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(audience applauding) (audience cheering)
- The year is 1990,
and my twin brother and I are six years old.
We've repurposed our dining room table into a bomb shelter.
Now, the reason for this was real.
Iraq had actually just invaded Kuwait,
and so we were living there
and my parents told us that if ever we heard rockets
sort of come too close to our house,
that we should run to the dining room table
and get under the wood
so that we'd be protected from falling rubble.
So we did this a couple of times, like drills,
my twin brother and I for fun,
but we weren't really taking this too seriously
because literally nothing had ever happened in Kuwait,
like except for the discovery of oil.
(audience laughing) (Mariam laughs)
My life proceeded like clockwork there.
You know, pick up from school at 3:00,
then we go home and have lunch,
which always started with clear vegetable soup,
and then dishes, and then communal family nap time.
And it was like (audience laughing)
my life was so regular that we didn't need an alarm clock
to know when it was time to wake up.
So the idea that there would suddenly
be like rockets falling on our dining room table,
I was like, "All right."
(audience laughing)
But it was actually a moment
when a lot of families were having to ask,
"What now," right?
There's a lot of foreign labor in Kuwait
because of the oil money.
My family is Egyptian.
I'd been born in Kuwait,
but that didn't give us citizenship rights there,
so our stay there was contingent
on someone in my family having a work visa, right?
So my parents were discussing this.
"What do we do? What do we do?"
And they decided between themselves
that my mother would take my twin brother and I
back to Egypt, where we were from,
and where we spent every summer,
and my father would stay in Kuwait during the war
to anchor us there.
Now, my parents were really strong believers
in the resilience of children,
which made them really bad communicators.
(audience laughing)
So like, they didn't really discuss
what the plan was with us.
But we like packed our stuff up.
And with a cooler of food in the back seat of the car,
we drove to the border.
And then,
if you can imagine the scene,
in 1990 there's 500,000 Kuwaiti nationals living in Kuwait.
There's 1.5 million foreign nationals living there.
We outnumber them three to one.
So if you can imagine,
at the border between Kuwait and Iraq
there's this enormous line of cars
just lined up of families going back
either temporarily or permanently
to where they were actually from.
And so we drive up, you know, there's a border agent,
and you have to take everything out of your car
and they inspect everything,
and they have like a little mirror at the end of a stick,
and they look at the underneath of the car
to make sure you you don't have anything that you're...
And so we do all of this, they look at our documents,
and we load the car back up.
And then my dad
just like doesn't get into the driver's seat.
And he says, you know, "Be good, take care of your mother."
Like, "I'll see you." (laughs)
(audience laughing)
And like he hugs us,
and then my mother gets behind the steering wheel
and we're supposed to drive this way,
and my father is literally the only person
going back into Kuwait,
'cause to review, there's a war on,
(audience laughing)
and there's no public transport going down that way.
Like, I'm just looking behind at the rearview mirror
and watching him get shorter in the desert and being like,
"How is he going to get home?"
Like, I know how distressing this sounds,
but actually I was young,
and also like the idea of saying goodbye to people abruptly
was just an everyday part of my life
as a daughter of people who had migrated for labor, right?
And there was someone who was always
like in between school years just leaving, right?
Because their family had repatriated.
You know, the first goodbye that I said
to a close family member, I don't even remember.
I was two years old when my sister,
who had been my primary caregiver up until that point,
had to go back to Egypt to start college, right?
So this idea that I would just suddenly
have to say goodbye to my dad and then like,
"See you when I see you,"
was just a part of my life.
It was every day.
And there was something exciting about going home to Egypt.
Like, it was the place we spent every summer.
It was really exciting.
There's great beaches there.
Our cousins were there.
Horseback riding lessons were there.
Like, it was a great place to spend a summer.
And it was also this place
that we were eventually always going to come back to
when we were going to like end up at home, finally.
Whenever that happened.
So I was excited a bit to be going back home,
but then being somewhere for like a summer
and then having to like resume your life somewhere
are two different things.
And I found that I didn't like Egypt
when I had to just be living there.
Like, I didn't have any of my stuff.
(audience laughing)
Like, it was just a harsh and unfamiliar place.
Like, I really hated the school that I went to.
Everything was just unfamiliar.
I didn't like my teachers.
So it was really hard for me.
And I began every single morning just wailing.
When I say every single morning, I mean that literally.
Like, every day for the time that I was at that school,
every single day I cried,
I'd have to get like peeled away from my mother.
Like, I was famous for it at the school that I went to,
(audience laughing)
because at six years old, it actually takes a lot of stamina
to make a huge scene every morning,
(audience laughing)
so like I was that kid.
And then it actually got to the point
where this woman who like ran the canteen thing
that, you know, you could like buy snacks
on the playground and stuff,
she would take pity on me,
and every morning would sort of like wait
until I'd been peeled away from my mother
and was like still weeping in the corner,
and she would come to me
and bring me to sit next to her at the canteen
and give me an enormous bag of salted popcorn
and a huge like glass bottle of Coca-Cola.
Second breakfast.
(audience laughing)
I would sit there and just like eat the whole thing
and drink the whole thing
and then like start to feel like a little bit all right.
(audience laughing)
And one day she actually met my mom, you know?
Like, so my mom was coming,
they were peeling me away from her,
and then instead of waiting until she left,
she came and met her and said,
"Hi, your daughter has been eating my food all term
and hasn't paid me for it."
(audience gasping) (audience laughing)
And she just told her an arbitrary number
of what my mother owed her,
and I was in a lot of trouble.
Like, I know she was a poor person in a poor country,
but I was still hurt.
It wasn't just me who was having a hard time, right?
Like, so I was crying in the morning,
and my mother was crying at night.
The Bazeed family.
(audience laughing)
And I didn't understand that.
Like I was like, "What's wrong with you?
You're from here, right?" (audience laughing)
Like, "You were born here.
This is where you're from.
This is what's familiar to you.
This is where you've been telling me
we're going to come back to eventually.
Why are you so upset?"
(audience laughing)
Like, "You're home supposedly."
But yeah, the adults in my life
didn't seem any less dislocated than I was.
But while I could generate
all the energy I needed just internally,
my mother needed a visual aid.
Her visual aid was this concert
that like had been composed about the war very hastily
and that aired on the local channel every single night.
And so she would listen to this and just like be sobbing.
And I would be watching her
listening to this and be sobbing.
And the lyrics went something like this,
(Mariam singing in foreign language)
which translates into, "Our hearts quake."
It's directed at the prophet.
"Our hearts quake because in this war,
both the victim and the aggressor are Muslim," right?
So we're fighting our own people.
And so my mother would listen to this and cry,
and listen to this and cry.
Thankfully, you know, the occupation
didn't actually last very long,
so our time in Egypt finally came to an end.
(audience laughing)
The Americans had come in
and the war ended very quickly after that.
And in exchange, of course,
America got to protect its oil interests in the Middle East
and also negotiate permanent military and air force bases
in the Middle East,
in addition to all the other permanent military bases
that the United States has in the Middle East
'cause nothing is free, not war, not popcorn.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding) (audience cheering)
So the war was over and I was coming home.
Like, we were going to go to home, Kuwait home.
And I was so excited,
and I was so excited to be seeing my dad.
And we flew back rather than drove back.
I remember he met us in the arrivals hall.
All of us were so excited to see him.
And my twin brother and I ran towards him,
and my mother still got there first.
(audience laughing)
And she kissed him on the cheek.
It's the only time I've ever seen them do that in public
in my whole life.
And so we like, you know, we grab our luggage
and then we go outside to the car.
And I notice as my dad's loading the car up
that there's actually a bullet hole
in the trunk of our red Chevrolet Impala.
In the trunk.
If the war had been in black and white
for me up until that point,
seeing that bullet hole
was like suddenly everything was just technicolor,
and I just kept looking at the trunk of our car
and looking at where the steering wheel was,
and then the trunk, and the steering wheel,
and being like, "Actually that's not a very big distance."
But we got in the car,
and in the weeks after
the end of the Iraqi occupation
everything on the radio was just like celebratory music
composed for the end of this occupation.
And so I remember that on the radio,
there were all these Kuwaiti children singing,
"Welcome, welcome, Bush.
Thank you, thank you, Bush."
(audience laughing)
And we drove home,
and like I could see there was a clear effort
that had been made in the apartment to welcome us home.
You know, my dad had like dusted. (laughs)
(audience laughing)
He made us our favorite meal that he makes.
But there was something that still just felt so still
about the inside of our home,
and something that was just so different about it
and unfamiliar.
It was good to be back together as a family,
and we were sitting down at the dining room table
and this was finally a chance for my dad to actually tell us
what the war had been like for him
that we'd left him in the middle of.
Because the whole time we'd been in Egypt,
we'd only been able to speak to him
once a week for three minutes,
which is not a lot of time.
You don't get to tell any stories, really, in three minutes.
So here we were,
like we were finally going to hear about it, right?
And so he's telling us
about one day when the rockets
had actually gotten too close to our house
and he had been in the shower, he panicked,
and with soap suds covering his body,
he grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist
and then ran into the desert barefoot
to get away the lights.
And I just remember feeling so ashamed at that moment
that these were the stories
that my dad had from the war, right?
This bullet hole that he never talked to us about,
and then this image of my father
running naked in the darkness, scared for his life.
And of course I realized,
"Well, yeah, like he had to leave
because dining room tables
like don't protect you from rockets actually."
Anyway, the war didn't really affect my family that much.
It left us unscathed for the most part.
But it was, for me, a moment of realizing
that I'd been lied to about a lot of things in my life.
It was a lie that American imperialism
has ever or will ever save anyone.
It was a lie that Egypt or Kuwait could be home for me
when I needed a visa to stay in one place
and when I'd never actually lived in the other.
And, I don't know,
the wood of that dining room table
wouldn't have protected me.
Thank you.
(audience applauding) (audience cheering)