In a summer of boredom and diary scribbles, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait jolted Selma Dabbagh into a sharper awareness of injustice and her Palestinian identity
My diaries are raw texts, notes, to-do lists, potted histories of what was done, read, or spoken of, self-abasing rants, heightened romantic expectations and (generally dull, long-winded) descriptions of dreams. My diary for one summer in High Wycombe is not more finely composed than the others. My family moved to Kuwait when I was eight and High Wycombe was where we spent long summers, knowing no one. Boredom and unwanted food weighed on us. For me and my sisters food was the enemy and the solace. “I’d rather have sex than porridge, but am in no position to choose,” reads one entry. “I could devote aeons of a lifetime to lovemaking, but I am not even given seconds where it is possible. What a joke,” reads another. Aged 20, I was infatuated by ‘J’ and Stockholm, where he lived. One night, leaning out of my bedroom window to smoke, a badger appeared by our pond. The date was 2nd August, 1990. Our father called from our home in Kuwait at 5am and managed to say “they’ve invaded”, referring to the Iraqi army, before the telephone lines were cut. “All day has been spent looking from one news report to another – there seem to be few reporters,” I recorded, “for once in my petty, selfish little life I can say I truly feel for the Czechs in the Sudetenland, the Russians under Stalin, the Palestinians. How the Western world is spoilt, spoilt to take justice and stability for granted as the order of things. Wake up in the morning and it is gone.” I cringe now: at my histrionics, my misplacement of the Czechs and at the designation of “the Palestinians” as another people, when my father was one. The badger became the safe subject to circle around. When the British started being rounded up as hostages, we speculated as to whether my father would count himself as one. I take two jobs in London, as a waitress and an usherette. The word ‘tired’ crops up repeatedly.
4 August: “How do people with husbands and fathers who are hostages ever survive it? The ever-present sense of dread and hopelessness.” I drunkenly phone J’s mother asking after him.
7 August: J calls. “The conversation was nice and it all felt okay. I couldn’t talk about it although I needed to: he needs to know? For it is heavy.”
10 August: “I don’t think J understands the implications for my family. He said that the Swedes were allowed to leave, and I feel why are some nations so privileged – and then people like the Palestinians get kicked in the teeth again and again and again and lose out: no justice, pride stamped on.” I send a letter to J.
16 August: “If he has read that letter and then just carried on plonking around Stockholm enjoying himself with a clear conscience and fucking ineffectual ideals, then it is unforgivable.” J does not call again.
17 August: “Some people have managed to flee across the borders, but it is haphazard and unclear which passports are more favourable to have.”
25 August: “Wonderful news!” My father had escaped to Jordan on an expired Jordanian passport, jobless. In the coming months our extended Jaffa family who were forced out in 1948 were, with their children, and over 400,000 other Palestinians, expelled from Kuwait.
Looking back, the night the badger appeared was the night I discovered I was Palestinian.
Photography Fatima Mian
This article is taken from Port issue 37. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe head here
