I’m currently working on a book about conversations I’ve had with my Native American friend. Conversations about non-typical topics. He would visit the video store where I worked for twelve years and chit-chat. Mostly, he did the talking. I listened, trying to understand the purpose behind his presence.
He said things that often stimulated my creativity and led me to write a poem or two, or to simply rethink history. To consider how our histories – me as a Chaldean and he as a Native American – were related. He transferred plain ideas into unique and priceless treasures. He is a matter-of-fact type of guy, a simple man living a meager existence. But then, little by little, he reveals himself as a profound person. Through these conversations, we see his wisdom and his willingness to admit to uncertainty. His humor and playfulness, wry judge of character and his offbeat sense of humor, is intriguing.
A Native American man with long hair walked into my place of business one day and verbally handed me a recipe, though I did not cook at the time – and now that I do cook, I doubt I could follow the instructions he gave to me, though I’ll never forget the recipe.
He said, nonchalantly: “If you want to make homemade turtle soup, you have to be careful and you must wait.. You’d want to catch a sea turtle because you get thirty or more pounds of meat from it – depending on weight. You need help too. A couple of men would do, to place the turtle inside a garbage barrel filled with fresh water. Close the lid and leave it there to starve.
It sounds brutal, I know, but there’s no other way to do it if you want to have homemade turtle soup. Sea turtles can live up to a hundred years, so it takes a while for them to die. If someone tried to slaughter them, they’d release a poison into their system that would kill anyone who ate from it. One must therefore keep the area surrounding the garbage barrel quiet so the turtle doesn’t think it has been caught by anyone but itself….
Turtles have a bad memory and will forget they were trapped.”
People trap each other like that and call it love.
Elephants, on the other hand, don’t forget. If someone tried to hurt them, they come back in a hundred years to step on them.
People avenge each other like that and call it justice.
Interview about my latest book
“Little Baghdad”
Upcoming Interviews for This Month
Check out my YouTube channel where you can watch the interviews live and subscribe. Be sure to set reminders/alerts so you can stay updated on Live and uploaded content.
Happy New Year! Hope you had a magical Christmas season.
Last month was quite exciting with holiday celebrations and completing projects I’ve been working on for years. I completed my 15th book, Little Baghdad: a Memoir about an Endangered People in an American City, which will be released on January 15, 2023, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Around the same time I’ll begin submitting the feature film Pomegranate to film festivals. And I’m excited to announce that the trailer was just released click HERE to watch now.
This film for me is special and unique for countless reasons, one of them being that it’s the first Iraqi American feature film and led by women talent. The main character, Niran, is influenced and inspired by Enheduanna, a princess, priestess, poet, and the first recorded writer in history from ancient Mesopotamia. In the story, Niran channels Enheduanna’s sense of power, creativity, and individuality through poetry.
Eneheduanna’s disk was discovered in 1927 yet she is hardly recognized in the world. Myself, I have raved about her in all my talks and several of my books since I came across her name over a decade ago. I dedicate a chapter on Enheduanna in my book Mesopotamian Goddesses: Unveiling Your Feminine Power.
If you still haven’t read the book Pomegranate, click HERE to check it out! (available in print, eBook, and audiobook)
Click the images below to read my articles that were published this month for the Chaldean News
Every month, I interview remarkable individuals on a weekly basis for the Virtual Discussion Series in partnership with Unique Voices in Films, the Chaldean Cultural Center, CMN TV and U of M [Detroit Center]. Below are the upcoming interviews for January.
Check out my YouTube channel where you can watch the interviews live and subscribe. Be sure to set reminders/alerts so you can stay updated on Live and uploaded content.
“You’ve moved away from each other. You’ve torn apart your families, disassembled your smaller communities in favor of huge cities. In these big cities, there are more people, but fewer ‘tribes’, groups, or clans where members see their responsibility as including the responsibility for the whole. So, in effect, you have no elders. None at arm’s reach in any event.”
Neal Donald Walsh
I grew up dismissing the value of what my ancestry had to offer me, which was overshadowed by a patriarchal system that defines women from that point of view. I was influenced by a young and modern generation that assumed they had life figured out, and as a result, tended to ignore the older generation’s way of thinking.
But shortly after I became a mother, things changed. I began searching into my personal genealogy and quickly became fascinated by what I discovered about my ancestors’ cultural identity, my “tribe” whose tribal ways date back thousands of years. Within a decade, I awoke to answers I’d been looking for: Who am I?Who are my people? I already knew where I came from – Iraq, but the physical distance between that place and myself and the human misery associated with it, kept me from truly understanding and appreciating its ancient history, culture, and language.
My mother and I
My research shed light on my people, the Chaldeans, an indigenous Aramaic-speaking group whose lineage dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, and it shifted my views. In television and movies, tribal lifestyles are stereotyped as backwards or romanticized as mysterious and belonging to uncontacted tribes. I soon realized that if not documented, the rewarding side of this ancient tradition will be wasted. So in 2007, I began filming a documentary that included interviews and archival footage. I interviewed my mother, sisters, nieces, cousins, and uncle’s wives about how it feels, as women, to live tribally in a democracy. They shared their perspectives, how, despite their assimilation to the westerner lifestyle, they continue to be connected to their instinctual tribal ways that most people repress in civilized life. They embodied an East-West wisdom that we are all in need of today. I called the documentary Living Tribal in a Democracy.
Over a decade has passed since I began the documentary. Between raising my children, working on various creative projects, and caring for my elderly mother who lived with us, I worked on it sporadically. After my mother passed away in February 2019, I screened and discussed a ten-minute segment of my documentary at Wayne State University at an event called Creative Many. The story received positive feedback and the organizers encouraged me to continue with the project. That’s when I realized it was time to revisit and complete the work. The community’s cultural identity endangered, I felt it especially important to systematize the memories of its people and heritage.
This is when I realized that the story also needs to be written into a book that, similar to the documentary, explores the role that ancient Mesopotamia played in the birth of our contemporary culture. In this book, I show that, although women played a major role in building the cradle of civilization, the rulers of that region tried to destroy/hide that knowledge. This great loss has had consequences for the world.
The book raises the following questions, which I myself, as someone living tribal in a democracy, struggled with for decades and went to great lengths to find the answers: Are tribal societies models for future societies? How can tribalism and democracy coexist? Would it do the world good to return to some of the old ways, with smaller communities, a higher regard for feminine sacredness, the family system, and the elderly? How can we learn from the ancients, who are often romanticized as warriors or noble savages and we assume live in faraway or remote lands, in the jungles of Peru or in restricted areas such as Indian reservations, and neglect to see their presence in our backyard? Are we aware they do live with us here today? What was the role of women in ancient Mesopotamia, where once upon a time, kings attributed their right to rule through their official marriage to the goddess?
My mother and her great grandson, Mateo
Some of this material became the topic of my book Mesopotamian Goddesses. The rest I bundled up in my upcoming book Little Baghdad: A Memoir About an Indigenous People in an American City, which will be published by the end of this year. As for the documentary, the completion and release of that project is still to be determined. Meanwhile, it’s shelved among my umpteen projects that want to bring to memory the wisdom and importance of ancient ways which revered nature, feminine sacredness, and community.
Once someone asked me why I felt I needed to write so many books. I thought it was a strange question. Would someone ask a surgeon why there was a need to perform operations on a regular basis or a teacher, or any other profession? Still, I reflected on that question and realized that part of the joy in writing my stories is the self-discovery that occurs in the process. How can you connect to the power of your own lineage and discover the richness, beauty and wisdom as well as the wounds and traumas that lie there? Your lineage doesn’t have to be physical heredity, but can be a spiritual lineage. Looking at your heritage will help you come to terms with and understand who you really are, what role you play in the story you’re in, and how to change, if you so desire.
Every month, I interview remarkable individuals on a weekly basis for the Virtual Discussion Series in partnership with Unique Voices in Films, the Chaldean Cultural Center, CMN TV and U of M [Detroit Center].
Check out my YouTube channel where you can watch the interviews live and subscribe. Be sure to set reminders/alerts so you can stay updated on Live and uploaded content.
When my neighbor has guests, and they gather in the backyard during warm weather days, she will often bring me a small cup of Turkish coffee. She hands it to me over the fence. Sometimes placed on the saucer, next to the small cup, is a stick of chocolate, dried mangos, dried apricots, walnuts, dates, or zlabia, the Middle Eastern equivalent to funnel cakes. When she sees that my husband is home, he too receives a cup of Turkish coffee. We both feel nourished by the hospitality of our Middle Eastern traditional ways.
I drink the coffee. The bitter but delicious taste is strong and rich. I hear Aramaic words from the neighbors’ home. They sound like birds singing. This ancient language has me traveling to my ancestral land. I journal, read, and remember those who have passed; my mother, my father, one of my precious mentors, and most recently, my dear teacher, Lynn V. Andrews.
Lynn passed away on August 17 at 4:44 pm. She was a mystic and the bestselling author of the Medicine Woman series. Her four-year Mystery School changed the lives of thousands of her students, particularly women. As such, it ended up influencing the lives of countless men and women, since we all affect each other. For decades, Lynn dedicated her life to the path of writing and healing Mother Earth, the mind, and the heart through ancient practices of the ancients. She had us raise the question, “What did they know that enabled them to live successfully on this Earth for so very, very long… that we have forgotten in such a short span of time?”
From her and her unique and intimate circle of women, I learned to walk in balance, with one foot in the physical world and another foot in the spiritual world. I learned to heal and transform my life with one act of power after another. I learned to continue to learn on a daily basis. I learned that we have all we need, right where we are. All we have to do is look; then appears the right story, the right job, the answered prayers, the perfect neighborhood and neighbors.
It was when I was looking that Lynn and her magical world appeared to me. I ended up becoming an apprentice in her school for four years, and later, the mentor for her apprentices. I ended up writing a four-part memoir series about the experience, which later expanded into workshops and classes to pass on the teachings that brought me from dark to light. This has led to many inspiring projects and groups, including this very blog and community called The Path of Consciousness.
Just a reminder, the online lecture series on the “Memoirs of a Babylonian Princess” begins this Saturday, September 10, 2022. If you’d like to register you can email info@chaldeanculturalcenter.org or use the QR code below.
Every month, I interview four remarkable individuals on a weekly basis for the Virtual Discussion Series in partnership with Unique Voices in Films, the Chaldean Cultural Center, CMN TV and U of M [Detroit Center].
Check out my YouTube channel where you can watch the interviews live and subscribe. Be sure to set reminders/alerts so you can stay updated on Live and uploaded content.
Archaeological evidence suggests that women in ancient Mesopotamia held high governmental and religious positions during the Garden of Eden period when goddesses and gods coexisted peacefully. The Garden of Eden was said to have had a design and a rhythm, a yin and yang concept. We seem to have lost that paradise because of the veil of ignorance. I believe that, to re-establish that equilibrium, we must first heal our that land by resurrecting specific stories and re-enacting them on the page and in our collective memory.
I spent the last few months posting on TikTok about the goddesses in my book Mesopotamian Goddesses: Unveiling Your Feminine Power. Although I have done many presentations on this topic, I have not read this book since it was released in January 2019. Re-visiting these goddesses through the pages brought me back to the realization of the power that women had in ancient times.
Source: Wikipedia
In the book, I draw from my extensive shamanic training and connection to my Mesopotamian roots to bring forth a transformed understanding of feminine consciousness, guiding the reader through powerful yet practical exercises to manifest their dreams and create a healthy marriage within the one’s self, home, and society. I share my interest, research, and connection to Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, and the amazing women who lived there historically, explaining where that region is today (in Iraq), its link to the Bible, and the culture and people that came from there. Each deity has her own chapter in which I tell her story: Enheduanna, a princess, priestess, and the first writer in recorded history; Gula, the Great Healer; Namshe, the goddess of Social Justice; and many others.
Today I’ve completed my Mesopotamian Goddesses TikTok series, and next I will start posting about Pomegranate, which we just completed the rough cut of! Working on the Pomegranate script, the book, the audiobook, and now the film, has been an amazing unforgettable experience. I’ve produced and directed a feature documentary before, but never a feature narrative. It’s a whole other ball game, requiring the kind of patience, talent, and collaboration that made me understand why I often heard along this journey that “Most films don’t get made.” I’m so glad we were able to make Movie Magic happen!
If you’re interested in mythology, history, feminine strength, spiritual lessons, heritage, love, then you will enjoy reading Mesopotamian Goddesses: Unveiling Your Feminine Power.
Every month, I interview four remarkable individuals on a weekly basis for the Virtual Discussion Series in partnership with Unique Voices in Films, the Chaldean Cultural Center, CMN TV and U of M [Detroit Center].
Check out my YouTube channel where you can watch the interviews live and subscribe. Be sure to set reminders/alerts so you can stay updated on Live and uploaded content.
The Path of Consciousness 