Mariam Bazeed
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Mariam Bazeed’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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, the occupation didn't actually last very long, so our time in Egypt finally came to an end.
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. Because nothing is free, not war, not popcorn.
So the war was over, and I was coming home. We were going to go to home, Kuwait home. And I was so excited to be seeing my dad. And we flew back. And 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. 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 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.
And 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 on the radio, there were all these Kuwaiti children singing, welcome, welcome, Bush. Thank you. Thank you, Bush. And we drove home.
And I could see there was a clear effort that had been made in the apartment to welcome us home. My dad had dusted. He'd 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. But it was still, you know, 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 while 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.
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 from 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. He had to leave because dining room tables like don't protect you from rockets actually.
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 the wood of that dining room table wouldn't have protected me. Thank you.
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