Betwixt and between
For young women in Baghdad, it's a disorienting time to be a teen
Baghdad--Hours before the roosters crow their wake-up call or the paperboys hit the streets of this war-weary capital, a young woman stirs from her bed to pray. It is 3 a.m., and for the hours that stretch before the first gray of morning, Leila Ali Hussein will kneel and bow in observance of the predawn prayer practiced only by the most devout Shiite Muslims.
She is not the only one who can't sleep. Alone in her dark, windowless living room, Qitaf al-Jabouri absent-mindedly flips through the 300-plus channels on satellite television that, along with the Internet and mobile phones, have flooded into postwar Iraq. She settles on the American sitcom Friends. Street violence and the threat of kidnapping have kept Qitaf holed up for weeks, and within the confines of the four walls she shares with her older sister and parents, time has lost its meaning. "We're in jail," she says. "I sleep all the time; then I wake up and watch TV."
Panic attacks. These young women are like the country they live in--insecure, tentative, and caught in a tide of violence and violent change that along with new freedom has brought new affliction. For some, Saddam Hussein's ouster has meant the right to embrace religious extremism; for others, the right to embrace jeans, Internet chat rooms, and the Backstreet Boys . But for all teenage girls in Iraq, it has meant pervasive crime, economic uncertainty, and social upheaval that are forcing them to abandon the whims of childhood and precipitately come of age. "The continuous effect of these problems--clashes, insecurity, bombs--has affected young women more than adults," says Mohammed al-Kureishi, a psychiatrist who has a private practice on Baghdad's busy al-Sadoon Street. "This is the age of change of personality, a period of turmoil. I have seen many young patients complaining of anxiety and panic attacks, or crying without cause and severe depression."
Listen to these young Iraqi women: "We don't feel like teenagers. Our minds have grown old," says Rana al-Asadi, 18, who lives on Haifa Street, the site of repeated standoffs between insurgents and coalition troops. "We watch movies with teenagers living teenage lives, [but] we are deprived of almost everything, like freedom, security." "We are so scared," adds her friend Dina al-Qasir, 16, who took the posters of her favorite pop idols off the wall because she was afraid they would be damaged by the mortars crashing outside her window. "We just want to live a peaceful life with no attacks."
At 17, Qitaf is a self-professed "modern" Iraqi teenager. She has her own E-mail account on Yahoo! and speaks fluent English, after having meticulously studied the lyrics of popular American songs (a tribute to which hangs on her bedroom wall in the form of a Metallica poster). Out of earshot of her middle-class parents, she reveals the best-kept secret of Iraqi adolescence: "We all have secret boyfriends, which is much more interesting than something public." Qitaf is wearing bell-bottom jeans and a T-shirt her mother gave her, which notably reads in English, "May we never break the strong spirits of our daughters." "I used to think life is much easier," she says ruefully. "I feel like I was really silly before the war, and now I've seen dead people and people who have nothing to eat."
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