The 13th Tablet

‘There’s nothing we can do about it,’ he said with the resigned calm of a young man who had seen too much fighting in his short lifetime.

He changed the subject abruptly as he stopped in front of his battered car, ‘So, Madam, what do you think of my new Mercedes?’

Mina suppressed a smile as she looked at the sorriest car she had ever witnessed. It looked like an art installation that had not quite made it to a contemporary art gallery. ‘It’s… it’s… does it work?’ she asked, trying to hide her doubts.

‘Yes Madam. But you’re missing the point. It’s mine!’ he added with a large grin.

‘Oh. Right, my apologies. What a beautiful car! Listen, about the drive, I’ve changed my mind. Do you think you could first drop me at my flat in town and pick me up later? I should be ready in an hour’s time.’

‘No problem Madam.’

‘And stop calling me Madam. Call me Miss, or just Mina.’

‘Yes Miss Mina.’

‘And…’

‘Yes, Madam?’

‘Speak to me in Arabic. We aren’t in class right now, are we?’

‘How will I practise my English?’ he asked, wringing his hands in mock distress.

‘And how will I practise my Arabic?’ she answered.

He smiled and they drove off.

Mina loved speaking Arabic and listening to Hassan’s comforting Mosuli accent. Her own accent had transformed beyond recognition. When she had first arrived she spoke classical Arabic, which she had learned at university. Although her parents spoke Arabic, they had always spoken English with her. It had taken her over a year to lose her literary turn of phrase and pick up the local dialect and, more importantly when in the field, the local slang. Even so, the incongruity of some of her sentences still made her students laugh. Luckily most of her classes were in English.

As she looked out at the familiar Mosuli landscape rolling past her window, Mina wondered whether she really was that glad to be back. She had a nagging feeling that she was running away from everything that made sense. Just over a year ago she had put her PhD scholarship at Columbia University on hold and left New York to take up a badly-paid lecturing position at the Department of Cuneiform Studies at the University of Mosul.

Nigel, her Columbia professor in Middle Eastern Studies had been very disappointed. She was such a promising PhD student and her dissertation on Early European explorers in ancient Mesopotamian cities would suffer greatly from her decision to leave so abruptly. Her parents too were appalled by her decision, despite being all too familiar with her passionate nature. This time it was different: they truly couldn’t understand her motives. They had been born in Iraq, suffered under Saddam Hussein’s rule and left the country to start a new life in America. Mina had been born in the US and brought up as a New Yorker.

Yet, Mina had felt uprooted and torn inside. Her parents had given her comfort, peace and freedom but for many years, she had felt betrayed, or more precisely, failed by them. They were unusual first generation immigrants; they didn’t live within an Iraqi community and they worked very hard at trying to forget where they came from. In high school, Mina had never fitted in. With her long black hair and dark eyelashes, almond-shaped eyes and her chiselled nose, she was different from the other girls in her class. It was only at the age of fifteen, when she started reading about ancient Mesopotamia, the land ‘between the two rivers’ — the Tigris and the Euphrates — that she began to yearn to know Iraq properly. It was her way of coping with a fractured identity. A few years later she was completely immersed in the study of the archaeology of the Near East and cuneiform writing at Columbia. For the first time she was proud of her heritage and no longer felt self-conscious about her not-so-American surname.

Then the war in Iraq broke out. At first, most Iraqi people were filled with elation; it was an epic tale of liberation and the end of Saddam Hussein, the tyrant. But after a few years, with American forces still on the ground, Mina wondered what good came from their lingering presence. Depending on what news she read, she felt pulled one way or the other. She was finding it more difficult than ever to reconcile the two sides of her American-Iraqi identity.

When the terrible lootings of the Baghdad National Museum occurred in 2003, she rushed to Iraq to help out in any capacity she could, leaving in her wake a confused ex-boyfriend, angry parents and a PhD on hold.