subdued to unwanted abomination from a leader, who had inflicted paramount terror upon Iraqis. Author Jean Sasson has penned a biography of the (L) Mayada Al-Askari who, ironically, was born into a powerful Iraqi family, only to have influence leave her side in the most critical juncture.
A divorced mother of two, she fell prey to the dictator’s many atrocities, as did others, but in particular, 17 ‘shadow women’ whom she met after she was thrown into a cell of the notorious Baladiyat Prison.
Set in 1999 Iraq, when Saddam Hussein’s monstrosity was at its peak, Sasson’s book revisits the early days of the tyranny imposed by the reign of the Ba’ath Party.
The book is merely but the journey of ‘one woman’s survival in Saddam Hussein’s torture jail’… and to think that there would be other women like her –tortured to the gut – shudders readers.
In 2015, Mayada passed away aged 60 after a long battle with cancer, however, she lived to see one dream.
Mayada writes in a letter to a fellow inmate she met inside prison, “A glorious day has dawned. This morning my daughter woke me at fifteen minutes before six and whispered, ‘Mama. Get up. I think it’s over’. I knew instantly what my daughter was telling me. After thirty-five years of cruel and capricious tyranny – from July 17, 1968, until today – Saddam Hussein’s steel grip on my beloved Iraq had finally been smashed. When the newsman said that Iraq’s Baathists were on the run, and that many of them had disappeared into thin air, I laughed with an abandon I hadn’t felt in years. Our hearts were bursting with happiness.”
The book opens with a rather important note from the author. Titled, “Meeting Mayada”, Sasson introduces readers to their meeting. The biography encapsulates her life, whilst detailing glimpses of her childhood, including the experience of being brought up in a wealthy, influential family and photographs of Mayada’s family, various maps of Iraq, among others.
Sasson writes, “Unlike many Arab women who were long burdened by cruel fathers and other men, Mayada had never known male dominance or masculine outrage. Her father, Nizar Jafar Al-Askari, had always been a gentle man. He never once favored the idea of sons over daughters, even though in Iraq a man surrounded by females is often pitied.”
The daughter of Iraq, rightfully so, carried the lineage forward of respected and famous Iraqi leaders, amongst whom were her paternal grandfather, Jafar Pasha Al-Askari (former Defence Minister and Prime Minister of Iraq) and maternal grandfather, Sati Al-Husri (celebrated throughout the Arab world as a genius and father of Arab nationalism).
Ensuing many difficulties, and devoid of the many risks involved, Mayada agreed to narrate the story of her life, as if taking on an incumbent responsibility on behalf of Iraqis, and the inmates she encountered in prison.
The book stands as a reverberation of her sufferings, a woman of high wit, forced to print pamphlets at her printing office in order to make a living. A fine day turns into the worst nightmare of the woman’s life, forcibly detained by Saddam’s secret police and thrown inside the Baladiyat – for no important reason per se, but one – treason, injustice with the government and with Hussein.
Readers are acquainted with Mayada’s wretched fortune despite having access to well-known contacts – Dr Fadil Al-Barrak, in Mayada’s words, “so powerful he could order the release of anyone from prison,” was also lashed in one of the prisons he once ruled over.
Hussein spared no one, until his government was toppled (2003) and he was, to the relief of many, executed in 2006.
The book is a vivid depiction of suffering and affliction through the writer’s disposition of stories owned by Mayada’s fellow inmates – innocent women who were tortured, beaten, raped, and even killed. Mayada felt ashamed to be born a woman in a country like hers.
In one instance, a rather disturbing event transpired outside Mayada’s cell… “The guards took turns raping Ahmed (a pious young Wahhabi convert). The brutal rape went on for more than an hour, until Mayada heard one of the guards laugh like a hyena as he told Ahmed, “Relax. You are now the wife of three men and you must please us all.”
The book raises one important point – how many more women, men and innocent children would have died at the hands of Hussein?
Sasson makes it impossible for readers to go through the book in one stretch. The gore absurdities faced by Mayada and other shadow women in the prison makes one want to take a pause, breathe and mull over what life has become of people residing in the Middle Eastern countries, over the years.
Once an intelligent woman, lauded and rewarded by the dictator himself for her journalistic authority, she ended in a vicious circle of dictatorship. Mayada stoically endured, gaining a valuable spot in the good books of Hussein’s regime, only to be tortured and electrocuted, with her dignity and rights ripped off.
Interestingly, she also formed a close relationship with one of the shadow women, Samara, whom Mayada never heard from or found out about after she was released from cell 52.
Sasson expresses her heartfelt desire through a letter to Samara, “I await yet another miracle, the miracle that you and the other women survived. I promise you this, as soon as it is safe to leave my children and travel to Iraq, I will come to look for you and the other shadow women. If you are alive, one day I will be united in happiness with you, and with every other shadow woman I came to know and love.”
Mayada’s devastating journey brings forth visuals of barbaric acts hurled at women across the country.
While the circumstances continue to worsen and intensify, barbaric acts currently evident in violence-hit Manipur do not go unnoticed.
Has it become a long-term tradition for society to consider women the ultimate receivers of misery, pain and misconduct? Or have we, members of society as a whole, accepted the said fact?
How long would we keep protesting for women to get justice? Mayada’s story nonetheless justifies one of the many answers, however. Women can save other women, if not through actions… through stories that stand the test of time.