Kate Brooke, Opossum Track Press

Details of Du'a

This web project is only about halfway completed. Yet to be added are Zainab's
journey past Baghdad to Najaf, and then across the desert to the refugee camps.

Overhead view:

Begin in present-day Lincoln, where we meet Zainab.
Click on the text in each image to get a popup detail
(your browser must have java enabled for this to work).

Lincoln

Now go to Basra, where Zainab lived as a child.
Explore the map boards, the linen canvas, and the bedrolls atop the roof of the house in Basra.

Basra, where Zainab spent most of her first fifteen years.

On the rooftop above the Basra house are these roll-up mattresses. Click on them for details:

Basra map panels. More of Zainab's childhood and the beginning of her family's exodus:

Zainab's family fled Basra toward Amarah, where they hoped to find a place to stay:

The road to the Holy City of Najaf:

Desert side of linen.

From here you would travel on map boards to Baghdad, then turn toward the holy city of Najaf where Zainab and her family stayed for about two months. Following the uprising against Saddam, they fled into the desert in front of his armies; they left so quickly that Zainab did not put on her shoes. In the desert the encountered soldiers from the U.S. military, and eventually they found their way to a refugee camp south of Basra. From there they were relocated to other refugee camps where they stayed for about four years before relocating to the United States. The refugee camp at Rafha is represented below. I will add more details as my time permits.

The refugee camp in Rafha.