Nazhat
By Sadie Sawyer
Nazhat’s eyes, hazel and sunken with ninety-three years of life, meet mine with a muddle of confused recognition and joy. We are lucky; dementia has taken her mind hostage, but it has not changed her kind disposition.
I tell her who I am, and a smile creeps across her face. Her glasses are a half-inch thick, and growing—the ophthalmologist increases her prescription often. Her silver hair is parted gently yet precisely in a rainbow across the back of her head, braided and knotted by her caretakers and adorned with colorful bobby pins. My grandmother is perched on the leather couch, a white, fuzzy husband pillow supporting her scoliosis-riddled back and pink, sparkly slippers on her feet (a birthday gift from Sharonda, her caretaker). All of her four children have come by to take down her Christmas decorations, but she insists on keeping them up even though it’s March. The TV blares advertisements between General Hospital reruns and CNN news reports that she can hardly hear. I mute it as I sit beside her. I tell her I want to interview her.
She furrows her brow, puzzled. “What?”
“I want to interview you about your life. Do you think you remember some things that I can ask you about?”
“I don’t remember,” she declares. Her voice is gentle yet gravelly, rumbling from deep in her throat with the guttural, staccato vowels of an Arabic accent, bending plain English into something richer.
“Where are you from?” I prompt. “I am from Baghdad.”
Nazhat was born in Baghdad in 1931 a Chaldean—an ethnic group of Christians indigenous to northern Iraq, descended from the ancient Babylonians. Bright and soft-spoken, she was a middle sibling of eight children, and spoke Chaldean, French, English, and Arabic. (“You spoke French in school,” I tell her. “No,” she disagrees. The French nursery rhymes she taught me beg to differ.) She recalls hot summers, sleeping on the roof of their home when it became unbearable, and watching her brothers splash in the river, though she never learned to swim.
As a twelve-year-old Nazhat strolled down the streets of Baghdad on her way to school, she walked arm in arm with her older sister, Bahidja. The streets bustled with women in flowing abayas window shopping, little children at their hips, and men in western suits carrying briefcases, sending dust into the thick, hot air until cooler winds off the Tigris blew it away. The two girls giggled to each other in French, the secret language they share, gifted to them by the nuns at the Progressive Sisters School.
As they neared the school gates, a large man with a long, scraggy beard stood in their way. Grabbing Nazhat by the arm, he pushed her frizzy hair back and yanked her gold earring from her lobe. Pain seared through her ear, sharp and immediate. She cried out, stumbling backward as she felt the hot trickle of blood slip down her neck. The man vanished, swallowed in the tide of people before anyone could stop him. A few heads turned their way, a shopkeeper muttering something under his breath, but no one moved.
Since then, she tells me, she has never worn earrings. Not once. Her piercing has not closed in eighty-one years.
Nazhat as an undergraduate student in Baghdad
“Then you moved to the United States, right?” She murmurs faintly in agreement, though she may just be following my lead. “And you met Jidou?”
The winds of change blew hot in Baghdad in the fifties. Whispers of a revolution hung in the sweltering air like an immutable verdict, the streets humming with unrest. Nazhat’s family listened and pulled up their roots, following their tribe to Detroit, Michigan and leaving behind the place they would always call home. She soon followed suit, by then both brilliant and independent, and earned her Master’s degree in Chemistry at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Then, she met Yusuf. My grandfather, my jidou.
I open the scrapbook she so delicately pieced together more than fifty years ago. A black-and-white photograph smiles up at us. Nazhat is young, her hair pinned in a high, teased bun, a delicate veil draping over her shoulders. Yusuf stands beside her, tall, dignified, his dark suit perfectly pressed, his eyes brimming with wisdom, quiet and certain.
She studies the page. Then, she laughs—softly, in disbelief. “Can you believe that’s me?” she asks, tracing the edge of the photo with her frail fingers.
The couple were married in 1965, two souls from the same city who grew up blocks away from one another, yet crossed an ocean to meet. Their home overflowed with love, wisdom, children, and the smell of Yusuf’s printing press as he put together one of Detroit’s first Chaldean newspapers. Nazhat bore three sons and a daughter (“She came late,” she tells me. She was forty-five when my mother, Maha, was born. “A miracle,” I say.)
Nazhat on her wedding day
Fifty years later, Nazhat sometimes takes a moment to recognize her own children. The filing system of her mind seems just out of reach, disorganized with everything in its wrong place, the words on the tip of her tongue dancing away as she tries to grasp them. Our conversations are a well-worn path in my mind, shared hundreds of times. To her, it’s the first.
“How do you remember? You are smart, you know everything,” she marvels at my retelling of her own life.
“You’re my grandma,” I swallow tears, “of course I remember.”
“I’m your grandma?” She smiles, more of a question than a statement. “With my age, I forget everything.”
I can see the effort in her face—the way she searches for words that refuse to come, the way she purses her lips, frustrated by the gaps where memory should be. I don’t push her further. She has given me what she can today.
“Thank you, Nana,” I say softly, reaching for the remote for a remedy.
The lilting, melancholic voice of Nazim al-Ghazali, an icon of Iraqi culture, fills the small room. Nazhat’s face softens, and she closes her eyes as the minor keys of the maqam wash over her. I wonder what unfolds in her mind. Does she see Yusuf, who she lost four years ago? Her sisters, her youth? Then, her lips begin to move.
ﻗﻞ ﻟﻲ ﯾﺎ ﺣﻠﻮ ﻣﻨﯿﻦ ﷲ ﺟﺎﺑﻚ
ﻟﻮ ﻛﺎن اﻟﮭﺠﺮ ﻣﻨﻚ ﺳﺠﯿﮫ
Tell me, oh beautiful one, from where did God bring you?
Though I’m not sure she can tell me her own name, she sings along.
Sadie Sawyer (she/her) is a sophomore at UNC studying computer science and information science with a creative writing minor. When she’s not hacking, she likes to write songs, play guitar and piano, and spend time outdoors.