MY FATHER AND SADDAM HUSSEIN
I cried the night Saddam Hussein was executed. I remember staying up late and watching the television, knowing that it was about to happen.
I sat flicking through channels - music videos, golf, a black and white film, all the time knowing that a few thousand miles away, he was getting ready to die and nothing could stop that moment getting closer.
Like when you try to ignore New Year’s Eve; no matter what you decide to watch instead, it’s still happening on another channel.
Afterward, when I was sure he was dead, I turned to the twenty-four hour news station. I looked at his picture in the right hand corner of the screen. That shot of him pulled from the cave, his half grey beard spread wildly across his face. Frail and humiliated. I wondered if my father’s beard had also turned grey by now. I wondered if my father was still breathing.
The image was replaced with a family portrait, shot some time in the eighties. Saddam sat on an ornate sofa with his first wife on his left and his youngest daughter on the right. Standing behind them, his adult children and their husbands and wives.
He’s smiling, baring white teeth below that stiff brush of a moustache. His tie flops out of his suit, the end resting in his crotch. He looks benign, a family man. This is where the two – my father and Saddam, become undistinguishable to me. Both terrible men, both capable of disguising themselves as harmless in a photograph.
I looked at Saddam’s wife, past the big hair and shoulder pads. A search for the clues I see in photographs of my mother when she was with my father. Glazed or teary eyes, the darks smudge of a bruise, hands clasped too tightly together. That awful fake grin she pulls, that even to this day makes me want to cry because I know it’s hiding something heartbreaking underneath.
The wife appears still, almost bored. No hunched shoulders or pursed lips. Her expression is almost peaceful.
Perhaps this is where my father and Saddam differ? One held a very public life of destruction and devastation, the other, only a private life of terror. I’ve heard my father was well liked among colleagues and friends, that he could charm his way to anything.
The images scrolled into a blurry montage stamped with the network’s logo. Saddam in court, his crisp white shirt looking fresh out the packet, Saddam in uniform, heavier in the face, staring into the camera as he delivers a speech.
On a throne, garish golds and blues, the same flash of teeth smile, but he’s gripping the arms of the chair like he’s losing patience. Finally, with thick noose around his neck, the rope too fat, too cartoonish to seem real. The masked men either side of him look more like patrons of an awful small-town nightclub than executioners. One wears a fat leather jacket, the other a brown suit.
The most upsetting part – a glimpse of the crowd, arms raised and mobiles pointing, ready to capture a shot of the moment.
The presenter explained that Saddam refused to wear a hood for the execution. Just like him, I think. I had forgotten that it’s a foreign dictator on the screen, not my own father.
Long after everyone else had gone to bed I sat with the television on mute, the news cycling between images of Saddam’s execution and the morning’s weather, researching facts about the dead dictator on the internet.
Four novels, a cameo in South Park and an Indian beach named after him. He seemed to have a lot of fans for a terrible man, I wondered if my father was one of them.