January, 2005
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE
The American Dream (continued)
Anwar, too, was a changed man. He had been sodomized and beaten, his nose had been broken, and he walked with a heavy limp. He had become a heavy drinker who now beat his wife regularly. For the next seven years, Hanna walked the streets of Baghdad, begging for food and drink. The couple had two children, but because the marriage remained unsanctioned by the state, they were considered illegal aliens. In January 2001, Hanna sent her husband to the Ministry of the Interior to obtain the documentation required for Sabr and Ayyub to attend school. It was a bad idea. Once again, Anwar was arrested and returned to the very cellblock where he was previously held. This time, he never came home.
THE STORY OF HANNA'S sufferings won the hearts and minds of the Americans in Baghdad. Grateful for her cooperation in identifying her attackers—several of whom were then being considered for important positions in the new government—the Coalition Provisional Authority bestowed medallions of honor on Hanna. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz toured Loose Dogs Prison and testified about her before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Her courage in coming forward to offer U. S. officials what is very likely credible information," he said, would help the coalition "root out" Baathist killers. Her story became a defining parable in Washington of a world gone mad, in which dictators had been given license to terrorize their people without consequence. But all that was changing now, as strongmen always fall, and Hanna was left standing to write the history of the horror. Her story became a favorite in particular among conservatives. The blogs spread the word; one, Townhall.com, proclaimed it "justification alone for Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom."
I met Hanna on August 24, 2004, eleven months after she, her mother, and her children were airlifted by U. S. military transport out of Baghdad to California. She had just signed a book contract with a literary agent in New York, having been referred by her psychiatrist, Paul R. Linde, who wrote Of Spirits and Madness, about his experiences working in Zimbabwe. It is a measure of Hanna's warmth and engaging personality—as well as the power of The Washington Post—that Linde immediately saw the importance and commercial potential of her story and tipped off his agent. Hanna needed a writer, and someone mentioned my name. Was I interested? As soon as I read the Post article, there was no question: I thought it was one of the most powerful stories I'd ever heard. The image of this woman in black "walking hurriedly, as if in a trance, oblivious to the weakness in her legs" as she led horrified Americans on a tour of the prison moved me deeply. I signed a contract to coauthor a book about her life and went to her house, happy to meet a modern-day hero.
She was a heavyset woman with mournful eyes and an expressive face that didn't hold anything back. Her tears could come on fast and hard, and she occasionally showed her contempt with loud clicks of the tongue. But she had an openhearted, ingratiating smile. Her e-mails always arrived with the same distinctive subject line: "Big Love." I liked her.
"You are my voice, you are my candle," she told me many times, her voice aching with love and gratitude. "I think you are not my writer; you are myself now. Because I don't have the language, you are my mouth." She filled my head with cinematic stories, and when I pressed for details, provided them effortlessly. It wasn't so much her harrowing accounts of torture that seduced me as her stories of growing up privileged in the Middle East. Like the one about her graduation from high school, when Jeanne d'Arc arranged an elaborate party at the Christian Hindya Club. The school principal was paid to deliver Hanna's diploma in person. But the climax of the evening came as Hanna mounted a platform of stairs to reach her monstrous cake, which hung suspended by cables from the ceiling so that she could cut it into slices with a bedouin sword.
We met two or three times a week, sometimes at her house, where her mother would prepare a traditional Iraqi lunch: kubba, a meat-filled pastry with raisins, nuts, and spices; quozi, fried minced lamb; and jajeek, yogurt made with mint, dill, and garlic. Other times, we met at a café, where Hanna struggled to comply with the no-smoking law. I brought a tape recorder for her to talk into, and a translator typed her words into English, which I then used to question her more deeply: Who were her friends growing up, and what happened to them? What were Uday's mother and sisters like? And what was she thinking when she walked into the lion's den of his Olympic Committee office? I began calling dozens of people: distant relatives in Detroit; high-ranking coalition authorities and their secretaries, aides, and interpreters; the American cops who originally debriefed her in Baghdad; her military investigators, now back in the States; women's-rights advocates in Iraq; therapists, volunteers, acquaintances, and friends in California.
Despite my enthusiasm, I had one immediate misgiving. Hanna claimed to have attended Oxford University from 1982 to 1984, graduating with a master's degree in accounting. That seemed unlikely: Her spoken English was limited, her written language literally indecipherable. I fought back my doubts. It is widely accepted that torture, complicated by untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, can affect a person in complicated ways. It might distort memory or sense of time. It could lead to a dissociation between mind and body. Perhaps, I told myself, it could even expunge the memory of a second language.
Copyright
2005
Esquire
