On staying in
— Anonymous
The conversations I have with foreign friends always end up at the same question: when are you leaving?
They mean it kindly. They have read about Iraq. They know the laws and the headlines. They cannot imagine a life that does not end with an airport.
But I have not left, and I do not know if I will. I want to write about why, because I think there are more of us than the diaspora narrative admits.
I am a queer woman in my thirties. I work in a profession that pays well by Iraqi standards. I have a small apartment that nobody enters except me and one friend who has a key. My family lives an hour away in another city. They love me, in the way Iraqi families love — with food, with calls, with worry, with judgment about everything except the one thing they do not know. I see them once a month. They believe I am unmarried because I have not found the right man. We have a deal that I will not name out loud.
The diaspora narrative goes: get out, find a country with rights, become legible, marry, build. It is not wrong for the people who do it. But it is not the only story.
Here is what I would lose if I left:
- My language, the one I think and dream in.
- The food my grandmother made that I now make for myself.
- A handful of friendships that took twenty years to build.
- A career that took twelve years to build, that does not transfer to most of the countries that would take me.
- The smell of my city in autumn.
- My mother, who I love.
- The small possibility that the country I came from will, in some decade, become a place where queer people can be seen.
Here is what I would gain:
- The ability to walk down a street with a girlfriend.
- Legal protections.
- A community that is visible.
I am not pretending the math is easy. Some weeks the math feels obvious one way, some weeks the other. I am writing this on a week when it feels obvious in the staying direction. I might write something different in six months.
The point I want to make to anyone reading this is: the choice is yours, and you are allowed to choose either way. Staying is not cowardice. Leaving is not betrayal. Both options are full of grief and full of life. The thing that is dangerous is being unable to choose — being trapped between two stories that other people are telling about you.
If you are staying, you can build something. A small private life with one or two people who know you. A career. A practice. A garden, if you have a balcony. A version of yourself that exists only at home, but that is real.
If you are leaving, you can also build something. A new language. New friends who will not have known the old you. A right to walk down the street.
I know queer Iraqis who have done both. I know who left and miss it terribly and would not go back. I know who stayed and have built private lives that are richer than the diaspora imagines. I know one couple — two women — who have lived together for fifteen years in the same city as their families, and the families have a deal not to ask.
What I want to write to anyone who is younger than me, who is feeling that the only way out is across a border: there are other ways. They are quieter. They are slower. They are private. But they are real.
I am here. I am staying for now. The river is still flowing under the road.
— M., somewhere in Iraq