'the limitations of language'

"I am so tired," Yusra said. "In Saddam’s time, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now: because I am Shiite, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because"—she picked up her abaya—"I don't wear my stupid hejab."

She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page. This was Yusra's way of explaining her situation and, sensing the limitations of language, she would sometimes seize a reporter's notebook and diagram her predicament. She drew a large circle in the middle.

"This was Saddam," she said. "He is here. Big. During Saddam's time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard."

She flipped to another blank page. She drew a dozen circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.

"The dot in the middle, that is me—that is every Iraqi," she said. "From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here." She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.

"We Iraqis," she said. "We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom.”

—Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (2008)