Still searching for you, Baba.

Baba and me, 1996

My dearest baba,

I still do not know how to write to you without first feeling the air change around me, as if the room understands that I am about to reach for someone who no longer answers in the ways I was used to, as if even the walls lean in when I whisper your name.

Baba.

Seven years have passed and I have spent them trying to learn you in your absence, the way one studies a landscape after the river has dried, tracing where the water once moved, where it carved softness into stone, where it left behind something fertile and alive even after it disappeared. I have asked about your childhood in Mdayna, about the dust of Basra that settled into your lungs and your laughter, about the stubborn pride of Bani Manssor men who carried both tenderness and fire in the same breath, about the date palms and the long afternoons and the way you must have walked as a young boy who did not know he would one day have a daughter who would sit across an ocean and try to write him back into the world.

I have learned that you were more complex than I ever allowed you to be when you were alive, that you were softer than your silences suggested, that your quiet was not absence but restraint, that your love was not loud but constant, like groundwater beneath everything, unseen yet sustaining. In the final years we had together, I was so intent on becoming someone you would be proud of that I did not always linger long enough to simply be your daughter. I was always in motion, gathering futures in my hands, certain that time would wait for us. Now I would trade many finished goals for one unfinished afternoon beside you.

Did you know, baba, that after you left this world I began searching for you in the smallest details, in the way I break bread, in the way I press sweetness into the hands of others during thawab and whisper Al-Fatiha under my breath as if the words themselves could travel to wherever you are? I learned that grief is not a single storm but a climate, that it reshapes the body and the voice and the way a woman stands in the world, that it hollows and fills at the same time.

Baba, I returned home and walked where you once walked. I let the soles of my shoes press into the soil of Mdayna and I tried to imagine your younger feet there, lighter, quicker, not yet carrying the layers that later settled onto your shoulders. I drove through Chibayish with Hassan beside me, your nephew tracing the roads with his finger as if he were opening a book about you that I had never read, pointing to homes and saying, here is where your baba would sit for hours, here is where his friends waited for him each year, here is where he was most himself. They told me how animated you were there, how your laughter stretched long into the evenings, how you moved from house to house with an ease that felt almost effortless. I sat in that car stunned by the revelation that you had a version of joy so expansive, so visible, that I had not fully known.

In Canada I had grown used to a quieter version of you, one who held much inside and carried responsibilities that did not always feel light. Hearing about the you of Mdayna and Chibayish expanded you. It taught me that a person can be shaped differently by different lands, that belonging is not sentimental but vital, that the heart requires places where it can exhale fully. It helped me understand that some of what weighed on you here was not who you were at your core, but what accumulated around you over time, the expectations and tensions and complicated dynamics that gather in any life, especially for those of us violently displaced from our homelands. And in understanding this, I began to ask myself where I feel most alive, where my spirit feels clear rather than constricted, and I started choosing more deliberately, pursuing truth and light with a steadiness that I hope honours the expansiveness you embodied there. I try to live in a way that allows me to be whole and present and honest, because I believe that is what you would have wanted for me, and perhaps for yourself.

You used to call me دوكة, ‘my little fried bread,’ warm and golden and soft in the middle, and I did not understand then how much that nickname carried, how it held playfulness and affection and a kind of everyday poetry that only Iraqi fathers seem to master, how it tethered me to kitchen smells and oil crackling and women’s laughter and the quiet miracle of dough transforming under heat. Now when I hear that word in my mind, it lands in my chest with a sweetness that hurts, because it is proof that I was once held in a gaze that saw me as something tender and precious and nourishing.

Since your death, baba, I have been learning myself as well, sometimes against my will, sometimes with a courage I did not know I possessed. I have learned that I am stronger than I ever wanted to be, that strength is not a trophy but a responsibility, that being called strong can feel like being handed something heavy and being told not to drop it. I have learned that I carry you in my stubbornness, in my refusal to accept injustice quietly, in the way I insist on speaking even when my voice trembles, in the way I build and rebuild when things collapse.

I have learned that I am more spiritual than I admitted when you were alive, that loss stripped away the illusion of permanence and left me face to face with Allah in a way that was raw and unfiltered, that I began talking to you as if the veil between worlds were thin and permeable, as if you could hear the rhythm of my days, the exhaustion, the triumphs, the moments when I sit in my car and cry before walking into another room where I must be composed and capable.

I have learned that I am still your daughter in the most ordinary ways, in the way I crave belonging to land and story, in the way I research our lineage and ask about our tribal genealogy and imagine the long line of people whose blood runs in my children’s veins, in the way I try to keep recipes alive and ask my uncle Nouri to write them down so that nothing dissolves into forgetfulness.

And baba, in learning how to live more whole, I have also been learning how to care for my own heart at the same time that I care for my children’s, holding both with a kind of reverence I did not always know how to access. You never got to see me become a mother. You never got to see me lift my daughter into my arms and watch her spin in her silliness and softness and unfiltered girliness, and every time she laughs with that bright, uncontained joy, I think of you and how you adored little girls, how you softened around their playfulness, how you would have been utterly undone by her. You would have called her something sweet and ridiculous, and you would have let her climb into your lap and rearrange your face with her tiny hands. You would have watched her twirl as if it were the most important performance in the world, your eyes crinkling at the corners, your whole body leaning toward her delight.

She tells me sometimes, with a light in her eyes that feels ancient and unwavering, that she is excited to meet her Jaddou in Jannah, as if she is already imagining the embrace, already rehearsing the moment she will run toward you. She speaks of you as someone she is certain belongs to her story, someone waiting just beyond the horizon of this life, and I hold her words carefully because they carry a hope that feels immense.

And Sajjad, baba, he stands in front of your picture longer than I expect him to, studying your face with a seriousness that feels older than his years, and he once told me that your eyes look comforting and loving, and I realized in that moment that even through a photograph, even through time and distance and death, something of your gentleness still reaches us and settles in him. He knows he met you only once, when he was new to this world and could not possibly store the memory, yet he holds that meeting like a quiet treasure, as if the fact of it alone makes him fortunate.

I am raising them inside the values you held with such conviction. I tell them, softly, about 1991, about displacement, about the kind of resistance that cost you everything. We speak about standing firm when something is unjust, about refusing to accept what diminishes human dignity, about what it means to carry your convictions in your body even when the cost is exile. I explain to them that their Jaddou’s journey to Canada was a passage carved by resistance, by sacrifice, by a refusal to surrender his conscience.

I never got to say thank you to you, habibi, for shaping my activist spirit, for planting in me that relentless insistence on dignity and accountability, for teaching me that silence in the face of oppression corrodes something essential in the soul. The work I do traces back to you in ways I only fully recognized after you were gone. My desire to shape a more socially just world for my children and for all of our children carries your fingerprint.

We sit together and recite Hadith al-Kisaa, our voices sometimes steady and sometimes trembling with emotion, and we memorize Quran line by line, syllable by syllable, as if we are building a shelter of words around ourselves that stretches across generations, a living inheritance that binds Iraq to Canada, that binds your endurance to their becoming.

And sometimes, when the house is quiet, I play the voice note I saved of you reciting the Athaan. Your voice fills the room, deep and measured and unmistakably yours, and my children grow still, their bodies instinctively attentive, as if they recognize that they are listening to something that carries both devotion and lineage. In those moments, baba, you move through our home, your call echoing softly against the walls, weaving you into the fabric of our everyday life.

Sometimes I wonder, baba, what you would think of me now, of the woman I have become, of the risks I take, of the public words I speak, of the way I carry our name into rooms that would never have imagined it there. Would you be proud of my defiance, or would you worry about the weight of it? Would you still call me دوكة when I am tired and undone, when the world feels too sharp and I long to be small again?

I have learned that love does not end with burial, that it changes form and temperature and language, that it becomes memory and ritual and responsibility, that it becomes a way of living so that the dead are not erased but integrated into the marrow of the living. I have learned that my grief is evidence of how deeply I was loved, and that even in your absence you continue to shape me, to refine me, to call me toward something larger than my own fear.

There are days when I ache for one more ordinary conversation, one more chance to talk about politics and the news, one more mundane exchange about nothing at all, one more chance to sit near you without knowing it was finite, and there are other days when I feel you so close that I am startled by it, as if your روح brushes past mine and reminds me that this life is only one chapter in a longer story we cannot yet see in full.

Your دوكة is still here, still reaching for you, still becoming.

Always your daughter,

Salsabel

Visitation as pedagogy: On going back home

Lessons are not always found in books or classrooms. Sometimes, they are found in the act of returning, in the presence of those we have been separated from, in the spaces we have longed for. Visitation is a pedagogy: a way of knowing, a method of healing, an epistemology of presence. To visit is to learn, to embody connection, to seek repair.

I am writing this from a coffee shop on the other side of the world—far even from my home in Ontario. I am in British Columbia, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples. The air outside is damp, the hum of espresso machines and murmured conversations fills the space, and yet, my mind is elsewhere. I am not really here. I am still in Iraq, still walking the familiar streets, still tracing the contours of memory and belonging. This is what it means to live in longing, to exist in one place while yearning for another, to be split across geographies, to feel the weight of distance pressing against your chest like an unseen force.

Living so far from home is not just a physical displacement; it is a spiritual and mental one. The isolation takes something from you, drains something vital. The longing is active, a force that gnaws at the edges of your being. It is the exhaustion of constantly translating yourself across cultures, the pain of knowing that no matter how much you hold onto, something will always be slipping through your fingers.

Seven years away. Seven years of absence. Seven years of longing that settled into the rhythm of my life like a second pulse, a silent but insistent beat beneath the surface of my existence in the west. Seven years of imagining what it would be like to return home. And then, finally, I did.

I returned with my children, Sajjad and Zainab, bearing witness to a world I had carried within me but that they had never seen. This journey was more than a visit. It was a lesson, a pedagogy of presence, a reckoning with displacement, and a return to the roots that have held me in ways I did not fully comprehend until I stood on that soil again.

My father’s death was a wound I have carried alone for too long. Returning to his gravesite was the primary purpose of this journey, the axis upon which everything else revolved. The context of the first visit was sunset by the river, the air soft, the weather kind, my sister-in-law playing duaa on her phone. And yet, what rose within me was unbearable, a grief that had been waiting in silence for years, now free to flood my body. I told him everything. My apologies, my regrets, my sorrow for not doing more, my desperate hope that he knew, that he understood.

Time moves differently here. It is flexible, unburdened by the rigid linearity imposed in the west. There is no anxiety about squeezing every moment for its utility. Instead, there is a deep ease, a willingness to surrender to the flow of existence as it unfolds. Time is communal, relational, measured in conversations, in cups of tea that stretch endlessly, in the weight of presence rather than the ticking of a clock.

People are sweeter here. Not in a way that is naive or saccharine, but in a way that feels genuine, uninhibited. Their love is open, their words are direct, their confrontations are immediate and unfiltered. There is no passive aggression here, no careful swallowing of grievances or calculated distance. There is love, and where there is love, there is also truth, sometimes gentle, sometimes sharp, but always clear. I am reminded that confrontation is not always a sign of rupture; sometimes, it is a sign of intimacy, a sign that the relationship can withstand truth.

Returning to Mdayna: The pedagogy of kinship

Seven years is an eternity when measured in the lives of loved ones. Reuniting with my family was not just a reunion; it was a reckoning with grief, a communal process of mourning that I had been absent from. My father’s death was no longer an isolated sorrow. It was a shared wound, and in that sharing, I found a form of healing I did not know I needed.

"When you entered the room, it felt like Mani entered." My cousins’ words lodged themselves in my chest. My uncle’s voice carried the weight of memory and devotion: "Your days and hours were the sunlight of our youth, the passionate tenderness of childhood, and the whisper of a gentle essence that illuminated our souls. You led us to days free from the pain of separation, and your radiance carried the spirit of a woman who walked steadily toward brilliance, achieving the highest degrees with determination. You are our only pride, my dear, until the very last breath."

In their words, I was not just me. I was an extension of my father, a continuation of his presence in the world. My relationship with my uncles deepened in a way that I had never known before. They got to know me not as a distant relative but as the person I had become, as the daughter my father raised. And I, in turn, understood their love in a way that had previously been abstract, theoretical. Before, I had known they loved me; now, I could feel it, inhabit it, make epistemological sense of it in a way that was deeply embodied.

Al nakhal w al Bahar. The palm trees and the river. The site where my father stood a year before his death, captured in a photograph that would later circulate in the wake of his passing, that would be displayed at his funeral. I stood there with my children. I took the same picture. The significance was monumental. A site of past and present colliding, of loss and continuation merging into something that felt like eternity. My father was here. I am here. My children are here. Memory does not die.

The pedagogy of visitation

The second visit time I visited my dad’s grave, it was at sunset again, but this time, the cold bit at my skin. This time, the grief was deeper because I knew it would be so long before I could return. Again, I told him everything. Past, present, future. I asked for his guidance to manifest in my life. I called upon Allah with an urgency that only my father’s gravesite can summon. I prayed for my family, for my friends. I held the weight of his death and, by extension, the weight of death itself. The inevitability, the finiteness. Our conversations echoed in my mind, his words a tether to a past that still breathes in me. 

I am facing incredible challenges in my life, and I spoke to him and to God about them, letting my truth spill into the air, unburdened by silence. In the presence of death, I allowed my voice to rise, steady and unwavering. I felt something shift—I felt the power of my own voice, the weight of my own resilience. I felt proud of myself, not just for enduring but for meeting hardship with grace, for refusing to look away from difficulty, for standing tall before the trials of life. I was beginning to hear the teachings of my own blood, lessons whispered across generations, carried in my veins. I told him about my visit to Mdayna, and I knew he was proud of me.

Visiting the holy sites was nothing short of breathtaking. Ethereal. The epistemological significance of closeness to leadership, to presence, to a lineage of sacrifice and justice. It was not just a religious experience; it was a pedagogical one. Visitation, I learned, is the antidote to longing. Visitation is a pedagogy.

To visit is to learn. It is to be in the presence of something greater than oneself and to emerge transformed. To visit family, to stand in person before them, is to resolve grievances, to mend fractures, to partake in a healing that cannot happen at a distance. Visitation is an act of repair, of restoration. It fixes, it soothes, it teaches.

The trip was just as exhausting as it was formative. For me, for my children. Sajjad, with his six-year-old heart wide open, reflected that he wants to live in Iraq. Part of his yearning was that everywhere he looked, Arabic words surrounded him. The streets bore the flags of Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq, a visual testament to resistance and solidarity that he had never seen so openly displayed in the west. He was able to live out his true self without repression, chanting Arabic anasheed and latmiyat without hesitation, without fear, without needing to make himself smaller. Here, his voice belonged.

When we were in Suq Al-Shuyukh, he reflected, “I’m finally home.” And then, in Karbala, standing in between the shrines of Imam Hussain and Imam Abbas, he said: "In this moment, all of my dreams have come true." What is pedagogy if not this? A revelation, an unveiling, a moment in which the deepest truths make themselves known. Visitation as pedagogy. Return as learning. Absence transformed into presence. Longing made whole through touch, through sight, through shared breath.

I left Iraq again. But this time, I left knowing that visitation is not just about arrival. It is about return. And return, when done with open hands and an open heart, is always a lesson.