RIVERS, SHARKS AND TREES by Shahin Sayadi

[From Jovanni:] Today I received an extraordinary e-mail from Shahin Sayadi, the gifted Artistic Director of OneLight Theatre in Halifax. With Shahin's permission, The Red Hut reprints his essay in its entirety.

On Saturday, a day before the end of 2006, I called my sister in Tehran, Iran, to see if she had heard the news that our father’s murderer had been executed. She had not. In fact she wasn’t much interested. Only then I realized that I was not much interested, either. Why were we not interested in such news? And if we were not interested, why am I writing about it?

Arvand Rood, the Persian name for the river which, according to some others, is the Shat ol Arab, runs behind my paternal city of Khorramshahr, on the very tip of the Persian Gulf. It forms part of the border that separates Iran from Iraq. My Father, his parents and their parents were born in Khorramshahr. Myself, along with my mother and my siblings were born in Abadan, twenty minutes south of Khorramshahr, along the same river and border to Iraq. Every Friday, my mother would take my sister and I to Khorramshahr to visit our grandparents. They lived in an old house that, to a child, was somewhat scary and mysterious. Not a big house but big enough for a six year old to find a lot of hiding places. Beside my grandparents, my two great-grandmothers also lived in that house. The yard—where my grandma Zahra would barbeque lamb kabobs for us—had two very tall and very old trees in it; this yard was my main playground. Every time we were there I would try to climb these two trees and every time I would fall down and hurt myself and get in trouble. When I was ten, I finally succeeded in getting to the top of the date tree and from there, after eating a bunch of half-ripened kharak dates, of course, I remember looking around and seeing, on the horizon, the outskirts of a city. I asked my mother, who was standing below, praying loud and hard that I would not fall, where that city was and she said it was Basra, in Iraq.

Six years later, in the year 1980, Saddam Hussein Tekriti went on Iraqi national television and ripped to pieces a treaty that was signed between Iraq and Iran in 1950 to recognize that Arvand Rood was Iranian territory. He then declared war against Iran.

Saddam wanted to take my river. That river was full of sharks. My river, my sharks and my tree.

On 27 Shahrivar 1359 of the Iranian Calendar (September 18, 1980) Saddam’s jet fighters bombed my city of Abadan and the war had officially started. On that day only 21 people died in Abadan. The first day of the war. One of the dead was my father. The Iraqi ground troops had started moving towards Khorramshahr, crossing Arvand Rood and in less than a week they were walking over the ruble of my grandparents’ house and destroying my date tree. I forgot to tell you that at the foot of that date tree, there were two shrubs. One a green fig and the other a black fig. The black one was, and still is, my most favorite food. The fig trees were gone too. I remember the day that my grandparents, with only their birth certificates in their pockets, slippers on their feet and the clothes on their back came to our house. They did not know, yet, that their only child, my only father, had died.

Saddam, backed by many of the countries in the region, along with Europe, Russia and, of course, the US, went on killing hundreds of thousands of my people, causing displacement of over five million of my country’s men and women, and testing—yes testing—chemical weapons on Kurdish women and children.

But, we took back Khorramshahr and yes, Arvand Rood is still Arvand Rood.

A few years ago I took my wife to visit that house, well … I mean where once the house stood. And in a couple of weeks we’re going to visit the same rubble, but this time with my daughter. What do I tell the four year-old about the house? Does anyone know? How do I explain to her what happened to the date tree? Since she’s a big fan of the Shark Boy and Lava Girl, I’m certainly not going to tell her about what happened to the sharks.

Saddam was prosecuted for crimes against humanity and he was hanged quickly. Why? When are we going to hear from Saddam why he attacked my country, why he used chemical weapons on innocent Iranian children, and if he was just doing his job who was he taking his orders from? Yes, that is why Saddam was executed so quickly. My judgment was that Saddam should have had a much longer prosecution and perhaps a life sentence. Evil cannot be answered with evil. What I got for the New Year was nothing more than justice the American way. GWB is trying to fix my house because, apparently, he is more skilled in the upkeep of my river, in the health of my tree and in the way my sharks swim. So if that was justice, you can see why my sister and I are not so interested.
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شاهین صیادی
Shahin Sayadi
Artistic Director
OneLight Theatre
902.425.6812