There was definitely fear when the plane began its descent into Baghdad airport. I don’t normally mind landings so much, but this one was unforgettably uncomfortable. Really bad turbulence and butterflies in your stomach don’t mix well. I was about to go report on a country that organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists have labeled the most dangerous place on earth for journalists to work. Yet it was also supposed to be where I was hoping to find a missing piece of the puzzle of who I was. How was that supposed to mix?

My childhood was spent in Abu Dhabi, my teenage and college years in Canada, and now I work in Cairo, but I grew up knowing I was supposed to be from Iraq. I talked differently from the other Arab kids—they were Lebanese and Palestinian and Egyptian—I always seemed to be the only kid with that thick Iraqi dialect. We had to learn to mimic our friends’ dialects so I became fluent in Lebanese and Egyptian to accommodate my friends who found it too hard to understand my Iraqi dialect. My last name was weird — it had too many s-h, c-h combinations and even Arabs could never say it properly.

War was always a character in our home. We never grew up in it, thankfully, but it dominated a lot of the adult talk at parties and picnics, and my parents always had worry marks on their foreheads when watching the news. They shouted into the telephone when talking to their relatives because the connection was never, ever good. The phone calls were always cut short, leaving them shaking their heads, dejectedly hanging up mid-sentence, more worry lines on foreheads. My mother would sleep in the living room, waking up to the news and falling asleep to the news. As I grew into a teenager, I would get offended by people asking me “Where are you from?” Or just taking “Canadian” for an answer. I would answer, “My parents are originally from Iraq.” I was anal about going through my life history so they’d get that I was not really Iraqi, but just kind of one. I’d never been, I didn’t know what it meant, I had no emotional ties to the country. Why were they forcing me to be something I didn’t feel?

And then I stepped onto the tarmac city of my heritage for the first time. I was sent to cover the 2009 provincial elections for work. I had heard my hyphenated Egyptian friends complain how they never related to any of the Egyptians they met when they came back to Cairo or Alexandria on holiday. I was worried I’d be smacked with the same kind of disappointment and resentment. I nearly burst into tears when the man at the visa window routinely asked me if I was Iraqi before stamping my passport. I stared at him, my eyes welling up. How do I answer you without going through my entire life story, I wanted to blurt out. I am, but I’m not, but I don’t know, I want to find out.

Driving through the city was intimidating. I heard about how beautiful Baghdad was when my father was growing up there, how it was magnificent in the ‘80s, and then deteriorated into rubble after years of sanctions and then the 2003 invasion. I was ready for rundown quarters and poorly dressed people, and that’s what I found. Blast walls were the main feature of the city, followed by intense soldier and police presence. It was a prison, and the city was pathetic in a way—once a force to be reckoned with, now toothless and feeble. It was sad, but I didn’t feel like crying for it. I was being selfish. I reveled in hearing the dialect I grew up with at home on the street. I reveled in hearing vocab only Iraqis used that we’d learned from my dad. I reveled in being embraced and warmly welcomed by everyone who met me and heard this was my first time in Iraq. Welcome home, they’d say. The men who worked on the compound at work would fuss over me to make sure I was comfortable, telling each other to take extra care of me because I was “the country’s daughter.” And I wouldn’t object, or go into a spiel about only having Iraqi roots, but really I was Canadian and I was born in X and lived in Y and worked in Z. I just shut up and enjoyed it. I felt like everyone wanted me to feel I was part of them, and I casually and easily fit in.

The realization a piece of the puzzle was fitting was when I noticed that no one — not one single Iraqi — had stumbled on my last name. Al-Shalchi. A very well-known and respected Baghdad family, no one asked me to repeat it, or spell it, or gave me a quizzical look. That was the moment I realized I didn’t care if I would never relate perfectly to Iraq, or if I never felt 100 percent Iraqi. It didn’t matter. I knew I was going to always be different from purebred Iraqis; that I’ll always fit in better in Toronto or New York than Baghdad. But I know this is where my name would always be understood.

Hadeel Al-Shalchi is a Canadian journalist. She studied chemical engineering at school before working as a radio reprorter and newsreader for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp in Ottawa, Canada. She now works for the Associated Press as a reporter in their Middle East bureau in Cairo, Egypt. She owns a Louis Vuitton purse.

Kahtan Alamery is an Iraqi-born New York freelance photographer, trained as a filmmaker but leaned toward photography. “I wanted to stop the image and give the viewer a chance to start a dialogue and to connect with the subject.” He spent the last five years following stories in conflict/crisis zones (Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon) and developing countries (Central America , Africa and South East Asia). He believes there is hope in every story.

Copyright Last Exit 2009