Persistence Tastes Like Dates
In 2009, I had an idea for a story while I was in Baghdad. I just needed a widow.
In 2009, I had an idea for a story while I was in Baghdad. I already had a name for it, I was going to call it The Widow of Baghdad. I wanted to use the metaphor of the abrupt tragedy of love lost to capture the way the city was frozen by war, all its plans and construction projects, dashed. I just needed a widow.
I met Samira in the lobby of a hotel in Baghdad, over club sandwiches without ham. She arrived dressed like a panther who had eaten a canary. Animal print. Dyed honey-blond hair. Not a trace of mourning in sight. She was also, persistently, the only woman still working at Baghdad International Airport. I had constructed someone else entirely in my mind. Someone softer. More defeated.
She told me about her husband. A university professor. She had been the girl in the canary yellow dress in the front row. They married. He was tall, lean, outspoken. He left work alone one evening and never made it home. An assassin described him vaguely afterward in a record I found in a police station. Tall, academic, critical of Saddam’s regime. A routine elimination.
She told me she would never remarry. Never love again.
Then she told me about her colleague Faizeh, who used to drive her to work and stop for coffee. Once, at a gas station on the way to work, a man told her to cover her hair, saying, “It’s a new country.” Faizeh replied: “Every day this country is a new country. A country is what we make of it.” The man dragged her from the car and right there in front of Samira, shot her dead.
Three days later, Samira went back to work alone.
I had come looking for a metaphor about grief and got something else entirely. I got a woman who had absorbed every reason to stop, and simply had not.
I said goodbye to her in the parking lot. On my way back I passed a makeshift food stand that was between the perimeter wall and the hotel. There, a man in his forties and his son, maybe ten, served hummus, foul, taameya, and sometimes fish. For twenty cents more, the boy would bring you a Coca-Cola or Sprite from a humming fridge connected to a generator.
They fed hotel staff and security, journalists and drivers. Their tabouli overflowed with parsley, cucumbers, and tomatoes. The boy fetched plates with joy, then perched on a plastic stool and watched Turkish soap operas dubbed in Arabic.
I often ate there. It was quieter than my room. The hum of the generator and the fake drama of television felt oddly comforting. I decided to sit down and type up Samira’s story. Her life halted mid-step, like the city’s many half-built skyscrapers.
I looked up just in time to see the father look at his son and hold out a glass of water to him. The boy fetched it and carried it to the corner, where a single tree grew in a plastic pot.
A palm. A date palm. He poured the water around its base.
I looked around. No one else was watching this. Water was precious, but here they were, under tarp and tin, cultivating a date palm in the cracked driveway of the hotel.
I think about persistence differently than I used to.
I used to think it meant not giving up. Enduring. A kind of grim, teeth-clenched refusal to be counted out. But the more I report from places where people have been waiting for justice long enough to outlive their patience, the more I understand that persistence is an active thing. It is organised. It is strategic. It chooses, every single day, to keep showing up even when the room has emptied.
And it requires a particular kind of faith. Not religious faith, necessarily, though that sustains many people. A structural faith: the belief that what you are building now will matter later, even if you cannot see how.
I have been covering the Iran conflict for AFP since the beginning, watching the machinery of war inch slowly towards the machinery of diplomacy. The talks are now in Islamabad. Every headline is about enrichment percentages, missile programmes, and who controls the Strait. And the Iranian people, who have been resisting the IRGC for more than forty years, who took to the streets in the largest protests since the 1979 revolution, who kept going when the internet was cut and the military deployed and thousands were killed and tens of thousands arrested, are still being left outside the room.
This is not new. People have always been left outside the room. What is also not new is what happens when they refuse to accept that as the final answer.
In 1998, two women from the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition forced their way into the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. No party apparatus. Almost no resources. They were told, plainly, that they did not belong there. They showed up anyway. They stayed at the table until civilian inclusion was part of the language of the agreement.
There were Cambodian documentation networks whose evidence shaped the Paris Peace Accords. There were Bosnian civil society organisations that pushed civilian protection clauses into the Dayton Agreement. People collected files full of violations committed in Yugoslavia, that were dismissed as irrelevant to peace talks, until they became the foundation of war crimes indictments that rewrote an entire post-war political order.
None of this happened because the world suddenly decided to care. It happened because people kept building the case after the cameras moved on.
Our character is built around many virtues. Persistence is one of them, and I will be honest: it is not the most poetic one. It does not shimmer the way curiosity does. It does not carry the moral weight of courage or the warmth of empathy. It is quiet and unglamorous, and it requires something of you that most skills do not. It requires you to be willing to look unremarkable. To keep doing the work even when there is nothing to show for it.
If we want the Iranian people to have a seat at the table in Islamabad, the path is not outrage. Outrage has a short shelf life. It peaks and it falls and it exhausts the people who carry it. The path is meticulous, organised, specific, sustained pressure. It is benchmarking sanctions relief to human rights conditions. It is coalition-building with Ukrainians and Syrians and every community that knows what it means to be erased from negotiations about their own future. It is documentation. Names, dates, locations, testimonies. Memory that becomes leverage because it is ready.
It is not the dramatic work. It is not the work that gets covered.
On my last day, I was stranded at Baghdad International Airport for eighteen hours. A sandstorm had grounded every plane. I sat on the ground with other passengers, with no expectation of comfort or schedule.
Samira, was working. She moved through the terminal like someone who had decided, a long time ago, that this place was hers to look after. She saw me, caught my eye, and gave a small lift of her chin. It was a precise gesture. It said: you will be fine.
When it was finally time to board, she took our seat slips at the gate. As I passed, she stopped me. From her pocket she produced something small and placed it in my palm.
“This is all I have on me,” she said. “I grow them in my yard. They won’t serve anything to eat on the flight.”
Two plump dates.
I have thought about that gesture many times since. A woman tending a garden. Producing something from it. Pressing it into the hand of a stranger before sending her out into a storm.