My grandmother through my eyes
As a child, I spent my early years with my grandmother because my mother was very busy with her work. I also used to spend the summer at my grandmother’s house when I was a teenager. From my mother and my maternal uncles I learned the true story of my grandmother and how she lived and what kind of challenges she faced.
The story I’ve been told is simply that my grandmother was my grandfather’s second wife and they were related by blood. Being a second wife, she had an unhappy life as there was always conflict and jealousy between the wives to control and possess the man. As a child and teenager, I just took the superficial story for what it was, and as a result, I felt a deep sympathy for my grandmother. As I grew older and had my own complicated experiences, I began to form a different view of my grandmother, not in the same way that my mother and maternal uncles portrayed her to me.
My grandmother was born in a village in the Diyala Governorate in eastern Iraq in the 1920s. My grandmother was an extraordinarily beautiful woman who deserved to be a beauty queen, with her fair skin, unique gray eyes, and long blonde hair. Although she was affiliated with a well known Arab tribe, many wondered about her Arab origins because it was very obvious that her features were not Arab with dark skin and dark eyes. Many assumed that she might have Turkish ancestry, which personally, I thought might be true.
My grandmother was born in a small town to an extremely conservative family that always lived a solitary, not sociable lifestyle. The eldest of her sisters, she faced the most severe restrictions on her freedom typical of women in the Middle East at that time a century ago. Due to her restrictions, her siblings were able to finish school while my grandmother’s fate was to be illiterate for the rest of her life.
My grandmother had no idea what education was except for her brothers, but she could feel that it is something very powerful and superior that she could not obtain because she was a woman. In this environment and atmosphere, my grandmother had grown up with no social life, no education, no way to learn, little personal development and personal growth. I am sure that when my grandmother reached adolescence, she did not have the slightest perception about herself, life, the world or people. She had no learning resources to help her or develop her mindset to form any concept of herself, life, and the world.
My grandmother spent all her years alone in a solitary life in her village, and in her late teens, her father informed her that there was a relative who had asked to marry her. Her father and her family approved this marriage, so she had to immediately prepare to get married soon. She might have found out that she was married with a child. She lived in Baghdad. She was to be a second wife. Then, she found out that my grandfather was older than her by almost or more than twenty years, but he was rich and wanted more children. Her first wife, older than him, was unable to give him children, so that was the reason for this marriage.
My grandmother had no idea of marriage, of a man, of anything. She was naive, innocent with a childlike spirit, completely unaware of anything cruel in this life. She has just married a stranger from her relatives who took her to Baghdad. At first, my grandfather brought my grandmother to live with his first wife, all in the same house. My grandmother found out that my grandfather loved his first wife but he wanted to have more children since he only had one child from his first wife.
My grandfather liked my grandmother’s youth and beauty, but my grandfather was oblivious to the jealousy between these two women and the consequences of it.
The first wife, who was in her forties like my grandfather, was born and raised in Baghdad. Although she was illiterate, she was a very sociable and sophisticated woman, and for her old age she had many life experiences and was very knowledgeable about human nature. She knew how to approach any situation or any type of person.
From the first wife I loved her husband (my grandfather). She felt threatened by my grandmother, the beautiful young lady, and she had already made up her mind to destroy my grandmother’s marriage in every possible way. The first wife achieved her goal and used all her intelligence, experience and cunning to ensure that with my grandmother’s inexperience in anything in this life, the natural result of any conflict or clash between her and the first wife was to make her lose the war. . There was no comparison between the skill of the sophisticated old lady and her naive skill.
After a year of marriage, my grandmother gave birth to her first child but during that year the first wife destroyed the marriage and separated my grandfather from my grandmother. It was very easy for that woman to turn my grandfather against my grandmother.
My grandmother couldn’t understand everything that had happened or what happened to her, all the trauma. As a young, broken and pregnant woman, she couldn’t understand or articulate her emotions. She had been rejected and treated very badly. She had been waged a war, but she had not understood what was happening. This whole conflict, life and situation was beyond her comprehension and all she felt at that moment was rejection and injustice. The first wife used my grandmother’s innocence and she used all of her wickedness and all of her experiences in her life to win the war. She had been abandoned and lived with her well educated single brother of hers in Baghdad.
My grandfather meant to my grandmother the whole world and life. He was the first man he ever met. For her and all the women of that time in the 1940s and 1950s, man and successful marriage was her world at that time and even now for some women in the Middle East. Marriage and the status derived from it meant everything to my grandmother, it meant her dignity and her need for approval. She realized that he had to fight tooth and nail to win in this conflict with his first wife. This war was the war of her life. She needed my grandfather financially, socially, and in every other way. She was very dependent on him as all women were dependent on men in those days. My grandmother had no studies to follow or finish or any degree. She was just an innocent, illiterate housewife who was desperately trying to make her husband want her.
After many years of separation, my grandmother was still trying to solve a puzzle. Why had my grandfather preferred her first wife to her? He hurt a lot, and he wanted to point out the problem, so he made the troubled marriage work. He wondered, what did that woman have that he didn’t? She was young, very beautiful and capable of having children so why? It’s wrong? What she was? She found out from some women around here that at that time women worked in black magic, so it could be that the first wife was doing all these spells so that my grandfather would hate her and abandon her; ever since she got this advice, my grandmother got involved in magic work. She may have thought that she was going to help her get my grandfather back and that it was an attempt to revive a hope in her soul that had been tortured by frustration, rejection and despair.
My grandmother managed to reunite with my grandfather and had two children, but the marriage did not work out again. My grandmother had been deeply disappointed and bitter, having faced the bitterness of rejection, humiliating defeat, and the continued control, power, and triumph of her first wife. I am sure that after the second separation my grandmother cried bitterly for years. All these years my grandmother wondered why? Why was this happening to her? Why had she experienced all of this? Why wasn’t she living an easy and quiet life? Why all this pain, emotional and psychological scarring, and brutality? She wondered what her mistakes were. What she did? Why had she failed while the first wife had succeeded? How to save her marriage in trouble? And to be a lovely wife, what should she do? All of this was beyond her capacity and ability. She felt that she was trapped and she didn’t know how to save herself and her family from her. These unanswered questions were just about killing her.
My grandmother desperately wanted to succeed and win, but she didn’t know what to do. She lacked all the resources; no one guided her. All her fault and her sin was that she was an innocent and naive woman. The other woman knew how to manipulate my grandfather and my innocent grandmother. The other woman knew how to separate my grandfather from my grandmother whether with magic or otherwise.
He was unable to keep my grandfather in a stable relationship and a secure marriage. For most of her life, she did not feel safe. She was always afraid of being rejected and she was forced to live alone with all of her emotional and psychological pain. She was weak and lost. She was incapable of facing the world alone. My grandfather (the man) represented the whole world to her. There was no way she could live without him or accept being the loser, and her first wife won the war.
Six years after the second separation, my grandfather was reunited with my grandmother. This time my grandmother took the opportunity to make the unstable and troubled marriage work. She was just trying to please my grandfather. Everything that had happened, including the experience of marriage, taught her hatred and disappointment. The troubled marriage continued, and jealousy was ever-present. My grandmother had always felt insecure; such a marriage had no security. The marriage of my grandfather and my grandmother lasted this time; there was no separation. Twenty years later, the first wife passed away, and after eight years my grandfather also passed away.
Now my grandmother was left alone. My grandmother had six sons and two daughters; the youngest daughter was my mother. Every time the children were controlled by their wives and did not obey my grandmother, I was reminded of the trauma of my grandfather and his first wife.
The only man my grandmother ever knew, my grandfather, did not make her feel love, care, and security. Everyone deserves love, but unfortunately not everyone is lucky enough in this life to feel it or get it. She was simply living in an ongoing war.
The brutality and cruelty of life made her a cruel woman who treated everyone around her the same way she had been treated. She wanted everyone to feel the way she felt. All of her children blamed her for any failure they might have in her lives. She might have been responsible one way or another due to her ignorance, but it definitely wasn’t her intention to hurt anyone. She lived alone the last years of her life. I was living outside my country at the end of 2010 when I called my mother and told her to contact my grandmother as soon as possible and to be close to her because I had a feeling that she would die soon. A few months later, my grandmother became seriously ill and it was obvious that she was dying.
She was alone when she was dying, and everyone around her was doing their duty. While she was on her deathbed, she said many things and she was not fully aware of what she was saying. She asked my mother, who was close to her in her last days, to call me because she wanted to talk to me. Regardless of all the people who had been in her life, she only remembered when she was dying to talk to me. She was able to feel my deep real love.
That’s why I want to answer you this way: I love you, my grandmother. You raised me when I was a child and I spent many times with you. You were so beautiful and smart and special. You deserve to feel loved, safe and wanted. In my mind and heart, I will always remember you as a wonderful woman. May your soul rest in peace. I miss you deeply.
Your granddaughter,
Sarah