Freedom Is An Inside Job – Zainab Salbi

Radya opened her door, also wearing an abya, except hers was full of dust. She wore it as if she never took it off. I stood in front of her, but her look of wonder made it clear that she didn’t recognize me. There was part of me that didn’t recognize her, either. “I am Zainab,” I said. She shook her head as if to say she didn’t know this Zainab. “I am Zainab,” I repeated. After a few seconds, a look of shock and disbelief crossed her face.

“Zainab. Zainab? Zainab, the daughter of Umm Zainab?” In Iraq, people call a mother by the relationship to her first child. I confirmed, yes, it was me. She stepped forward. “Oh, Zainab! Oh Zainab! If you only knew what has happened to me!” Radya embraced me, weeping and moaning. I tried to speak but was overcome by emotion myself. I’ve found her at last, I thought, this girl— this woman—who had been part of my family for so long, whom I had loved and missed so much.

Radya, whom I had been searching for and with whom I needed to make amends. She took my hands and led me into her home. It was just two mud rooms with a straw carpet and mattresses piled to the side, not so different from the ones she’d grown up in.

She had changed a lot in twenty years. I recognized the dimple in her cheek, but she had gained weight and carried herself differently from the young woman of twenty-three whom I last saw in 1990. I still had doubts that I was talking to the right woman. I took her left hand and pushed up her sleeves to see the burn marks I remembered. She had burned herself as a child while baking bread in a traditional Iraqi mud oven.

They were there. She smiled and asked me if I still had the birthmarks on my stomach. Yes, yes, I assured her. Those marks are almost entirely faded now; only someone who’d known me as a child could know that I once had them. Then she jumped up to the only cabinet in the empty room and took down a teapot, marble eggs, and an old photo album that she had kept from the days when she lived with my family.

“I have very little from the past,” she said. “I had to run from Baghdad after the militias killed my husband. In the rush, I only managed to take what was most important to me. Do you remember these things that you gave me when we were children?” She was indeed my Radya.

The Girl Who Sings nce upon a time, a girl in a green dress lay forgotten at the bottom of a ship. Her hands and feet were tied, and she lay among hundreds of slaves, one next to the other. They had been in captivity for a long, long time, and in the shadowy bottom of the boat, it was not clear if they were dead or alive.

Dust covered their bodies. One day, a mouse started gnawing on the girl’s ropes, and she woke up. As she stretched and looked around, the ropes that had bound her for so long frayed and broke. With that she was able to stand up. Liberated, she looked at the others around her and saw that they had all died in their sleep. Afraid and alone, she stood in the darkness of the bottom of the ship, thick with the smell of death.

She began to sing softly. The melody had no words, but it made a unique sound—the sound of her life. As the tune took shape and her voice strengthened, she felt less scared and alone. Her body magically rose up and up and up until she entered another reality. In this new world, the girl found herself on a bustling city street where people were rushing from one place to the other. Cars were speeding by and honking. She didn’t recognize anyone or anything.

All she knew how to do was to keep on singing the song of her life. Her voice was so beautiful that passersby stopped to listen. As more people noticed her singing, they talked about her, and she became popular. People were whistling her melodies and seeking her out wherever she’d wandered in the city.

Since no one knew who she was, they called her the Girl Who Sings. She became more and more known. More and more people wanted to hear her. One day, people got together and built a clay statue to put her inside so they could hear her whenever they wanted. At first she went along with their plan, but soon she realized that being in the statue was like being tied with ropes at the bottom of the ship.

Both were forms of enslavement. She was not trying to please anybody; she was simply singing the sound of her heart. That is what made her sound so moving. To stay inside the dark statue was to suffocate. So she decided to break free. Singing and singing the song of her life, she was lifted again into another reality, one very different from the bustling city.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: b3c85415f0a21dc7
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,413,263 bytes (1.348 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 171
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 330.16 minutes
• Total Words: 66,032
• Total Characters: 361,718
• Average Words per Page: 386.15
• Average Characters per Page: 2115.31

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