Radio Workshop

Attack on an Ancestor's City (Transcript)

by Catherine Fenollosa

I sit on my dark green couch in my tiny New York City apartment and watch as my grandmother's city is bombed. Like everyone else, I see the journalists with their goggles and bulletproof vests riding on tanks like roller-coasters. I see the evening Baghdad sky flash with falling missiles and anti-aircraft fire. I see US troops battling sand storms and mud and 100 degree days. But what I see most is a place 7-thousand miles away. A place I've never visited - The place where my grandmother was born and raised. And I have a first hand seat watching it all being destroyed.

My grandmother was born in the old city of Baghdad in 1898. As a child, she helped her mother and aunts bake bread and sponge cake in their basement kitchen. The women sat in a circle on the floor, passing bowls full of batter from one to the next when their arms grew tired from stirring. When her family purchased sacks of fruit, she snuck extra dates and pieces of watermelon, her favorites. She used to soothe me to sleep with stories of her trips to the desert with family friends. She traveled by camel and gathered cucumbers by the banks of the Euphrates River. Watching the news coverage, I wonder if there are now US tanks camped on that same fine desert sand where she climbed off her camel and slept in big tents as uncles played music and wives cooked.

Ask many people in the US about life in Iraq, and you hear comments

of arid deserts and poverty. But my grandmother's Baghdad was lush

with art and theatre and music. It is the birthplace of modern

civilization... the home of the first alphabet; the invention of

the wheel. Caught in the middle of this war are hundreds of

thousands of archaeological sites that stretch across what was once

Mesopotamia. Some people say the Garden of Eden is in the southern

Iraqi city of Basra where, just last week, nearly a thousand women

and children spilled into the streets as fighting broke out between

British and Iraqi troops.

Watching the war unfold, I see the faces of young men with the same

olive complexions as my four brothers elbow one another for food

and water. I see the eyes of my grandmother in women protectively

ushering their children to safety as helicopters roar overhead.

After my grandfather died in the late 1970s, my grandmother

followed custom and came to live with her only son... my father in

the US. When she arrived, she refused to unpack her suitcases,

defiant this was her new home. She couldn't understand soap operas

on TV or the dance show "Soul Train" where men and women grinded

against one another. She recreated much of her old life, spending

days in the kitchen, cooking grape leaves and stuffed tomatoes and

baba ganoush. To this day, everyone in my family swears they are

the only ones who learned her secret grape leaf recipe. She was a

beautiful seamstress, sewing me pink pajamas trimmed in white lace.

She'd challenge my brother's and me to endless card games… her

favorite pastime in Iraq. She never let us win.

I have a picture of my grandmother's wedding in 1919. In the black

and white photo, she wears a white gown embroidered with lace. Her

dark brown hair folds in loose curls around her chin. On her left

hand is a band of tiny diamonds. Eighty years later, I wore the

same ring when I got married. With its dents and scratches, the

thin silver-colored band reminds of me where my grandmother came

from. I have inherited many things from her - her thick dark hair,

her big brown eyes, her stubbornness.

She defied stereo-types. She was educated and traveled the world. She

spoke more than three languages. She also spoke her mind and stood

her ground - all 4 feet 8 inches of her. She was the smartest and

strongest woman I've ever met.

I wonder if she'd be proud of me. If she'd approve of my husband,

of my choice to go back to school and to delay having children. And

I wonder if she could have ever imagined that one day her only

granddaughter would be sitting on my couch in New York City

watching bombs drop on her childhood home.

For Columbia Radio News, I'm Catherine Fenollosa.