An Arab Woman Blues - Reflections in a sealed bottle...

But will leave you with "sweet" Dreams ... until we meet again.

The story am about to tell you is a true one. I have kept the details unchanged, but I did change the names, location and dates to protect the anonymity of the victims. Ahmad lives in an insalubrious, run down apartment in Syria with his wife and 5 kids. Prior to his forced exile, he lived in a decent neighborhood and in a large home, large enough for his family and his parents. After the occupation and during the usual nightly American raids, that all Iraqis have experienced, Ahmad's life took a definite turn from which he will never recover. His house was besieged by a horde of American barbarians, tanks and weapons...They stormed in the middle of the night, made everyone lie on the floor, face down, including his elderly parents, kicked and beat the whole family with their boots, resting them on their heads and necks... Then they proceeded to storm each room using axes to break down the doors when the doors were not locked to start with. Then they opened the wardrobes, and said ...

There are subjects I find ways to avoid or not dwell on for too long...I don't think am a terribly courageous woman for doing so. But then, these subjects are so painful for me that if tackled, leave me totally depleted, enraged like some animal gone wild in a metal cage, or terribly hopeless... Hopelessness not to be understood as in "I want to kill myself now" kind of hopelessness, but a hopelessness that is best translated as loss of Faith. Again loss of faith not in a strictly religious/metaphysical sense, but loss of Faith in the broadest of terms...Can be summed up as loss of Faith in humanity, in human kind. Not to be underestimated at all. Dark stuff is made of a lost humanity. The darkest moments of an Occupation... These darkest moments can be found everywhere in Iraq. In the smelly rotten prisons. In the torture wounds of the detainees. In the snatched childhoods. Under the rubbles of a bombed home. In the morgue underneath the putrid stench of Death. In the ...

I've been asked many a times, through this blog, what are my EXACT thoughts on the Iraqi Resistance. My standard reply has always been the same unwavering one - Resistance against a foreign Occupation (dual as in the case of Iraq) is the legitimate right of every people. That means that if tomorrow, the US is invaded and illegally occupied by a foreign power - I will put aside my deep dislike for you lot and will say that the American people have a right to resist any form of illegal occupation. My heart will probably rejoice that you are being made to taste what you inflicted on others, but I will place my principles above my personal/collective story. Right is right. Of course I will try to find legal loopholes by which the invasion and occupation of your country can be justified...Mind you, I will not need to search far for these legal gaps, since you have proven over and over again, not to be a state of law, positing yourselves above the Law. Clearly, the same is applicable to ...

Helwa Ya Baladee...Beautiful my homeland/Country.

This is a sequel to Part I, in case you've missed it. It can be read/watched HERE. The so-called civilized West, always prides itself on this notion -- "bridges of understanding." I was conned, I believed in the lie too. Until... Yesterday I met up with Manal. I had not seen her in ages. She told me that her residency permit will not be renewed and she and her family will have to return to Baghdad. No options. Her home which she described in the minutest details, from the kitchen to the bedrooms, is now occupied by armed Shiites. Her brother tried finding a solution through lawyers and governmental offices, to no avail. "They are armed ya Layla. They took all our furniture, all our belongings, everything we worked for. The fruits of a lifetime's labor... " Manal has a university degree in architecture, she now works in the black as a junior " hafafa ", i.e her job consists of waxing the ladies in a beauty salon, while dreaming of home... Her family...

Blogs just like Life itself, attract all kinds of people...Sane, mad, lost, aware, confused, sick, searching... I took this title from a commentator who keeps harassing me...but even a harasser can come up with some good stuff...How about that for impartial, unbiased, objectivity ? Don't you Westerners pride yourselves on being rational beings and o' so fucking objective? Are you not the ones who posited empirical positivism, cartesian minds over matter, thesis and anti-thesis, dialectics, and hypothetical assumptions tested against hard facts ? All and above a "mundane" reality - "theirs". A "mundane" reality that "we can't measure, assess, calculate, evaluate...unless..." Indices, figures, diagrams, curves, stats, polls, maths, econometrics, measurements, graphs... Let's see now how "their" reality truly measures up -- you think to yourselves. Your anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists gather in conferences and...

Just in case you're feeling out of place...

A friend just returned from Baghdad. He said that people stopped asking each other the usual " How are you and how is your family ". Greetings start with " Do you have any electricity?" He also said that neighborhoods have totally been transformed. For instance an up-scale neighborhood like Al-Mansur is now populated with riff raff shroog , in other words sectarian whores who falsify their diplomas and get governmental posts with titles like " doctor " when in fact they have not even completed secondary schooling. Only 2% of the original inhabitants of let's say Al-Mansur remained there. All the others have fled or been killed, leaving in their place the rot of the new Iraq, the new Zionists who go by the name of sectarian Shiites. My friend said he felt like a stranger in his own neighborhood, where he was born and raised. As I've mentioned before, on more than one occasion, the Shiites revivalists are the most chauvinistic, sectarian, bastards y...

I was not sure what to call this post and where to publish it either. Here or on the Uncensored one. What should I call it ? On Death , Parallel Lives or just Attachment ? And why the Uncensored blog and not here ? I've been debating fine lines with myself... Not that it really matters to you, but for me they are important. This may stem from my new compulsion - that of finding order or creating order in my life, after all this chaos. A possible, pathetic attempt to categorize, compartmentalize, events and people, so this feeling of total loss of control, becomes less acute... In the end, it does not really matter. Just as the dead don't request their exact place of burial, these fine lines are irrelevant too. Some dying people do request their place of burial. What a luxury ! They specify in advance the exact location, the rites and who should be invited to their funeral. I have often wondered, and I do admit, I can be quite macabre when it comes to parallel lives - what is ea...

Ya'nee what the fuck is happening to the world ? I can't believe my eyes. The President of Sudan is charged with Genocide in Darfur and Bush and the American scum are let off the hook ? Over 1 million dead, 3 million maimed for life, 3 million widows, 5 million orphans, 5 million refugees, over 150'000 detainees, homes destroyed, massive ethnic cleansing, unprecedented torture and rape in the history of mankind, summary executions and arrests, billions of dollars stolen, antiquities and oil plundered, an economy in shambles, a 70% unemployement rate, walled ghettoes, use of illegal weapons - DU, napalm, White Phosphorus, Cluster bombs, thousands of tons of bombs, robotic weapons, phyiscal deformities, use of Iranian militias, drills, physical mutilation, desecrating religious sites, pissing on corpses, arresting and imprisoning children, sodomizing kids, raping and burning women alive,insults, humiliation and slurs of Iraqis in their own country, on their own turf...and mo...

Nothing beats living pictures, sight and sound...Nothing beats the Truth you are about to witness. Nothing beats your hideous, heinous, barbaric crimes... The Video Link below is a must see. It does not allow any embedding, so I am not able to post it here on this blog. But do click on IT HERE. You will be taken to the other side of the world. To a world of monsters, monsters of your own doing. The Title ? Iraq Deformities / Fallujah- July 2008 . Thanks to YOUR Weapons of Mass of Destruction. Yes, we found the weapons. They were and are still used by YOU in IRAQ. And I don't want to receive any comments, mails or the like telling me that you could not bring yourself to watch it, because of your extra sensitivity. We are living it, you bastards. So you watch it NOW. Just as you watched our lives being destroyed...

Again, the same pattern repeats itself every time massive ethnic cleansing takes place in Iraq. It happened with Iranian maneuvers when Baghdad's Sunni population was being wiped out and a "divine victory" was proclaimed in Lebanon and it is happening again when the Sunni population of Mosul is being wiped out by the sectarian, Iranian, Shiite government and the Zionist Kurds and all attention/focus and news coverage are being directed on Iran's missiles test. And the continuous crimes go on, unnoticed, unaddressed, while other - cheap, low-life, sold-out bitches are claiming more "divine victories"... My relative K. has just returned from Mosul. I will not give you details on him, I am adamant about protecting his anonymity. I can tell you though that K. was the most apolitical person you can meet. K. by virtue of his profession, witnessed many cases of torture victims, he said what he saw in Mosul was nothing compared to what he had seen in the past . In o...

Upon the recommendation of a friend, I took up swimming again...She said it will expand your lungs and I could do with some extra air. I actually love swimming, but I regard pools as nests of bacterias, germs, fungus and chlorine...This obviously doesn't help my chronic apprehension of becoming contaminated with one thing or the other... After all there were/are enough of DU, polluted water, soiled foodstuffs, biological particles from white phosphorus stacked in the Iraqi body, surely I don't need an added germ - albeit of a local flavor... But I did try to overcome my hypochondriasis and hit the pool for some lung expansion. Slow, even, strokes - my friend suggested, so I did just that - slow, even strokes, in yoga like fashion. I nearly bumped my head a couple of times on the edge of the pool, having adopted this contemplative Zen approach, but did manage to avert any major accident, thankfully... After a while, I got frankly bored with the back and forth, and my meditativ...

If there is one thing that should absolutely not be relinquished, it's Siesta time. Those short afternoon naps are considered a luxury in the West, here they are considered essential coping skills. Coping with the heat, with the overtired minds and it is scientifically proven that they are a great source of regeneration. Westerners often criticize us for this habit. They believe it is a waste of time. Their whole culture hinges on being available for work, for profit, for more...Yet most of them are hardly available at all. I remember having to note down in an agenda the date and precise time to meet anyone for a cup of coffee. You are all a very busy people running around like headless chicken, doing nothing. Yes nothing, because if you really look back on all your years of running around, you will realize you have achieved nothing of substance. You are still empty, hollow and got your minds very tired in the process. You really need to learn how to nap in the afternoons. Of cours...

I've just realized that I will be "celebrating" two years of relentless blogging, soon. It all started in July 2006, with yet another external "aggression" - Israel/Lebanon. I was familiar with blogs and even thought of starting my own - way before, but something held me back. I am not sure what it was, maybe the timing was not right. I know I was way too raw, so raw, I felt I had lost my skin...So I just perused other people's blogs and thought to myself -- maybe one day I will start my own. And interestingly enough, my first posts were not about Iraq. I simply could not get myself to write about Iraq. You know, it felt like someone who had just lost someone very precious and when you meet that person, he will talk about the weather instead of his loss, or maybe she will talk around the subject or avoid it altogether and pretend nothing... This usually happens when a person is too raw and simply cannot deal with the event. This is exactly what happened to m...

I did apologize for not remembering your day of "Independence". Now, I really want to extend to you my warmest wishes on that "honorable" occasion. Please accept this humble present from me to you . A special message to an Italian Friend - Don't lose hope. Silence is not absence. And to JM, the American, who supports me 100% and unconditionally. Youtube video: Directed by Farismn, 2 June 2008.

I was at the grocer's yesterday...hate shopping but my fridge was kind of totally empty...I know I need to lose a few pounds, but starvation is not on the menu. So I really forced myself to walk to the grocery store, a 20 mn walk from where am at. I resented the fact that am not allowed to drive here, resented the fumes from the car exhaust pipes filling my lungs with lead, resented the lack of pavements, resented the holes and craters in the streets, resented the fact that I have to debate for 30 mn or so what is appropriate or not appropriate dress code... Knowing the tight frontiers, almost everything is not appropriate short of stuffing your head in a veil...but then it takes courage to dare and affirm some identity. So it takes creativity to play around and work your way with these frontiers, imposed frontiers... Anyways, so I finally made it outside the door filled with resentment and apprehension. Fear of falling into another hole, choking from the fumes, harassed for playin...

I have been (very) unable to blog...Today is the first day I am back to my "wits"... Am sure some of you are terribly annoyed that am still around while others are probably relieved...The first group -- I didn't miss you at all. The second group --you've been in my thoughts...Good thoughts. Now that am done with the preliminaries, let me get to the real important matters. Today, my thoughts have been dominated by one single idea -- WE NEED ANOTHER SADDAM HUSSEIN NOW! I was in a cab and as usual, the bored/curious/snoopy driver was trying to suss me out. I don't know why but his conversation took on immediately a political twist. OK, maybe I do know why... Life is getting very, very expensive, here and most people can't make ends meet anymore. In particular the Iraqis... So this is how the conversation started -- with the ever increasing price of cab rides, to fuel, to food...to everything. So the driver said to me " It's all because of the war in Iraq...