Sahar Bahraini and my mother grew up together in Baghdad, Iraq. They both left in the early 1990s, following the Iran-Iraq war; my mother settled in England and Bahraini in the US. They were not alone in their exodus. Since the late ’80s, millions of Iraqis have left their home country.
Decades after her departure, Bahraini gives me a tour around her typically American house, located in a picturesque, affluent northern suburb of Chicago. Passing one kitchen counter, she casually picks up a book – Khaled Hosseini’s And The Mountains Echoed – “This is for our next book club,” she says. Bahraini’s book club is for Iraqi women, all of them mothers, in suburban Chicago. “One month we read an English book, the following month, an Arabic book,” she explains. Some of these women were born in the US, some are more recent arrivals.
The book club was founded in 2010 by Dalia Rasheed with the help of her friends Bahraini and Nadia Bakir. It now has around 13 regulars. They started out reading Arabic books, many of which were (and still are) not readily available in the US, so members would bring back stacks of them from their travels to Iraq, Dubai and Egypt. Rasheed once hauled 80 books from Jordan in her suitcase.
Now, the Iraqi women’s book club offers members such as Nadia Killidar a positive way to connect with her Iraqi community and, as she says, give them “something to talk about that’s not gossip and won’t cause problems”. Killidar moved from Iraq to the US as a young bride in 1979, during a period of relative stability and prosperity in Iraq but just one year before Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran. “I was lucky,” she says. “I missed out on that one. When I first arrived, there weren’t as many Iraqis,” she continues. “[Many were] forbidden from coming to the US. They couldn’t get visas due to the war... there were sanctions, especially after the Kuwait war [also known as the Persian Gulf War]. So our numbers were scarce.”
After having children, Killidar felt particularly keen to reach out to the local Iraqi community: “You try to have your kids meet others that are like them – first-generation children.” She found herself particularly craving community during cultural and religious celebrations such as Ramadan and Eid, something she eventually found with the book club.
Initially, the group also acted as a useful space to discuss motherhood as migrants, and it has since grown with them. “[Now] our kids are grown-ups and married or out of the house,” Bahraini says. “We have more time... I’m retiring soon, so for me, [book club] is great to keep [my] mind going, stay up to date on what’s happening and socialise with friends.”
The group started out gathering at one another’s homes, but soon decided that the burden on the hosts was becoming too much. Hospitality is an Iraqi’s strongest quality, so the pressure to prepare delicious kleicha and ma’amoul (pastries), chai and qahwah (coffee), started to overshadow the book discussions. Eventually, the women decided to meet in cafes to avoid this, starting with one run by an Iraqi friend of Rasheed.
These days, the women deliberately choose a mix of books that open their eyes to stories rarely discussed in Iraqi circles – “broadening [their] horizons”, as Rasheed puts it. For example, Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano – a family drama set in a close-knit Italian-American community in Chicago – showed them the city they live in from an alternative perspective. Rasheed once suggested the thriller Kismet by Amina Akhtar, which the ladies didn’t wholly enjoy. But “I enforce[d] it because I want new experiences,” she says. “And as Iraqi women, [we] are not always open to that.”
Rasheed and her husband arrived in Chicago 31 years ago as newly qualified doctors, along with their baby son. Joining family who had already settled in the US, Rasheed built a “successful, happy” life, ending up with four children. But as with Bahraini and Killidar, she sought a wider community in her new home city. “The book club made our friendship stronger and more solid,” she says. “We felt a unity. We have something to defend and worry about like our baby.”
The book club has brought these women a lot closer together, as they have grown older and experienced life in the US over the past decade and a half, explains Killidar. “We have changed. We’re not the same people we were when we first came.” So, after many years, the women introduced more English books into their reading lists, taking recommendations from Oprah’s Book Club, as well as the New York Times Bestseller list.
While Iraq has seen waves of violence over the decades since the women left, most of the book club members come from middle-class families in Baghdad, the country’s capital city. As a result, Bahraini explains that many don’t feel as directly affected by the wars as other Iraqi civilians and expats do. But they regularly reminisce on shared experiences. “[Iraq] is on our mind all the time,” says Bahraini.
Book club discussions are also a place to bear witness to events such as “what’s happening in Gaza, or what’s happening now with the [US] election,” continues Bahraini. “Some of us are Republicans, some of us are Democrats,” she adds, but believes that despite conflicting beliefs, they express their opinions in a healthy way: “This forum has been a venue to express our emotions.”
Celebrating its 15th anniversary next year, the book club is perhaps stronger than ever. This month, the group will come together to discuss their summer read – Hosseini’s And The Mountains Echoed – and the women are eager for their next meeting. It’s clear they’re keen to return to more than just their books.
3 Iraqi Reads Recommended By The Mothers’ Book Club
- I Heard Everything by Sara Alsarraf
- Sadas Al Ahmar by Ahmad Khayri Al Omari
- La Naphtaline by Alia Mamdouh
