hey (with the intention of killing my past self before she kills me)
THe haunt PROJECT IS PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WRITERS SA, AND IS SUPPORTED BY ARTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
Nonfiction by Lur Alghurabi
Inside every man
Lives the seed of a flower
If he looks within he finds beauty and power
Ring all the bells, sing and tell the people everywhere that the flower has come
Light up the sky with your prayers of gladness and rejoice for the darkness is gone
Throw off your fears let your heart beat freely at the sign that a new time is born
—‘Les Fleur’ (2013), Minnie Riperton
In Jordan Peele’s film Us (2018), Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o) goes on a holiday with her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). Her life as we see it is easy: the car has sand leather seats, the holiday home is light-filled and spacious, and Gabe has just bought a new boat. On a trip to the beach, when Jason, her youngest, exits her sight for a few minutes, her panic hints at an untold story. The streets of Santa Cruz, the waves, the theme park, the people, and just about everything in this city overwhelm her with triggers of a past trauma. Adelaide grows restless, paranoid of a disaster that promises to come. Her nightmare is actualised when four strangers dressed in orange jumpsuits appear in her driveway, silent and unflinching, each of them wielding a golden pair of scissors. But these people turn out to not be strangers; they are the carbon copies of Adelaide, Gabe, Zora and Jason. The untethered Wilsons (Red, Abraham, Umbrae and Pluto—respectively) don’t want to be outside anymore. They want to enter the house, and they want to take back what’s theirs.
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Once upon a time there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow. The two were connected. Tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit, raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys. Soft and cushy. But the shadow's toys were so sharp and cold, they'd slice through her fingers when she tried to play with them. The girl met a handsome prince and fell in love, but the shadow at that same time met Abraham. It didn't matter if she loved him or not. He was tethered to the girl's prince after all. Then the girl had her first child, a beautiful baby girl. But the shadow, she gave birth to a little monster. Umbrae was born laughing. The girl had a second child, a boy this time. They had to cut her open and take him from her belly. The shadow had to do it all herself. She named him Pluto. He was born to love fire. So you see, the shadow hated the girl, so much for so long, until one day the shadow realised she was being tested by God.
It was only a couple of years ago that I came to terms with my need for therapy. This came after the realisation that writing, as a practice, an art form and a way of expression, was no longer cutting it. This need for professional help became more urgent when, after my first trip home to Iraq in over twenty years, I started seeing my shadow.
It was how I met Beata. I told her that when I went to Iraq I saw my shadow staring at me from the other end of the room, hovering at the end of the sofra laid out on the floor with all the food I love, all the family I would die for. She sits in the corner not able to reach any of the food but stares at me with hunger and envy, as if I could be the meal myself, and gives me the impression that it will be any second when she pounces on me and digs her teeth into my flesh. Perhaps she will start with my cheeks, maybe use my hair to stabilise my head as she digs in, she’ll make my big nose disappear in one bite and my eyeballs will burst with their juice in her mouth, yum, she hasn’t eaten since I left Iraq in 1998.
I told Beata that since the return, my double has been stuck to my body, poking out the side of my stomach like a tumour—a human-sized tumour. Since that trip I had been carrying a weight with me everywhere I went. When I sat in a chair, I would feel her indignation that she sometimes didn’t have a chair of her own next to me. If the train was full and the people were overflowing, she had to float about in the air next to me with no respite of her own. When we were in bed, if I slept on my right side then I was sleeping on her. But if I slept on my left side, then she would be floating again—she’d become quite restless. If I slept on my stomach she would suffocate. I learned to sleep on my back.
It was a very emotional session, where the poor woman (a highly accomplished psychiatrist) started crying too, so much so that I felt helpless about her and what to do with her. Did Beata have someone who can support her through this? I felt guilty making it her problem too. I told her than when I went back to Iraq I could see my life for what it could have been, how it could have ended, all the ways in which I would have suffocated and died but didn’t because we left, which meant that the shadow that lived in Iraq never had the fair opportunity to die, but I lived a life so far from her, so far from hers, that she never ended up living either. What a cruel thing to do: to start out life in one way, in one body, in a particular spirit, and to then shift gears and change directions, leaving your old body and your old spirit to rot.
Maybe it is because I don’t know how to make room for both people, like Adelaide and Red know very well. It has to be one or the other. There cannot be both. And Red will not rest until Adelaide is killed, so Adelaide must kill Red first. Only one can stay. I can only keep one, and the other would need to find her way to commit murder or to accept being buried.
I didn’t actually pay Beata. I met her through a clinical research study where a group of psychiatrists wanted to examine the brains of unmedicated, depressed people. They wanted to give them a drug or another and then examine what that did to their physiology. The perk was receiving regular sessions with a psychiatrist to ensure the volunteers were well and safe (and, of course, three thousand dollars). What a great stepping stone into therapy, I thought. My one and only session with Beata was in March 2020, a few days before a nation-wide lockdown. The study was put on indefinite hiatus.
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There was another girl in there. She looked like me. Exactly like me. She wasn't a reflection. She was real. She was real. She ... I ran as fast as I could. My whole life, I've felt like she's still coming for me ... She's getting closer.
As they walk to the beach on the first day of their holiday, an aerial shot of the Wilsons shows us that their shadows are much bigger and much taller than their bodies. They are but tiny little heads or bucket hats on the screen next to a towering darkness occupying the majority of the screen. The disparities between the Wilsons and their tethered body doubles are intense: Gabe is in a Howard University jumper; he’s educated, he’s upper middle class, he’s in love and has very few of the world’s troubles on his mind. His shadow, Abraham, has bad vision and no glasses. Jason, learning to be a magician and practicing with a lighter, fails to get a flame going for himself. But Pluto, who has been mirroring his behavior, has burnt half his face off. There’s not much fairness in any of this.
Where did the separation between me and my double begin? Was it when I was born, that we were born as two? Did God always know we would be separated, so he put us in a twin pack from the start? And did we spend our childhood together until we were separated and my shadow ate dirt off the side of the streets while I ate hot bread dipped in fried tomatoes? Or was I only one person, one being, until I turned six and we left Iraq and I left a part of me behind (the part that was meant to die)?
I have a habit, as I flirt with existentialism, to associate my existence with small objects that mean nothing and everything, and to hinge my meaning upon them in the absence of anything more substantial. I guard my favourite wooden spoon with my knife. I buy my loved ones wooden utensils of their own so they can have a piece of me in their home. My plants are named after my friends, because this way I know how to look after them, but I end up killing a couple and going down a depressive spiral for a few days. Later, I accidentally damage one of them but it manages to grow a new leaf nonetheless and when I see that new leaf bump I am so happy like I’ve just gotten my whole life back.
It is a permanent state of horror, hanging one’s own existence on objects that come and go. Photos from my childhood drive this horror deeper: when I see old versions of us, me and my family, right before me, undeniably and irrefutably alive and in existence with flesh and bones and lips and teeth and hair that still curls the same. As I watch Us again now, my father is sending the family group chat photos of us from when we were children. Photos of my sister and I at pre-school, with cousins, playing in the street; photos of us being and existing and playing and at times seeming very happy. One of these photos is of my parents’ engagement party before I was born: my mother wearing a purple sequin dress, one that kept and that I remember pulling out of her drawer every other weekend to look at it, to feel the shiny little pieces in between my fingers, to see their rainbow sparkles against the wall if I waved it by the window—I even remember how it smelled, like a wooden cupboard with traces of gardenia. When Father sends the photos the shadow comes back, and she tries to snatch my mother’s engagement dress from my hands and tells me to fuck off; this is her childhood, not mine. I leave and walk away. Give me back the dress, she orders. She takes it away and runs off with it into her little corner and buries her face in the fabric.
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To remember that she was once a little girl, innocent and free and safe, Adelaide whistles ‘itsy bitsy spider’ to herself. To kill that version of the truth once and for all, Red breaks Adelaide’s neck. No more whistling. No more itsy bitsy.
Beata told me that there was a whole life in the person I left behind. There were all the things she could have done, the books she could have read, the songs she would have learned, the fights she would have had with Mum and Dad when things didn’t go her way. Maybe there would have been people she loved, and maybe she would have eventually made some friends if she got out of her shell, or if she started talking to others instead of crying every time a stranger approached. There was so much she could have been, so much she would have said. I can only imagine. Beata said that while I’ve been telling and writing and understanding my story, this girl hasn’t had her story heard. Maybe that’s the problem.
In Us, while Red is the only one among the shadows who can speak, her voice is slow, raspy and suffocated. The other shadows merely give out loud, guttural screams. The people of this netherworld, the tethered ones, have had their voices taken away from them by their very existence: an existence that is lonely, cruel and deprived of purpose. What story would they tell, now that they have the chance?
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‘What we feel like we deserve comes at the expense of someone else's freedom or joy. The biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege, like the United States, is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn't luck that has us born where we're born. For us to have our privilege, someone suffers … Those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin.’
One way to drive someone to the brink of insanity is to take away a fundamental right of theirs, such as the right to speak, the right to be heard, or the right to exist in safety and peace, and then when they demand any of these rights back, make it seem as if they are being outrageous, taking what is not theirs and what never has been. Tell them they are entitled, ungrateful, that they should just accept what they’ve been given, feel so lucky that they even have it, and if they don’t like it, threaten them by telling them, don’t they know that it could be a whole lot worse? Don’t they know that they always have the ‘choice’ to return to wherever they’ve come from?
A journalist tells Peele how much she loves horror, how Us reminded her of Hitchcock suspense and Cronenberg body horror. Does it? She asks him what his moodboard looked like as he was making the film. Peele talks about a beautiful beach in Santa Cruz, and the concept around taking something very pretty and showing its shadow. The tension being the invasion. The outside is now inside. The threat is now very close: it sits by the fireplace, holding handcuffs and giving instructions and starting to act on its threats.
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How it must have been to grow up with the sky. To feel the sun, the wind, the trees. But your people took it for granted. We're human too, you know. Eyes, teeth, hands, blood. Exactly like you. And yet, it was humans that built this place. I believe they figured out how to make a copy of the body, but not the soul. The soul remains one, shared by two. They created the Tethered so they could use them to control the ones above. Like puppets. But they failed and they abandoned the Tethered. For generations, the Tethered continued without direction. They all went mad down here. And then, there was us. You remember? We were born special. God brought us together that night. I never stop thinking about you. How things could have been. How you could have taken me with you. Years after we met, the miracle happened. That's when I saw God and he showed me my path. You felt it, too. The end of our dance, the Tethered saw that I was different, that I would deliver them from this misery. I found my faith and I began to prepare. It took years to plan. Everything had to be perfect. I didn't just need to kill you. I needed to make a statement that the whole world would see. It's our time now. Our time up there.
By virtue of being on the receiving end of refugee-worthy oppression or injustice, the refugee is sentenced to death. This person is, by all accounts, meant to die. The authorities have done everything in their capacity to ensure that this person dies, and at the earliest opportunity. But then, the refugee, through some sliver of hope, and by a miracle and a piece of divine intervention, changes the course of their lives. Something unexpected happens, such as the passport smuggler coming through with the goods at the last minute or the bus to Jordan doesn’t get shot at like it was supposed to or the driver doesn’t turn out to be the snitch everyone was fearing them to be or my oversleeping on the bus means that no one searches my body for smuggled goods. So now the refugee’s journey is wonky: out of nowhere it has had a little mutation, and I don’t know whether to turn my head left or right or how to look up at the sky or how to eat bread, or how to wear shoes with clasps decorated with little ducks, or what to make of my hair, my hands, my stomach, all of my organs, without a sense of purpose or a mission: they weren’t meant to have ever made it to this point, and we are now directionless.
There is no undoing the hurt that the past self has lived through. A woman who is, for all I know, for all that’s been said and proven to me, a woman or maybe a girl who is basically as good as dead. How can that be undone? The situation—the situation being her existence—can only cease, and perhaps that’s the next best thing to undoing the injustice. Perhaps it is only when there is no clear path for justice that we start to work on revenge. Perhaps if we can inflict and expand the pain we’ve received, through vengeance, perhaps there’s a justice in that, in all of us hurting the same. There’s not much fairness in any of this.
Just before the shadow presses Adelaide’s head into the coffee table so hard that it cracks the glass, she tells her what she wants. We want to take our time. We've been waiting for this day for so long.
I want to learn how I can offer peace to my shadow, how perhaps I might be able to give her some of the time she’s been asking for. Maybe if I give it to her voluntarily she won’t push my head into a coffee table and crack the glass. Maybe if I give her something of myself she won’t break into my home won’t come for my loved ones won’t be so charged with resentment; she may not be so hungry for revenge mistaking me for the enemy. But I don’t know how to become a friend to her or if I should try; maybe we got away because some people and some things are meant to die, die off, for good, a little snap to the neck so we hear no more itsy bitsy, so maybe this is the enemy I want to get as far away from and maybe I should be erasing instead of reconciling, and there is a peace to be found in the silence. Maybe there are no dues to be paid and no story is owed, and the kindest thing we can do is put something to an infinite sleep, break its neck, gently yet quickly, and only one of us writes the stories now. And the other, she belongs to God and to him she can return.
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Lur Alghurabi is an Iraqi and Australian writer, poet and playwright. She is winner of the AM Heath Prize for Prose and the Scribe Nonfiction Prize, and shortlistee of the Deborah Cass Prize. Her work has been widely published in Australia and the US. Lur is a recent alumna of the Oxford University Master's in Creative Writing with Distinction, and outgoing Director of the National Young Writers’ Festival. She is working on her first book of personal essays.
