Do not stand at my grave and weep waves
A few days later plainclothes security personnel detained him and tortured him to extract information on other protesters. During the protests in the summer of 2018 he had received messages on social media from regime thugs warning him to stay away. He spoke of the pain killers he was taking and the costly physical therapy. Safa was 26, but he was using a cane and grimaced with pain when he moved. The letters he had to write were quite prosaic, mostly about mundane accidents or transfer of ownership. “It is just a traffic court,” he said with a smile.
“Were there any interesting stories that you came across?” I asked. He would set up his chair and table every morning outside a courthouse in Baghdad. Over breakfast he told me that he’d recently started working as an “ardhahalchi,” or a scribe, writing letters and filling out forms for citizens going before courts. He once wrote to me wondering when he might meet “the gratuitous death waiting for me in my homeland.” He loved Iraq and would go to sleep at night thinking of what he could do to change it. “We are staying here in Tahrir,” he would write, referring to Tahrir Square in central Baghdad, where the protesters have been gathering. I worried about him and would check on him every time protests broke out to make sure he was safe. Despite being harassed and detained several times, he would be back on the street for the next protest. He was at the forefront of every single wave of protests in the years that followed. Safa, who was 18 at the time, joined his compatriots seeking change. In 2011, a wave of protests against the corruption and sectarianism of the Iraqi regime swept through the country. He worked hard - three days a week as a construction worker and porter while studying at the University of Technology in Baghdad - to make ends meet and to support his family. His father had died when he was quite young. He grew up in a large working-class family in Baghdad.
Safa was a precocious, passionate young man and a voracious reader, particularly of poetry. I loved his wit and sense of humor, and his insightful posts about life and politics in Iraq. He wrote to me nine years ago on social media about one of my novels. I did know Safa al-Sarray, a 26-year-old aspiring poet and amateur artist, very well. But it also illuminates their names, faces and life stories, making them ever more familiar to those of us who are viscerally connected to Iraq, whether we live there or in a distant country. Death seizes them in a flash and delivers their bodies to the darkness of the grave. I try to find out their names and catch a glimpse of their faces. More than 500 protesters have been killed. And the regime’s violence continues unabated. The resignation of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi on Nov. It also radicalized the tone and demands of protesters who have been calling for an overhaul of the entire system, rather than cosmetic change. The regime’s brutal suppression and killing of peaceful protesters fueled Iraqis’ anger, widening and intensifying the protests and strikes across Iraq.
The most common and passionate slogan throughout these protests has been, “We want a homeland.” It reflected the anger and alienation Iraqis felt toward a political class beholden to external influence (Iran and the United States) and oblivious to its people’s demands. Unlike previous waves of protests that began in 2011, this protest was spontaneous and not organized by any party. Iraqis have been protesting since early October against the dysfunctional and corrupt political system installed by the United States after the 2003 occupation.