Zainab Salbi --- founder and president of Women for Women International, a non-profit organization created in 1993 to provide female survivors of war and genocide with the tools and resources necessary to move forward with their lives --- has written an engrossing memoir about growing up in Baghdad beneath Saddam Hussein's watchful eye. With her mother's journals as her guide and the help of Los Angeles Times reporter Laurie Becklund, Salbi painstakingly chronicles the humiliating subjugation that she and her family endured (both in Iraq and later in America) and provides a unique inside perspective into a conflict that is sadly still going on to this day.
From the time she was a child, Salbi and her family lived in constant fear of Saddam Hussein. In 1969, when she was 11 years old, her father was appointed to be his personal pilot. Because of this prestigious promotion, Saddam's presence in their home became increasingly commonplace, so much so that she and her family were instructed to call him "Amo," the Iraqi word for "Uncle." They were invited to parties at Saddam's palace and, in some of his more "merciful moments," were given lavish gifts, including a house on the palace grounds where they could spend their weekends. "But [Salbi] came to understand that these moments would be followed by months of excruciating, often mystifying punishment." Their movements were monitored. Their freedom to travel and pray was severely limited. Any difference in opinion from what Saddam believed was strictly forbidden. Although they looked to outsiders as though they were living in the lap of luxury, she and her family were trapped in an oppressive, highly controlled lifestyle with no likely means of escape.
It took years for her and her family to get out from under Saddam's influence, and even then, they could never completely break away. Salbi's mother and father became estranged after years of enduring Saddam's torture, and eventually divorced. Salbi suffered through a disastrous engagement, an abusive arranged marriage to an Iraqi man thirteen years her senior in America, and years of emotional damage before she finally met a man whom she could trust enough to begin a life with. A few of Salbi's aunts (like many Iraqi women) had been harassed or raped by Saddam, Uday, or any number of the Mukhabarat, and would never fully come to terms with the terror and humiliation they felt at the hands of Saddam and his men.
So why didn't they leave? Why didn't they get out in the beginning before things got too harried? Even before the Gulf War began, couldn't they see that Saddam would never stop until it was too late? Hadn't they learned from history's disastrous examples, such as what happened during the regimes of Stalin or Hitler? "That question haunts whole generations of people from around the world whose parents tolerated the rise of dictatorship."
Zainab Salbi and her family's horrifying experiences when living in Iraq under Saddam's brutal reign are shocking but not uncommon. Countless numbers of frightened people are living out similar nightmares in Iraq, the Sudan, and war-torn countries the world over. In 1993, Salbi formed Women for Women International in order to fight against these atrocities and to help women like herself heal from the life-altering wounds that were inflicted upon them. Later, she would pen BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, this evocative and haunting memoir that proves that one courageous woman can rise above her own painful past in order to make a difference in the lives of others.
In the Afterword, Salbi writes, "...In the end there was a point at which I felt that I had to take ownership of my voice, my truth, and my story. I felt I had lived through other women's stories and through their courage in breaking their truths. Perhaps, it was my turn to take that jump and to speak up. So, here I am, taking ownership of my story and telling it."
--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling
